Sunday 25 March 2012

toro, toro

York is sunny and gorgeous, I've just spent an amazing few days in Leeds and have nearly finished one essay. I'm alone in the house and am sitting out in the garden in a bikini with a gin & tonic and enjoying the weather, writing alternately: this, my review of Shared Experience's Mary Shelley, a job application and my diary.


I went to Yorkshire Sculpture Park on Thursday, specifically to see the Joan Miró exhibition. I know very little about Miró, although slightly more now, and loved his work. If you've tracked my taste in art through this blog, you'll realise it's all about photography and, in painting, bold brush strokes and heavy on the colour. I know very little about sculpture so wouldn't really say that I have a defined taste in that yet, although am starting to learn a little more about what I like. And I can say that I like Miró's sculptures, but that sounds like a bit of a sheep thing to say if I'm unable to compare it to those of other artists.

The colour of his work is incredible, and it's that which appeals to me. Walking through the exhibition was so evocative of Spain and particularly Pamplona. It was a sunny day and the exhibition is in a small building built with light yellow stone and yellow wood. The conservatory-effect of the tall windows, the watery late afternoon light heating the inside of the walls and the bright colours of the paintings and sculptures made me feel like I was a tourist in some gallery in Valencia after a day's walking, ready to go out and get some tapas, an ice cream, a cool jug of agua de Valencia.

We looked for the repetition of symbols in his work - my friend said that a teardrop kept recurring in his paintings and sculptures; I noticed a sickle shape, like a bull's horns. 

Compare - posters advertising the Fiesta del Toro in Pamplona, and Miró's paintings.






It was a lovely day, and has sent me craving Spain and watching Spanish films and making Spanish food and planning Spanish holidays. Looking forward to Sónar Festival in the summer, a three-day city festival the week of my birthday in Barcelona. Can you think of a better birthday present to myself?


And as promised, my review of Stomp, although the delay in posting means that the link to ticket booking is somewhat redundant, but they're touring so you can check them out on their website.

Stomp - 19th March 2012, York Opera House

Let’s just get one thing straight. I have two left feet. I have no sense of rhythm. I couldn’t even clap in time to John Cage’s 4’33”. And I never particularly minded about not having those skills. Until now. Now – oh yes - now all I want to do is wander around the house making my housemates steadily more irate by dropping cool beats with upturned mugs, run rampage down the street on rubbish day by playing with everyone’s dustbins, sit in the library around finals flicking pages in a nonchalant and rhythmical fashion. This is my dream. And I will clutch this dream to me until that tragic realization, once again, that I was not destined to be a percussive person. At all.

So what, or who, could have torn and replaced the dreams of a little girl who always wanted to be an astronaut?

It was Stomp.

Stomp is a percussive and dance show that has swept the world. There are up to three companies touring and performing in the UK and two American casts touring as well. They’ve even collaborated with The Muppets. Yep. That’s how big they are. Although the show describes itself as physical theatre, on their website they reassure you that Stomp isn’t about music taste, but about rhythm, and that ‘everyone knows rhythm, if only from the beating of their own heart’. (They clearly haven't met me).

My friend and I made our way to our seats in the Grand Opera House – he’d seen it before and had jumped at the chance to see it again - whilst I eyed the set. ‘The set is full of what look like very hittable things’, I wrote knowingly in my notepad. And then the show began, and I gradually forgot to write things down. From the first scene, which starts slowly and then builds, one could discern the mood of the show. One guy comes on stage, idly sweeping and desultorily marking out a rhythm with his broom. He is joined by someone else with a broom, and then someone else, and someone else, until the stage is filled with sweepers, each creating their own rhythm that ties in perfectly with the whole. And the result is not a cacophony, but an electric sound that somehow keeps you on the edge of your seat as you wait for the unused beats, for the drop, for the sudden change in note, for the final, exultant clash. The tempo at which the performers move is incredible: it is a tightly choreographed dance show that creates something new and inventive with each scene, from the most basic starting points. The objects that they create scenes out of include huge metal sinks (complete with marigolds) hanging from around their necks, basketballs, a bin bag full of rubbish including polystyrene cups, plastic bins, mops, sand… the list is endless. And for a 100 minute show without a narrative or any speaking, they need to be inventive to keep the audience’s attention.


©Stomp
The show was very slick in that the different choreographies rolled right into one another, and often incorporated a clean-up from the previous scene’s mess. I would have liked to have seen different characters portrayed with each scene, but instead the audience learned early on which member of the cast would forever play the clown for audience laughs, which guy was the leader of the group and was used as the audience mediator, and which guy was the ‘fit one’ of the group who could impress with his break-dancing skills. The development of character early on was a device that held the show together with a kind of linearity, but it meant that it seemed halfway to becoming a narrative without actually going the extra mile to do so. Aural humour was plentiful, as one would imagine, but the lack of speech in the show meant that the cast relied too much on slapstick and innuendo to provoke laughs. A scene with long rubber tubes as the instrument was obviously bookended by penis humour, in an infantile episode of tube-length comparison. I felt that some of the ‘comedic’ scenes were predictable and overworn, often resulting in my rolling my eyes rather than laughing, and this detracted from – on the other end of the scale – the clever and original choreography.

The choreography is stunning, the rhythmic melodies created sound faultless (to an untrained ear, at least), and the overall visual effect is very impressive. The aesthetic of the show is one of urban decay: the set is comprised of scratched street signs, old bins and saucepans and other aforementioned hittable things, all with a rubbish-tip air to them. The costumes are grey-hued, perhaps slightly ripped, and covered in paint. Everyone looks like a cooler, younger and probably more percussively talented version of the builder that your mum hired to paint the kitchen.

Although I felt that the lack of a narrative really was a lack (and needn’t have been), Stomp was a show that just oozed with talent, and some really spectacular scenes of physical skill. It will be at the Grand Opera House until the 24th March, and you can book tickets here. And now, please excuse me, while I go and annoy my housemates by bashing the crockery.

No comments:

Post a Comment