Dicks, Tits and Chip: Arches Live
The Arches Live launch night hit the ground running on Thursday with plenty of dicks, tits and ass from performance poet Drew Taylor. Apparently shipped over from NYC, all glittery in pink tights, blonde wig and shrivelled pig snout sporran, he supplied a faux cosmopolitan sheen to a festival that mainly provides a platform for local talent.
Though Taylor’s act is a little hackneyed – the ultra camp persona, the eighties style slam poetry - it's a fun reminder of the relationship Arches Live has with other international and local events such as the ongoing Glasgay festival. Arches programmer Jacqueline Wylie followed with more serious words on the creativity and commitment which made the festival possible, assuring us “Sometimes one person inspires a movement; sometimes a few passionate people change the world.”
With a song in my heart and a renewed sense of possibility I set off for my first show - the father daughter collaboration Chip. Chip is the most recent of several productions by Glas(s) Performance who strive to create socially engaged theatre which draws on the stories of real people. Working together, Jim and Jess Thorpe escape the self-obsessive tendencies of autobiographical art by inverting the format - Chip is about each performer's relationship with the other person. The effort that this acknowledgement requires and the relief it can offer are both explored, and the play is comprised of little acts of appreciation or selfishness, frustration or compromise, first in the stories they tell, then reinforced by their real-time repartee.
It amounted to a degree of intimacy, but also some considerable distance. The content was astonishingly safe. Both Jim and Jess recite their 'ground rules', an apparently inexhaustible list of taboo subjects they can and will not talk about, leaving mainly harmless anecdotes and lists of lovely things like sticky toffee pudding or Smooth FM radio. The omission of any serious threat or conflict or tragedy is never really acknowledged, and the result is perhaps too idyllic to make any claims for universality and a little too sterile to fully entertain.
Tiring of reality's inability to represent truth, I found Pullover a welcome respite. As graduates of the Arches' own Diploma in Physical Theatre, Jukka specialise in distortion and manipulation through physicality, and this commenced within moments of entering. Parodying the reverence of the dressing ritual, officials with clipboards and tape measures urged the audience to dress up and undress, got changed themselves, and encouraged us to make our own adjustments, weaving around us, blurring the boundary between audience and performer until a squeal, cries of 'Stand back!' and a sudden spotlight revealed a woman trapped in a pullover, her face a mask of terror beneath the fabric.
Modest restriction was followed by ever more absurd studies of ritual and entrapment: being trapped by the convoluted procedures of a sinister helpline; lying sedated on a medical table while doctors amuse themselves with elaborate ceremonies in air; high priests resisting calls for help insisting prayer is the only answer. The audience are complicit at every turn, respecting procedure, wheeling the bed, praying for her, yet they continue to wear the jumpers provided throughout, laughing at Lisa's misfortune while theoretically in danger themselves. Furthermore, Pullover distinguishes itself from July's excellent Splinters by fully exploiting the performers' familiarity with the space through intensely site-specific devices and structure, and the whole piece left me with high expectations for Jukka's future work.