What the **** is Normal? // Francesca Martinez

Although this was the second time I’d seen Francesca Martinez, her show was still my highlight of Normal? 2018. Francesca’s experiences of school and life beyond mirrors my own. She describes how school ground the confidence out of her and how bullying, by both pupils and teachers, affected her mental and physical health, and then describes how she found a way out of the course that had seemingly been set for her.

Her description of her life draws empathy rather than sympathy. 

She doesn’t want to be patted on the head and told 'Poor little thing'. She totally rejects the description of herself as ‘disabled’, preferring instead to call herself 'wobbly'. The stories she tells are laugh-out-loud funny, but she is also a campaigner and educator, addressing school children to give them the confidence that she was robbed of. Martinez points out that society deliberately makes us feel inferior, or, as she puts it: 'Society breeds self-loathing'. Many of us can remember being told, during our teenage years, that ‘how we look is not important’. But, of course, at that stage of our lives, how we look can seem to be the most important thing in the world.

Martinez’s show emphasizes :

‘Don’t fear difference’

‘Being different is important’

‘Only care what you think of yourself’

‘Life is too short to be spent doing something that you hate’

- Keven Blake

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Francesca Martinez - Russell Howard's Good News (YouTube)

A Wobbly Girl's Battle Against the Last Taboo - The Independent

Martinez and the WOW Welfare Bill - Disability News Service

Francesca Martinez on Woman's Hour - BBC Radio 4

Pint of Science

Two-thirds of the way through Pint of Science: Beautiful Mind, talk turns to Socrates and the pursuit of happiness. Familiar conversational territory for a regular night out. 

Jim Lockey invites us to join him on a journey of creation and loss. He recently built, then captained and sank a paper boat in local shallow waters. We are asked whether grief is merely a by-product of human evolution, whilst considering themes explored in Ode to A Nightingale by Keats.

Thou we’re not born for death immortal bird

No immortal generations tread thee down

Tim Rittman condenses years of his work analysing footage of task-free brains and the rigidity that develops in those with neurological degeneration into ten minutes. He likens the brightly lit areas on the scans to conversations at a cocktail party and introduces us to the experiments of William Lennox, a scientist who stuck pins into the jugular veins and carotid arteries of his volunteers.

Within her Weight installation, Aiste Janciute encourages participants to use all five senses as they explore words or concepts that weigh them down or lift them up.

Without gravity, the cosmos is everywhere

Dr. Shabhana Khan returns us to the laboratory and to work being undertaken there to increase efficacy in the treatment of anxiety disorders by balancing three key -amines. She works in the field of optigenetics. Endeavours include the use of light to control cells and tickling mice.

Charlie Murphy, resident artist with the Created Out of Mind project, firstly outlines the complex science behind attempts by the team to grow brains from the skin cells of anonymous volunteers then explains how she transformed this process into a series of dance moves and created her Neuronal Disco.

Work it harder

Make it better

Do it faster

Makes us stronger

Two pints of science and three shots of art. I’m left with thoughts around the poetry of the former and the rigor of the latter and how the two push and pull the other into new spaces. The next morning, I feel a slight sense of disorientation as I work to recall, unpack and re-order conversations from the night before. Perhaps only fitting when themes of life, death and the transition between these states are explored, whether this is done through the medium of science or art or over a drink with friends in the pub.

- Melissa Jacob

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Pint of Science

Pint of Science on The One Show - 18 April 2018

Byron Vincent - Live Before You Die

The Love Affair Between Poetry and Science – New Statesman

The Neuronal Disco

What is the Common Ground between Art and Science? – Guardian

Sponge // Big Imaginations and Turned On Its Head

Sponge is a feel-good soft-play disco for ages 0-4. It’s full of the silliness and mischief that kids love and targeted at an age range that forms experiences that open up theatre to them in the future. Kids are dazzled by the lights and props, the possibilities for play and the opportunities for participation. They run around without being told to sit down, throw things and shout out without being told off, and dance with the performers rather than sit still. It’s not strictly dance, theatre or comedy, but it is happy, bright and open.

The show is a slow escalation of size and texture. Buckets are used as drums and boats and sponges as building blocks, trampolines and rain. It makes a mess of textures, coarse, soft, honeycomb and stretchy. The sponges also prove oddly versatile as costume – here a crawling mushroom that looks like it’s from a 50s sci-fi film, there used to gently reference Charlie Chaplin’s potato fork dance from The Gold Rush or dance moves from Saturday Night Fever. These subtle allusions exist more for the adults in the room than the kid themselves, but they offer another level to the show, little Easter eggs to keep parents entertained alongside the kids

As theatre and performance for young people continues to innovate and expand across the country with new companies and artists, performances like Sponge are a soft and squishy entry into that world. Its allows all kids to feel the freedom of new performance and encourages its audiences to engage and have fun. It introduces from the first (perhaps the very first time for many of the children there) the idea that there is more to theatre than sitting in the dark whilst someone speaks. It can be anarchic, rough and ready, silly and bizarre, with no story to speak of but built on of a series of interactions between performer and audience. And that’s a good lesson to share. 

- Lewis Church

Links Relevant to this Diagnosis:

Sponge – Turned on Its Head

Purni Morrell on Children's Theatre - The Stage

Half of Teenagers 'Never Been In a Theatre' - BBC News

The Blob (1958)

Charlie Chaplin's Table Dance - The Gold Rush (1925)

Rap Guide to Consciousness // Baba Brinkman

Have you ever wondered if a zombie is conscious? Do you love hip-hop? This a show that addresses the former through the latter. Baba Brinkman tackles ‘the hard problem’: how are we conscious? Consciousness is the awareness of your own existence, sensations and thoughts. So how then do the 90 billion or so neurons in our brain create a conscious being? This is a question science does not yet have the answer to, but though a series of ‘peer-reviewed raps’ Brinkman explores what we know about the brain and what this can tell us about the nature of consciousness.

Brinkman takes us from Bayesian probability theory to panpsychism (the theory that the universe is conscious). He breaks down these complex ideas using his son, acid trips and Google’s DeepDream generator, to create a funny and enjoyable hour long discussion about some hardcore scientific ideas. This makes Baba Brinkman’s Rap Guide to Consciousness a fantastic example of how to communicate complex scientific ideas. Every day we are bombarded with news stories about the latest scientific discoveries and asked to change our behaviours and lifestyles, and yet more often than not we are expected to just believe in the experts as the science is too hard to explain. With global phenomenon like climate change and obesity having the ability to affect us all, it has never been more relevant that we demystify science and remove the lab coat and safety goggles. 

- Kate Porcheret

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Baba Brinkman - Rap Guide to Consciousness

Consciousness Round-Up - New Scientist

Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality - Anil Seth (TED)

Rapping Evolution: An Interview with Baba Brinkman - Committee for Sceptical Inquiry

DeepDream Generator

FINDERS KEEPERS // Hot Coals Theatre

Finders Keepers is a devised play using mime-based physical performance and puppetry to convey the story of a motherless girl who lives with her dad, and one day finds an abandoned baby that the pair care for together until its real mother returns to claim it. The production is loosely based on the story of Moses, and the final moments show the child's foster mother leaving home, perhaps to follow and become the baby's nanny.  

Within the story material, described by the company as 'a live cartoon', the show hints at issues around care and loss without explicitly interrogating them (we see moments: the ritual of kissing an absent mother's portrait, different situations involving saying goodbye to a child, the adoption of a stranger to the family).

Finders Keepers is is billed as 'accessible to deaf and hearing audiences in a shared experience', and isperformed by two women, one of whom hears, one who is partially deaf. It has been directed by Caroline Parker MBE, who grew up deaf in a hearing household, and we we are shown a world where significant sounds happen as part of the storytelling. The feature that distinguishes deaf audiences from Deaf ones is that they identify themselves as belonging within a majority hearing culture.

There are utterances whose meaning is not always reflected in visual portrayal; trumpet playing and headphones used as devices to soothe the baby; plot shifts in the story marked with pre-recorded soundtrack noises - most prominently the infant's cries, which the characters repeatedly hear and respond to.

During the periods of the show where the baby is crying, a string of lanterns above the set flicker. An extra layer of semiotic interpretation can translate that visual signifier to the understood fiction of a distressed child, by watching the ensuing responses of the cast onstage and extrapolating through repetition, or through familiarity with flashing and/or vibrating baby monitors for parents with hearing impairment.

Whilst we may all share the same theatrical environment, deaf, Deaf or Hearing audience members will receive differently nuanced versions of the story, as with lived experience.

- KK

Finders Keepers is on at 11:45 at ZOO until August 27th. Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/finders-keepers

On making theatre for D/deaf and hearing audiences: https://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/2015/may/12/staging-theatre-deaf-hearing-audiences

On the differences between being deaf and Deaf: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/opinion/d_or_d_whos_deaf_and_whos_deaf.shtml

Resource of information for Deaf parents and professionals working with Deaf parents: http://www.deafparent.org.uk

Organisation dedicated to enriching the experience of CODAs (Children of Deaf Adults): http://www.coda-international.org

Collection of lectures on affectional bonds: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Y1ifjsdRGjsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Making+and+Breaking+of+Affectional+Bonds&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiemKj7rr_OAhUmLMAKHWUYCSMQ6AEIJDAB#v=onepage&q=The%20Making%20and%20Breaking%20of%20Affectional%20Bonds&f=false

PEOPLE OF THE EYE // Deaf and Hearing Ensemble

Deaf and Hearing Ensemble’s first major Fringe production – The People of the Eye – is an exploration of the development of a deaf identity from a number of different perspectives: from a deaf child learning to deal with microaggressions, to a hearing sister’s struggle to understand how difference might affect a person’s access to opportunities, to a hearing mother struggling with the reality that their child will need to live in a world in which there are challenges.

By focusing on the perspective of a child growing up in a hearing world, it might be easy to dismiss the ignorant comments faced by the central characters as the ignorance of childhood bullies, but Deaf and Hearing Ensemble’s focus is sharp: although such idiocy from strangers towards children, of course, does exist, the microaggressions, the stupid things that are said, are not limited to child perpetrators. They use humour to make their point, but their look at the chasm between hearing and deaf culture is a sharp rebuke of the ‘kindness’ and ‘goodness’ enacted by so many hearing adults.

People of the Eye is an origin story – a look at how the identity of a deaf adult might be built through a personal medical history, family interaction, and their peer group over time – and the incorporation of family videos demonstrates a strong and moving desire to understand one’s past (and thus, one’s present). But the political is never far away – much like in Nina Raines’ 2010 play, Tribes, People of the Eye shows that brief moment where a doctor convinces a parent not to teach their child sign language, referencing their chances of being ‘normal’ as improved by lip reading. While Deaf and Hearing Ensemble drop the comment lightly, it – combined with thoughtful performances in BSL and English, and a good chunk of light ribbing at audience members’ ignorance of BSL – resonates deeply. As with Touretteshero’s Backstage in Biscuitland which you cannot watch without wanting every show in the future to be a relaxed performance – one leaves People of the Eye understanding not only how much they really should learn BSL (or even basic BSL) but about the culture difference which can possibly be breached with a bit of effort on the part of hearing adults. (BL)

People of the Eye is on at 13.00 at Northern Stage at Summerhall until 27th August (not 10th, 17th, 24th). Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Closed Caption, BSL - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/people-of-the-eye

Francesca Ramsey on Microaggressions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPRA4g-3yEk

Touretteshero, Backstage in Biscuitland: http://www.touretteshero.com/2014/03/19/backstage-in-biscuit-land/

Nina Raines’ Tribes reviewed in The Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/8078475/Tribes-Royal-Court-review.html