SWEET CHILD OF MINE // Bron Batten

While Bron Batten’s performance of Sweet Child of Mine (seemingly) did not seek to directly explore ideas of ageing and care; making the piece with her father led to an additional layer of performance gently weaving itself in. In this piece, the lines between Bron’s relationship to her parents on and off stage begin to blur.

In the piece, the artist interviews her parents about what they imagine she does for a living. This projected, hardly edited, documentary-like footage of Batten’s conversations with her parents gets us to think about art and performance. What are they for? Who might they be aimed at? What’s the point of it all?

For Bron Batten, those questions led to her making and touring a performance with her father for the last five years. Performance becomes a way of finding out more about each other, and of opening out a conversation across generations and on both sides of the fourth wall.

This, however is not the performance that was presented during this Edinburgh Fringe. Not quite. Due to an unforeseen illness, Bron Batten’s father, James has been unable to travel to Scotland to perform the show with his daughter.

With ten days to go until the start of the festival, Batten sought support from the local arts community to recruit local dads to stand in for her own.

Beyond the comment and gentle satire of contemporary art, James Batten’s absence - and his daughter’s decision* that ‘the show must go on’ - bring an additional signifying layer to the piece. Indeed, with life expectancy having significantly increased in recent decades, most people currently enjoy longer adult relationships with their parents. As these relationships evolve over time, carer/cared for dynamics shift. In Sweet Child of Mine, Bron Batten is now ‘orphaned’ on stage, and beyond the theatrical framework, we become aware that she will soon become a carer to her ageing parents.

Elsewhere, in Joanna Griffin’s Bricking It, while her father Patrick is indeed present on stage with her, the absence felt is that of their mother and wife whose death prompted the making of the piece, during which Griffin jokingly asserts; “it’s cheaper to bring my dad on stage with me than to put him in a care home”.

A few Fringes ago, Simon Bowes took to the stage with his father in a poetic exploration of the passing of time, with his mother watching from the front row, prepared with cue cards for her husband. A whole family present, but the disappearing of memories and the perceived increase in the speed of time passing.

Opening up their personal relationships to their makers’ families, each of those performances invites us to consider and re-define how we might choose to age, and manage ageing alongside our kin.

- Leo Burtin

* It feels important to note that the performance itself doesn’t inform us as to whether the decision to adapt the performance to accommodate James Batten’s absence was artistically driven or purely circumstantial.

Sweet Child of Mine ran at Gilded Balloon Teviot until August 29th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/sweet-child-of-mine

Journal of Marriage & Family article on intergenerational bonds: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2001.00001.x/full

Annual Review of Sociology article on intergenerational family relations in adulthood: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27800075?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Bron Batten’s website: https://bronbatten.com/

Information on Bricking It: https://making-room.co.uk/portfolio/bricking-it/

Information on Kings of England’s Where We Live & What We Live For featuring Simon Bowes and his father: http://kingsofengland.tumblr.com/WWL&WWLF

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