Body Language: Liverpool Physical Fest

The late choreographer Pina Bausch used to cover her stage in soil, flowers and mud, and have her dancers enact weird and wonderful scenarios, from sleepwalking to chasing each other. She reshaped and redesigned what we think of as contemporary dance, blending absurd cabaret and poignant movement, and is widely considered the most pioneering dancemaker of the past century. When Bausch died suddenly in 2009, just days after being diagnosed with cancer, she left her dance company, Tanztheater Wuppertal – not to mention audiences around the world – in mourning.

Several years ago the German choreographer was on a train to a performance in Paris with one of her dancers and rehearsal assistant, Daphnis Kokkinos. “I was sitting in front of her, in the direction the train was going,” he tells me, “and she had her back to the direction the train was going. I asked her, ‘Pina, would you like to change places?’ She said to me, ‘No darling, you're looking at the future, and I'm looking at the past.’”

This small exchange rooted itself in Kokkinos’ memory, and now forms part of the inspiration for his first ever solo piece, Addio Addio Amore, a touching and witty tribute to the life of the great choreographer. “I've been working on this piece for the last two years, in between rehearsals for the company, working in airports, all over the place,” says Kokkinos, speaking on the phone from Moscow. “The piece is what I wanted to do for Pina. There are little stories she said to me, some dreams I had of her. It’s all to say thanks to her, and to show how much more I love dance because of her.”

Addio Addio Amore will have its UK première at Liverpool’s International Physical Theatre Festival – or Physical Fest for short – this summer. Launched in 2004, the festival stages dance, circus, and physical theatre performances – and runs several workshops that are open to the public.

“The festival started from our desire to bring stuff to Liverpool,” says artistic director Elinor Randle, who also directs the city’s Tmesis Theatre Company. “We were always travelling to see exciting work or take part in theatre workshops, so we thought, Why don’t we bring this to Liverpool? This was at a time when we were building up to the European Capital of Culture [in 2008] so there was a lot of positivity around bringing other things to the city. We want to maintain that now.”

This year’s festival, occurring in venues across Liverpool, including Unity Theatre and the Bluecoat, also features the Barefeet Acrobats – a troupe that mixes rhythm, voice, and krump influenced movement while drawing ideas from traditional Zambian myth and folklore – and Jamie Wood's Beating McEnroe, an energetic show about the great tennis star Björn Borg, exploring rivalry, love and self-doubt.

“A lot of the performances are by people who have never been to Liverpool, or perhaps wouldn’t [otherwise] come,” explains Randle. “Some are UK premières, or styles of work that haven't been seen in Liverpool before, so it's a great benefit to the city, bringing exciting and brilliant artists from all over the world extends our community.”

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“The piece is what I wanted to do for Pina. There are little stories she said to me, some dreams I had of her” – Daphnis Kokkinos

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But the festival doesn’t just provide a stage for global performers in Liverpool: it also wants to nurture homegrown talent and cultivate the region’s theatre and dance scene. “I’m an artist myself and have a company making work,” says Randle, “so I understand all the difficulties involved with that and I'm passionate that there are genuine opportunities for people, that there are real ways of developing work.”

With this in mind, the festival’s showcase night – played to an audience of promoters as well as theatre fans – isn’t just a singular performance from an artist never to be heard from again; it’s a proper platform for up-and-coming talent, which may then be picked up by the festival for development.

Randle expands: “A local artist, Mary Pearson, did a short piece at the festival showcase last year, which we thought was brilliant, so we committed to developing that and seeing the full piece.” This summer Pearson will perform her full-length work Failure (and other opportunities for non-linear success). Playing a ‘fashion victim, aspiring pop diva and chronic underachiever’ with delusions of commercial success, Pearson promises a funny and irreverent show.

Even volunteering at the festival could lead to getting your work noticed, says Randle. “We give opportunities to people at the beginning of their careers, and the chance to take part in our workshops for free. For the volunteers, it’s also a chance to be part of a professional organisation and meet other artists from around the world. Some volunteers have stayed with us and we’ve helped them develop their work.”

Randle has personally mentored several artists, including Plastic Factory Theatre – whose work has been praised as compelling and macabre – and Caustic Widows, an all-female radical performance and visual theatre troupe.

When Physical Fest started out, it was purely a workshop festival, mostly aimed at artists and arts practitioners to develop their practical and creative skills. Randle and her team have since been programming more on-stage performances, and gradually building up the audience to include the Liverpool community and general public.

“This is work that’s exciting, dynamic and new,” she says. “I don't really want to use the word accessible, but we want to show that physical theatre is a wide genre and can actually be really engaging and entertaining, and not exclusive or just for artists. That’s really important to us, that these aren’t just performances for artists to watch other artists. That’s why we’ve programmed work that isn't some weird, experimental thing that's quite alienating, but actually exciting to watch.”

To this end, this summer’s Physical Fest is collaborating with the Glasgow-based group Conflux to bring street art, circus and installations to the streets of Liverpool. Randle is hopeful that this will drum up interest around the festival's main performances and encourage people to see a show.

But although the festival has made a concerted effort to increase the number of theatre, dance and circus shows, workshops are still its main focus – and this level of real audience participation is fairly unusual on the festival circuit: anyone can come along and try their hand at mime, acrobatics, acting, and dance. Wood will lead a clowning workshop encouraging participants to be playful and fun as well as honest and vulnerable, while Michael A Brown will teach a two-day workshop on masks in performance.

“The workshops are open to anyone,” adds Randle. “If the workshop is very physical we’ll recommend the taster sessions to people who aren’t sure and just want to drop in. The workshops are at a professional level, but we don’t ask for previous experience, and so far this balance has worked really well. We get a lot of people who just want to try something completely different.”

One of the highlight classes will be taught by Kokkinos himself. Of teaching a modern dance class, and then helping participants create their own movement, he says: “I think it’s very important for young dancers [workshop participants] to learn something about Pina's work, her ideas, her world.”