Back to the Underground

My selections in the second week of Arches Live! confirmed by impression that this was a festival that offered marvellous opportunities for young companies and performers, but lacks a populist edge. While I enjoyed every piece that I saw, being a pretentious critic who has no use for traditional forms and an abiding love for tricksy experimentation, there was a strong sense of work-in-progress and a complicity between audience and performer that allowed some rough drama an easy passage.

Idolon, for example, was a welcome attempt to include experimental music. Unfortunately, it was never clear whether this was performance or installation, and the ear-splitting noise and murky video seemed self-consciously hip and uncommunicative. Kylie Minoise (sic) does this kind of live art/noise music cross-over far more passionately and viscerally: Idolon wandered about, never giving much and making, frankly, a horrible racket.

Another disappointment was Equal and Opposite. Gary McNair is an engaging performer, and he was simply coasting on his amiability for forty-five minutes, promising to talk about physics but delivering only gags and rambles. Artists are rarely able to grapple with the mysteries of science, usually tumbling into generalised amazement at the immensity of it all and adding little to any understanding. A good script, and this could have been enlightening as well as mildly amusing. It is all the more irritating to see a talented performer squander a supportive audience by lacking purpose.

Over in A Slice of Salvation, Molly and Me were honing their mutually destructive double-act in a performance that chafed at the format. Molly and Me have the same ferocious dependence that marks out the great duos - Steptoe and Son, Ren and Stimpy, Little and Large - but an hour long show doesn’t focus their frustration. Salvation was a reimagining of their show It’s Not About Us and exposed the characters’ antipathy and neediness. Unfortunately, the overall impact was diffuse and too surreal.

Nic Green and Laura Bradshaw - despite a very silly singing interlude and an ironic distance that did not serve the great passion of Trilogy: Part Three - demonstrated how powerful purposeful art can be. Trying to recover feminism as a vital force in her life, Green combined Blake’s Jerusalem, an interactive website and a power-point presentation to consider how “herstory” could be rescued from the dustbin of ideology. Moving and provocative, Green found a way to present nudity as something powerful rather than titillating, and made salient points - through humour and a lecture - about the paucity of modern culture. Not only did Trilogy have a clear political agenda, it was self-conscious, mature and intelligent - a real treat that will, hopefully, inspire other practitioners to invest more engagement with their work.

Arches Live! is a fortnight of fun, which offers some performers a safe space to explore and experiment. Nic Green, happily, took that freedom and set a standard for contemporary experimental performance that is both accessible and worthwhile.