Oral // Viv Gordon

ORAL is a play about mouths and starts with Viv Gordon running. It is the 90s, and she is running away. In this neon-lit setting, Viv starts to tell her story. She talks about her fear of dentistry and her love of cooking. Cooking — she explains — is predictable: it’s a safe-space. But her daydreams of being on MasterChef often end with an unhappy twist as the dish she tries to create based on a childhood memory is found unacceptable by the censors.

ORAL is a play about childhood sexual abuse and its effects on adult survivors. It is a story of a survivor, made not only to raise awareness and visibility, but to empower other survivors, and it does so with the utmost respect. Viv’s memories are told in allegory; she compares her childhood self to a princess who lives in a colourful kingdom but gets lost in a deep, dark forest.  It talks about topics that are still considered taboo today even though 90,000 people in the UK alone are affected by them. 

While the play deals with heavy topics, it still manages to maintain an optimistic outlook. Alongside the comedic elements, like the surrealistic dance with cheek retractors,the main source of light remains hope. The effectiveness of hope lies in its subtlety, as at the moment when Viv is ready to leave the dentist's office and the doctor mentions that he read the article that she had sent earlier. This simple act of reading her article about the connections of childhood sexual abuse and dental fear fills not only Viv, but also the audience with hope for the future.

The 90s are having a renaissance today. Like the recently premiered Captain Marvel film, which seemingly starts with a clichéd ‘girl-power’ agenda of having to prove your worth to your abuser but debunks it by the end, ORAL shows how feminism and mental-health activism have changed in the past three decades. Victim-blaming has slowly been recognized as a problem, and the idea that people can remain comfortably neutral on certain topics too. 

ORAL is a play about hope and ends with Viv Gordon running. It is the present day, and she is running towards the future. She is running with her fellow performers, who are also her friends and allies. They remind the audience about the importance of change — about how by not pursuing it, we as a society, maintain a status quo that is harmful to many. In our time, having good intentions is not good enough: only our actions matter. 

-      Masha Laszlo

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Viv Gordon

Key Facts and Figures - NAPAC

Tips for Abuse Survivors - Dental Fear Central

Dental Hygiene Care for Survivors of Childhood Abuse - Oral Health Group

The Psychological Impact of Victim Blaming and How to Stop It - US News

Captain Marvel Has Nothing to Prove to You - Pajiba

Fury1/FuryZ // LAST YEARZ INTERESTING NEGRO, ROWDY SS AND SHELLEY PARKER

Every time I see Jamila Johnson Small dancing in Fury I remember how it feels to stand on a dance floor undulating, oscillating, swinging and wavering. 

I used to be a party girl, and as such have often lost track of many things going on around me whilst I was trying to lose myself. 

Every time I see Jamila Johnson Small dancing in Fury I can look for those things, trying to recognise me and the indistinct multitudes that trundle around a dance floor seeking for love. We are all falling, and slouching, and seeking for love.

- Camilla Carè

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Last Yearz Interesting Negro (Jamila Johnson-Small) - Fury1/FuryZ

Art in the Club - Crack Magazine

Dance Memory - Duke University

Clubbing, Dancing, Ecstasy, Vitality - Ben Malbon

Ugly Chief // Victoria Melody

Framed as a living funeral, Ugly Chief mines what is at stake when we numbly follow mainstream social norms or accept glib representations of the truth.

The entire show is founded on the misdiagnosis of Victoria Melody’s father with a terminal illness. Although he notices his health fails to plummet, he does not confer with his doctor, as is all too typical in relationships with professionals where technical prowess subsumes empathy. In the space of ignorance, Melody plans her father’s funeral, as requested, and trains as a funeral director. When the doctor’s error comes to light, the Melodys collaborate on ‘Ugly Chief’- a title that emerges from an inaccurate meaning ascribed to their surname picked up from online ancestral research.  There are frequent prods at our tendency to infer truth from unsubstantiated sources, like her father’s apparent familiarity and connection with the culture of New Orleans. As revealed by her research trip, it turns out it's limited to the opening sequence of Live & Let Die.

Melody confronts the conventional taboo of talking about death, luridly describing funeral practices such as sewing mouths closed in an attempt to make corpses parody the living and for death to appear less distressing. She shows us a product range of coffins rising to one at £19,000 with no value to the end-user.  These shiny veneers may offer more comfort than openly discussing death when alive, but in doing so they sidestep environmental factors and we relinquish our freedom of choice. We succumb to limited and often more costly options driven by corporate agendas. 

Rather than experience emotions, we choose what psychotherapist M Scott Peck describes as 'dinner party conversations', prevalent in what he describes as pseudo community: a shallow existence. Melody moves beyond her explorations of death and goes on to break a second taboo, the public airing of familial dirty laundry as she and her father explore their fractured relationship. Experts in truth and conciliation identify this willingness to talk as a precursor to forgiveness. At the end of the show, the Melodys read eulogies for one another that are raw and touching. Although this is a performative work and we have no way knowing what is real, Melody has attuned us to this dilemma earlier by describing her dim experiences at Chelsea College of Art, which include a tutor berating her for a poor understanding of Baudrillard’s Simulacra. In the end, perhaps it is only the willingness to experience emotions, to allow discomfort and speak the unspeakable that sets us free and enables us to be real. 

- Lubna Gem Arielle

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Doctor Patient Relationship - Huffington Post

A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics - Daniel Levitin

Live and Let Die (1973) - New Orleans Funeral Scene

Death Cafe

Death Doulas - Huffington Post

The Different Drum - M Scott Peck

Funerals - Ethical Consumer

The Forgiveness Project

Baudrillard's Simulacra

Hyperthymesia // Cece Otto

In the world today, there are between twelve and twenty-five documented cases of hyperthymesia, also known as highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM). People living with this, are able to remember most of their life events. Their recall can be incredibly detailed including the weather, events, emotions and sensations of any given day. All these memories are mentally catalogued and remembered with astounding accuracy. Vivid sequences of events are almost trapped in time, living forever as they are…unaltered by the usual process of re-remembering an event from the distance of time passing.

Cece Otto delivers a one woman-show inspired by these individuals. We glean a sense a life never forgotten; cascading in all its happiness, joy, shame, disgust, embarrassment and sadness. Most affecting is the reveal that the emotions attached to these memories remain potent (demonstrated by Otto's character revealing they are still furious about something that happened when she was five years old). 

It feels like lots of models for increasing a sense of wellbeing (mindfulness, meditation, yoga) encourage one to be present and/or ‘let go’. Difficult or traumatic events hook themselves into our memory and are often re-triggered by other, separate but related circumstances. Revisiting these events to understand them and find a little breathing space, the tiniest bit of relief is already quite an undertaking that can require the sensitive mediation of a mental health professional. So, what happens when you live with hyperthymesia and it is a near impossibility to ever let go of emotional attachments to a memory? How do you come to terms with a difficult moment when it lives on in the sharp focus of the present? Might a person with hyperthymesia relate to lying, fictions or speculation differently, because their own mind has no need for such inventions when telling their own stories?

An infallible memory challenges much of our understanding that recalling memory is predominately a process of recalling ever-changing versions of that memory. Remembering everything as it is-was, crams a brain full. Many people with hyperthymesia stem their barrage of memories by writing them down. Something about visually storing memories by giving form and language must help contain them. Hyper-real by comparison to someone living without hyperthymesia, these memories line up, attentive and unimaginably close. Permanently in order. 

- Alexandrina Hemsley

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Hyperthymesia - Cece Otto

Total Recall: The People Who Never Forget - Guardian

9 Facts About People Who Remember Everything About Their Lives - Mental Floss

Meet The Man Who Remembers Everything - NBC News

Remembering Everything: Superpower or Burden? - Plaid Zebra 

Memory Is Inherently Fallible And That’s a Good Thing - Technology Review

The Science of Cringe // Maria Peters

As a child, Maria Peters went to school early every day to conduct a secret science project (investigating the effects of shampoo on hair strength). But she stopped when she could no longer keep it a secret from her friends, fearing social rejection. This is just one of many personal 'cringe-cidents' revealed during the course of her show, which uses comedy and science to explain what cringe is, why we feel it, and whether sharing the most cringeworthy experiences of her life will help her control her fear of rejection.

The audience, too, is invited to share, albeit anonymously. Everyone has the chance to write down an embarrassing memory that Peters will later use as the basis for an improvised reenactment or song. We get to cringe for each person's remembered experience as well as for them having it replayed in front of all of us. How much we cringe or laugh depends on our level of empathy - people's capacity to feel each other's emotions, including social and emotional pain, is a strong part of human culture. Cringe, it seems, helps bind us together and exclude anyone who doesn't quite fit. Peters pulls in arguments from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology to support this idea.

Research into modern-day emotions can be complicated and sophisticated, but can it help us cope when excessive cringe interferes with our lives? 'Shame attacks' form part of some types of behavioural therapy designed to ease social anxiety. Participants are tasked with going out and committing small acts of social disorder (loudly calling out every floor in a crowded lift, for example) in order to learn that cringing is not the end of the world. Peters seems to be trying something similar with this show, and her conclusion is that while cringe may sometimes save us from social embarrassment, it also sometimes stops us being who we truly are. Her suggestion is to embrace the cringe, and when everyone in the audience joins her in a most cringeworthy dance at the end of the show, it is hard to argue.

- Michael Regnier 

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

The Science of Cringe

Reputation is the Modern Purgatory - The History of Emotions Blog (2012)

The Centre for the History of Emotions - Queen Mary, University of London

Cells That Read Minds - New York Times

Evolutionary Psychology - Science Daily

Shame Attacks - The Albert Ellis Institute

DREAMCATCHER // Dreamcatcher

From Shakespeare to Emily Bronte and beyond, many authors have given dreams the power to direct, challenge and reveal. In Dreamcatcher, young Indian playwright Kashyap Raja explores whether dreams may hold the key to unlocking your subconscious mind and your destiny.

The significance of sleep is a hot topic in modern science. Researchers have recently uncovered evidence that our brain has a plumbing network called the glymphatic system, which they believe may be responsible for clearing out dementia-causing toxins while we doze.

But dream analysis is still on the borderline with pseudoscience. Sigmund Freud’s idea that we act out our desires in dreams is undermined by a study showing that paralysed people dreamt about walking less than average, even though they all expressed a desire to regain that ability.

Carl Jung also taught that dreams are highly significant, containing truths and visions that emerge from different levels of our unconscious mind. This is the scenario that Dreamcatcher explores, with a machine that can look inside living people’s dreams, where, it’s revealed, you can always find your heart’s desire.

So does science support the notion that dreams can reveal the workings of the subconscious mind? Unfortunately neurobiological theory suggests that dreams emerge as we try to make sense of sporadic firings of nerves in our brain stem, which randomly activate memories. 

But scientists continue to explore what’s going on in the brain’s unconscious. The latest experiments show we can do complicated maths, as well as making rapid-fire judgements that guide our behaviour, without even knowing we are doing it. Is this how our destiny asserts itself?

The more that experts probe how our brains work, the more we realise how much processing is going on in our unconscious without our awareness. Currently, though, the suggestion that dreams carry great significance seems like wishful thinking. (RM)

Dreamcatcher ran at theSpace @ Surgeon’s Hall until August 27th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/dreamcatcher 

The discovery of the brain’s glymphatic system: https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/3584/scientists-discover-previously-unknown-cleansing-system-in-brain.aspx

Significance of sleep to brain cleansing: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/brain-may-flush-out-toxins-during-sleep

Neurobiological reasons for dreams: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2010/04/07/why-do-we-dream/#.V9m5A_krKUk

The power of our unconscious mind: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160315-the-enormous-power-of-the-unconscious-brain

4D CINEMA // Mamoru Iriguchi

Mamoru Iriguchi’s moving planes of flat projection are a visual signature, a recurring technique constructed through a wacky series of contraptions that disguise their sophistication. In 4D Cinema the footage projected onto them are used to question time itself, the ability of a subject to define their own home and the biographic responsibilities of the performer and audience. The nature of memory is as much its subject as Marlene Dietrich, both in what the audience remember of themselves as they were fifty minutes younger, and in thoughts of how your memory will survive after death.

It is apt that this questioning of memory happens through a screen. There is constant media speculation on the consequences of modern humanity’s deferral of the responsibility of remembering onto external devices. No longer do our brains contain sets of memorised phone numbers or addresses, they're filed away as discrete pieces of digital information accessed through a screen or a cloud. Iriguchi’s work highlights the risk that this trust of the screen might come to dominate our own memories. Believable biographical material is delivered through screen and authoritative speech, causing a brief cognitive dissonance with my vaguely recalled pop cultural history. Was what was said about Dietrich true, whether played forwards or back? Can I trust my disbelief without a surreptitious Google?

As the performance finishes, the last thing the audience see is themselves reversed in moving image, a playback of themselves entering unaware into the space. It’s a riff on self-perception and its communication, on the marketing of ourselves as a central concern, the modus operandi of social media and advertising, subcultures, clothing and rep. Like the mirror stage of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the point at which a toddler locates themselves in the image in the mirror, video documentation shows the subject to itself as something others see. In 4D Cinema our image is reflected back to a later version of ourselves, through an unaware entrance, and the ramblings of a reticent historical subject.

- LC

Mamoru Iriguchi - http://www.iriguchi.co.uk/About.html

How the Internet Inhibits Short-Term Memory -http://www.medicaldaily.com/information-overload-how-internet-inhibits-short-term-memory-257580

Digital Amnesia: Real or Not? -http://www.techtimes.com/articles/65431/20150709/digital-amnesia-spreading-due-to-internet-and-smartphone-use-or-crass-marketing-ploy.htm

Metaperceptions: How Do You See Yourself? -https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200505/metaperceptions-how-do-you-see-yourself

The Mirror Stage –http://www.lacanonline.com/index/2010/09/what-does-lacan-say-about-the-mirror-stage-part-i/

Mamoru Iriguchi/Lewis Church Interview (Exeunt) - http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/between-the-genres/

HIP // Kriya Arts

Hip is an hour drifting through the Jungian collective unconsciousness; during the performance, Jolie Booth explores the serendipity of finding uncanny parallels with past lives. Based around found objects, Hip is a semi-autobiographical one woman show that starts by introducing us to a location caught between two timelines and personalities: the home of Anne Clarke during 60s bohemian Brighton, and a squat established by Jolie in 2002.

In homage to Aboriginal songlines which suggests location designates family, the audience is transported, in this extra live performance, to a cosy living room with cushions and cheese and pineapple nibbles. Acting as an aid to suspend disbelief, these props along with real love letters and transparencies of Annie’s eccentrically erotic art, are accompanied by Jolie’s soothing and passionate storytelling.

The title Hip comes from a Hip bone found amongst Annie’s possessions, eludes to a posthumous physical memory and is used to initiate a séance, in which the audience hold hands to connect with the presence of Annie. No longer spectators, they are now a tribe connected and enthralled by the memories of Jolie and Annie. Maffesoli (1996) describes tribes as a collective form of identity which is based on sentiment rather than rationality.

The hypnotic environment of light from an overhead projector used to display letters and poems from lovers and friends of Annie these are interwoven with vestiges from Jolie’s own life and there is an immediate and clear association. In later life Annie was consumed by alcoholism and died alone estranged from her family but Jolie suggests her funeral was well attended, if only by the patrons of her local drinking establishment. At the end of the play, Jolie explains that the hip bone isn’t human and is surely a memento from the Occult bookshop where she worked and frequented: just one of the glimpses into the community of 60s bohemian Brighton.

In respect for the dead, before we leave we join Jolie in a toast (with free tequila shots) to Annie’s life. This closes the circle of memory, love and loss. In a somnambulistic trance the audience leaves; Jolie has provided an authentic and human exploration of inherently unstable modern tribalism.

(LO)

Hip is on at 16.30 at ZOO (Venue 124) ntil August 27th. Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets, Relaxed Performance - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/hip

E15-mothers: https://en.squat.net/tag/e15-mothers/

Advisory Service for Squatters: http://www.squatter.org.uk/for-new-squatters/squatting-made-less-simple/

The lethality of loneliness - John Cacioppo at TEDxDesMoines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0hxl03JoA0

One-woman show Hip charting the times of Anne Clarke, who helped set up Infinity Foods: http://www.theargus.co.uk/leisure/stage/14483157.One_woman_show_Hip_charting_the_times_of_Anne_Clarke__who_helped_set_up_Infinity_Foods/

Dissecting and Detecting Stories in Found Objects and Remnants: http://hyperallergic.com/223735/dissecting-and-detecting-stories-in-found-objects-and-remnants/

What are song lines?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVOG-RKTFIo

TORCH // Flipping the Bird

The setting for Torch is a narrow one: its narrator has locked herself in a toilet cubicle at a nightclub, unable to summon the confidence to storm the dancefloor despite plenty of shots and a snort of coke. Within its confines, she journeys across her past, reflecting on the relationships and sexual experiences that shaped and eroded her sense of self. It's a history of disappointment, mostly: whatever she wanted of the men who paraded through her life, she never got it. All that remains of them is a set of lifeless mementoes, a jumper maybe, recording their interaction.

But the disappointment is also in herself: reaching back to her teenage years, she wonders at her youthful exuberance, revels in the memory of her ease in her own body. Having sex for the first time, she says, “I finally understood my own power.” That teenager didn't hide her body behind baggy t-shirts, and didn't need a man's permission to do anything. More than once the woman cries out that she wants that teenage self back.

The experiences described in Phoebe Eclair-Powell's text are common enough to feel like archetypes; performed by Jess Mabel Jones, iridescent with gold glitter strewn across her eyes and lips, they gain a potent charge. Interspersed between each anecdote is the song this woman might have belted out in her kitchen, or listened to on an iPod while crying on the nightbus: some morose, some cheeky, none of them specifically relevant to the story but useful all the same. There's some fascinating neuroscience describing the ways in which music – especially the music heard as a teenager – impacts on the human brain: the nostalgia connectors that develop as a result are the same ones triggered by this show.

The text doesn't do much sexual-politics work: the affairs described are all heteronormative; and although the woman remembers with regret not kissing a woman she found attractive, her desire for lesbian experience is vague. And although the work is feminist on the surface, it's noticeable that the woman seeks self-definition in sexual relationships rather than intellect, work or non-physical engagement with the world. In essence, Torch is itself a torch song: a shot of emotion directed straight at the heart. (MC)

Torch is on at 20.50 at Underbelly Cowgate until August 28th. Hearing Loop - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/torch

On the lack of scientific research into female sexuality: http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/08/03/sexual_orientation_in_women_why_so_little_scientific_research.html

On lesbianism and sexual fluidity: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/nov/26/lesbianism-women-sexual-fluidity-same-sex-experiences

Questions raised by women equating sex with power: http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/12/power-in-sexuality-problem/

The neuroscience of musical nostalgia: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/08/musical_nostalgia_the_psychology_and_neuroscience_for_song_preference_and.html

On the benefits of nostalgia: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/science/what-is-nostalgia-good-for-quite-a-bit-research-shows.html?ref=science&_r=1