Time Off For Good Behaviour

Since I don't mind a spot of emotional manipulation - both on the stage and, if anyone is interested, in my personal life, the finale of Beady Eye's Everything Must Go moved me and made sense of the previous hour's loose reflection on the performer's father. A short video of father and daughter, it revealed their intimate bond and turned the entire show into a personal obituary of a man who lived a full and ecstatic life. An eposodic and inconclusive narrative had glanced at his story, dwelling on his eccentricity and geriatic struggles: only in this short final film did his impact on his daughter become clear.

Like many of the personal works that Jackie Wylie has programmed for Behaviour, Everything Must Go tended towards sentimentality. With the exception of Transgressions, which leant towards gender politics and sexuality, Behaviour 2010 has been about family, community, with the vulnerability of the performers excusing the absence of stronger content. Everything Must Go focussed on a man who defied convention, without questioning the consequences: Glas(s) took a generous look at intergenerational relationships, while John Moran exhibited a masterful control of sound and rhythm as he reflected on his friendship with his now-distant neighbour. Difficult emotions, usually the source of contemporary theatre, have been side-lined.

This has done a great deal for the atmosphere of The Arches, but I have welcomed the occasional jarring moment. John Moran appears to have mellowed since his last visit to Scotland, yet the tension between the artist and his muse still throbs beneath his perfect, disorientating soundscapes. After introducing his neighbour Saori in 2008, Moran now finds himself separated from her and ends up in Thailand, alone. Wandering around lady-boy bars and Buddhist shrines, Moran struggles to find his place, and nurses a sadness at Saori's absence.

Moran's process - he creates music from founnd sounds, strung together precisely and collaged to a steady beat - is a stunning, psychedelic collage of moods and conversations. Throughout the evening, he gradually refines the material, finishing with a single piece that condenses his experiences into a perfect evocation of the American isolated in Asia. With Saori and Moran acting along to the soundtracks - Saori is a dancer, Moran parodies his own clumsiness - the embarassing episodes, the frustating conversations, the obscure details are dislocated and re-assembled as an evocative representation of how memory exaggerates and distorts: and the music, defining their movements, suggests a fatalism that dooms Moran to repeating the same mistakes and successes.

Aside from his shambolic persona, Moran charms me because he takes the idea of a muse seriously. Ironically, in Transgressions, Annette Foster seems to have met my muse's avatars, and turned them into a Live Art/burlesque amalgam. A bearded fan-dancer, Foster begins by parodying the cliches of bad burlesque, before costuming herself in the discarded lingerie as the goddess Athena, Gesturing towards the burlesque fantasy of empowerment, Foster seems ambiguous about the reclamation of striptease: she is never quite passive, nor assertive, preferring to toy with ideas of submission and glamour. The research is inconclusive, uncomfortable; the humour sly rather than hilarious. There's a knowing edge to the routines that makes this more ironic than vaudeville, and Foster goes nowhere near the abrasive sexuality of the best Scottish cabaret acts. Yet I was grateful for being made uncomfortable.