A dramatic week: absurdity, tragedy, & some poetry...

.

Who said February was a dull month? This week has been crammed with performance and creativity. Let's start with live theatre:The Late-ivity. Yes, it is the nativity story from the bible, Jim, but not as we know it.  Living Spit, unabashed that January is trudging onward, has brought their version of the arrival on earth of the Son of God to Bristol’s Wardrobe Theatre at the end of its short revival tour - revived from December’s performances when it was called The Nativity, that is.

The Wardrobe has fantastic audience atmosphere, especially for comedy, and Howard Coggins & Stu McCloughlin are absolutely on top form here - I speak as one who has followed them for over a decade of fantasies and histories, always steeped in absurdity. Here, Howard’s bored God picks a random woman (Howard) to impregnate, so Stu dashes around as an exasperated Gabriel, and both of them morph into shepherds and kings, skimming hilariously through the familiar tale to their own undoubted highlight: Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, recreated by audience participation as scores of dolls were chucked at us to dismember and hurtle back. The stage by the end looked like party leftovers from a cannibal feast. Sadly next week is the end of the run for this show: if you can’t get tickets, keep your fingers crossed for The Later-ivity - this one could run & run.

The recent remake of West Side Story, which has been popular with both reviewers and the public, has been showing at the Westway, Frome's charming little independent cinema: the combination of Spielberg and Sondheim, plus wild passion and hot nights, is clearly unmissable in a chill January, and the Westway has added attractions like icecreams on offer from a tray during the intermission, and a foyer bar. Adding to these small delights, this movie has been very well reviewed by both critics and audiences - and rightly so. This version is, as you'd expect, careful to get ethnicity correct, and also to establish a credible social context for the aggressions of the deprived teens.  Choreography & agility in the dances is as brilliant as you'd expect, and that clever, funny, song Gee Officer Krupke works particularly well as a private ensemble number rather than an unlikely challenge to real authority. It's great, altogether.

Still with drama: a chat in The River House with Frome's writer/performer Hannah Kumari whose one-person show ENG-ER-LAND will be touring the UK from February. As well as celebrating her own passion for football, Hannah says it's an exploration of her own mixed race identity, and what it means to be English. "I wanted to write a play that was fun and uplifting, whilst also confronting big issues," Hannah says. The play is coming to Frome in March, with a showing at the Football Club as well as the Merlin theatre.

This was a rich week for poetry too: Words at the Black Swan ekphrastic poetry group met on Monday to respond to the extraordinary Slow Time exhibition in the Long Gallery which opened last weekend. This fascinating project proved really stimulating to all ten workshop participants- do take a look at the website in the link, there are some extraordinary and beautiful responses to these pinhole landscapes extending Cartier Bresson's concept of a 'decisive moment' into an infinity of time. One of the group, Mike Grenville, also made a film you can view here.

Then Thursday evening Rainbow Fish Speakeasysession on Zoom led by by Frome's wonder-girl Liv Torc included some wonderful words, mostly crafted from heart-felt personal experience, with brilliant guest Rebecca Tantony also movingly personal in her poems: there's a sample of her work here. 

And after a couple missed Wednesdays, here's your musical blast from wonderful Bar Lotte! Saxophonist Iain Bellamy was with Nick Pini on bass, guest guitarist Denny Ilett, and drums this time from Marc Whitlock. I know nothing about jazz, but I do know that these sessions are fabulous.

And your final footnote this week is a recommendation for all those who for various reasons don't get up to the talks at the National Gallery in London: this is another of their short free-to-view exhibition promo films, this time Albrecht Dürer. It's a fascinating revelation of Dürer's huge impact on artists ever since.

Fast dance, slow art, & Boxes - a week of permitted joys

We live in interesting times, don't we? This is allegedly a Chinese curse but 2022 is taking it literally. Parties and protests, operation Big Dog/ this is the background to January's blog, as Julie Andrews might not have trilled in 1965. However this is an arts blog, so ignoring protest marches & the bumper batch of bulletins about ludicrous misbehaviour in the corridors of power, let's go direct to Frome's Merlin Theatre for a double bill of talent and innovation on Saturday night. First aKa dance theatre presented a speechless solo show of brilliant parody, dance, mime, and mimicry all exquisitely synched to a clever topical soundtrack.  A Real Fiction (do check this link) had the circle of audience transfixed by stunning moves and surreal comedy, including an 'intermission' where we all got jellybabies and concluding with a short series of 'out-takes'.  Next, the fable of Pandora's box was given a new twist with puppetry and current context by Kerchief Theatre in their short performance Boxes - basically a simple piece of story-telling made enchanting by the rapport between the two women performers, Esme Patey-Ford and Maddy Herbert, emerge from boxes with different perspectives which are increasingly highlighted throughout their drama, ultimately resolved not by 'hope' as an  abstract injunction but by their playful Tiktok. There's more about this delightful production here.  

From hi-energy drama to silent art, as Black Swan Arts has re-opened the Long Gallery after its long break for Slow Time, a fascinating exhibition of pin-hole camera photographs taken in Somerset on long settings - a week, a month, or longer. This project began as a creative response to lockdown, inspired initially by Steve Poole & Jannette Kerr who provided neighbours and friends with pin-hole cameras created in cans, and a brief to leave them in any situation for long enough to register the changes of light over time. With support from John Gammans of Somerset Arts Work, this project developed into a fascinating collection of images that in their distorted stillness seem to chime with the strange life-reorientations of our community during these times of stillness imposed by the pandemic. Here's Steve showing me a typical pinhole camera, and one of the images created by months beside an immobilised concrete works when the passing of daylight was its only illumination. (workshops available - check Black Swan site.)

Other than that, my week has had a focus on written word: two live writers' group meetings, now that we're allowed indoors, a meeting of Hunting Raven's Proof Pudding Book Club at River House on Sunday, plus a zoom discussion with Hazel Stewart on the progress of our twin-twin poetry collection (two writers, two reading routes) now that our commissioned cover imagery* has been delivered to our publisher. What's it like for you? and Dance for Those Who'd Rather Not are both pamphlet-length collections jointly devised, exploring & expressing our personal themes as well as our long friendship: we're both beyond thrilled that this Caldew Press, who recently published John Hegley's collection A Scarcity Of Biscuit, has now added us to his stable of quirky poets. *images available soon!

Patchy sun this week has allowed for some very pleasant local walking too, so to conclude this chat on disparate topics, here's Nunney Church looking particularly lovely as the snowdrops in the graveyard start to flower.