As the Body Is, So it Knows // Kopano Maroga

Kopano begins this workshop by offering a congratulation to the participants for taking the time to honour yourself in a society that doesn’t want you to. For often pressures on our time remove us from our bodies and the things that they know, cutting us off from the knowledge contained in bones, muscles and the way we move. Our time here together asserts writing as a bodily practice as well as a cerebral one, and it asks its participants to share intimacies with each other as they share the space, filling pages with dialogue as we fill the space with our dance and shouting.  

Many of the movement exercises engage with the trauma that lives in the body by borrowing movement practices from somatic therapy. The notion that trauma is a physical reality is one that is increasingly understood by psychiatric professionals - a biological process where the rush of adrenalin migrates deep into the core of tissue. Within the workshop, Kopano instructs us in an extended period of shaking and trembling designed to free whatever experience of this form of trapped history we may own. We then turn from this movement to the writing of letters to those people or things that we might want to forgive in our lives, linking this freeing of emotion through movement to the production of text. Writing in silence before sharing these letters with a partner, the movement sparks new connections across language, nationality and experience. 

Its paradoxical that self-care can become an added pressure to an already hectic life. Competitive wellness is a fundamentally modern phenomenon, with time spent in exercise construed as achievement. What the time here in this workshop reminds its participants is that the brain and body are not only linked but one and the same, with subjectivity created through being and relation rather than internal definition. My body is what writes, and my mind and emotions are what direct my body to move. By taking time to link the two once again, I understand the extent to which my practice relies on this relation.

- Lewis Church

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

 Kopano Maroga - As the Body Is, So it Knows

Time to Move Beyond the Mind/Body Split - The British Medical Journal

Working with Traumatic Memory in the Body - NICABM

Somatic Therapy - Psychology Today

Writing Dance - Lila Dance UK

Self-Care Won’t Save Us - Current Affairs

50% LIABILITY // The Emslie Effect

Stripped down to its bloodless essentials, life is- give or take- a series of disjointed happenings, comings together and comings unstuck. There are birth pangs, there are death pangs. Big deal. John Emslie’s 50% Liability is a play that has something to say about all these things, plus one of those other elemental, everyday components: luck. Particularly, exclusively, bad luck.

In all honesty, it’s a show that deals exclusively with accumulated bad luck. How it stacks up, adds together and hardens into all that you’ve got. The genetic bad luck of being born, in a ‘scrawny’ (and Emslie makes this go a long, long way) frame ripe for the horrors of adolescence and high school, ripe for the bitter comic irony of becoming a male stripper in 80s Aberdeen (‘quite a conservative place’) having to carve out a niche hovering on the borderline of mutual humiliation for both stripper and client. Of all the petty, excruciating layers of incomprehension between the generations.

There’s not much in the way of linear narrative. But, for Esmlie, that’s sort of the point. He presents his life as a series of fluid, semi-connected catastrophes, each one more seemingly inevitable than the last. A broken neck in a slapstick occurrence at work, a near-death dream trip to Alaska, the use of his claims money to finance the show itself. In a sense, it’s a play that deals with how misery breeds misery and accumulates, as if by stealth. It’s a play that deals, blithely, with causality, with self-pity. With how it can take a whole lifetime to scramble clear of unpropitious beginnings. How that might be an impossibility in the end.

And finally, it deals with a kind of gallows hope. That even now, after a more than a lifetime's worth of ‘bad luck’, there’s the creeping anxious hope that ‘things can only get better’.

- FG

50% Liability played at C Venues - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/50-liability-1

Exotic Dancers: Gender Differences In Societal Reaction, Subcultural Ties, and Conventional Support- http://www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol10is1/bernard.html

Naked Ambition: The Truth About Male Strippers- http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/sex-industry/naked-ambition-the-truth-about-male-strippers-7820919.html

Chance: A Key Role in Life- https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/ChanceCanPlayKeyRole.pdf

A DREAM OF DYING // Fake Escape Theatre

Life is just a matter of appropriate planning. A good life is a well ordered life. The fullest life is the most neatly divided life. Birth, school (“with outstanding grades”), a lucrative job, a beautiful wife, a spacious suburban house, grinning suburban children, early retirement, grinning suburban grandchildren, a cheerful death and a well peopled funeral. It’s so simple, so simply broken down.

All that’s known of the ‘real’ Peter Bergmann is that he spent the last few days of his life in 2009 in the Irish city, Sligo. Every possible step had been taken to eradicate any clues relating to his identity. No tags on his clothes. No identification. No personal effects. No traces of a life. Even the name was an alias. It endures to this day, a mystery unresolved and apparently unresolvable.

Treasa Nealon’s script seeks to provide something approaching context to this strange, poignant tale. Lawrence Boothman’s performance as Bergman is pitched at a hypersensitive frequency, at turns vaudevillian, needy, broadly comic, shatteringly fragile and wildly allusive (there are strains of Yeats and Beckett throughout). 

As an audience we are treated to a spectacle at once manic and potentially hallucinatory. Boothman’s performance and multi-angled characterisation leaves it unclear whether the memories of family life and friendship are real or the projected fragments of an unhealthy mind. It plays with our ideas about self-determination and agency. The illusion of life being a simply ordered thing is supplanted by the realisation that the only real control we have is over our deaths. It’s not just a dramatic concern, but one that we deal with directly (and indirectly) in our society. It’s the question of the ‘right’ to die, and the question what significance an unexamined, ‘unmourned’ death has in comparison to conventional notions of dying as an event.

- FG

A Dream of Dying played at theSpace @ Surgeon's Hall - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/dream-of-dying

Loneliness Swallowed Me Up- https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/may/28/emily-white-loneliness

Life-hating Loneliness- https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/suffer-the-children/201303/life-halting-loneliness

Sense and Nonsense: an essay dealing with the ethics of schizophrenia research- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920996498001285

 A short essay on the mystery of mental illness- http://noelbell.net/resources/world-mental-health-day-resources/the-mystery-of-mental-illness/

Self-Determination: A Buffer Against Suicide Ideation- http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2012-Bureau_SaLTB.pdf

THREE JUMPERS // Unearthed Theatre

A council worker watches on as a young man takes a running jump to throw himself off a bridge. He pulls back at the last moment. The young man, elegantly dressed, starts to converse with the dry witted street sweeper and the tone shifts. Things are revealed to be more complicated, as things often are.

Soon we are joined by two others and a queue forms at the bridge. A queue of suicides. They start to squabble and confer and details start to drip down to form a patchwork of connections. Unemployment, childlessness, the absence or death of love. The mutual connection through one female character.

Three Jumpers treats suicide as something more than just a one-off kind of ultimate madness, or a sudden burst towards self-annihilation. It shows the sometimes farcical, even grimly humorous faces of self-loathing and depression. It’s all in the conversation- after all, isn’t the absence of dialogue, the feeling that internal suffering is something to be born stoically and alone, that one of the biggest factors in suicide being the biggest killer of young men. It’s not that the conversations are flawless. They are often stilted and spiteful, yet strangely fluent in the way that desperate peoples conversations often are.

The play unfurls like a morality play without a moralising streak. Through its humor and subtlety it shows suicidal tendencies not as aberrations, but part of the complexity that constitutes being human.

- FG

Three Jumpers played at Greenside @ Infirmary Street - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/three-jumpers

Self-Determination: A Buffer Against Suicide Ideation- http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2012-Bureau_SaLTB.pdf

From Beckett to Stoppard: Existentialism, Death, and Absurdity- http://home.sprintmail.com/~lifeform/beckstop.html

An Essay on Influence in Waiting for Godot- http://www.samuel-beckett.net/Penelope/influences_resonances.html

Campaign Against Living Miserably- https://www.thecalmzone.net/

FAT GIRLS DON'T DANCE // Maria Ferguson

There's some crunk dance moves happening in Maria Ferguson’s first one woman show, Fat Girls Don’t Dance, it’s an autobiographical account of her struggles with food and body image and how this has affected her dreams of becoming a professional dancer.

Stuck in a job cold calling for Which magazine Maria is day dreaming of supplying the dance floor with some sick moves. She sings "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid as if a plea for inclusion to the world of performance.

There’s more sick moves when Maria gets home but these involve vomit, as the audience witnesses her battling with her eating disorder, obsessive exercise and calorie counting. Like every thinspiration instagram post she contorts till her collar bones protrude and runs desperately as if searching for that ever elusive thigh gap, her brows knit with determination or maybe confusion as the Meghan Trainor song "All About the Bass" resounds across the stage, a positive body image and self-acceptance anthem which entreats her to embrace herself at any size.

A beloved but expensive dance class involves tap, ballet and modern but also French Fancies, Custard Creams and wotsits. Through repetition and Tourettes-like physical tics, Maria describes her auditions, which are always met with a mantra of “too fat to play pretty, too pretty to play fat.” Maria is caught in a mental and physical loop of auditions for the indistinguishable female performer’s holy trinity of Holby City, Casualty, Eastenders.

Culture Club's "Karma Chameleon" is Maria’s Bulimia musical touchstone, a song to be sung so she recognises dangerous behaviors, but also to comfort shattered dreams and the painful daily realities and challenges of bingeing and purging.

When even record breaking Olympian Simone Biles suffers body shaming, the challenges of maintaining a positive body image seem insurmountable to most women. Fat Girls Don’t Dance is a touching, brave and at times uncomfortably honest performance that entreats the audience to challenges the impossible aesthetic of professional dancers.

- Lucy Orr

Fat Girls Don’t Dance is on at 14.50 at Underbelly, Cowgate (Venue 61) Hearing Loop. https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/fat-girls-don-t-dance

Stripping away negative body image | Lillian Bustle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME-c0l8oTkY

Proof That You Can Be A Wildly Talented Dancer At Any Size http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/05/fat-girl-dancing-video-talk-dirty-to-me_n_4730408.html

Girls with anorexia turned away by NHS because they are 'not thin enough' http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/03/girls-with-anorexia-turned-away-by-nhs-because-not-thin-enough/

A resource for professionals and carers of people with eating disorders http://www.thenewmaudsleyapproach.co.uk/

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/