Best of BE Festival @ The Lowry, Salford
BE Festival (Birmingham-Europe, Birmingham’s annual international theatre festival) is a celebration of theatre that crosses borders. Not only cultural borders, and the blurry borders between dance, circus and physical theatre, but borders between audience and performer – seeking to create an intimate and two-way communication between actor and observer. This show at the Lowry is a celebration of what the festival has achieved so far and features three of its favourites.
The first piece – Al Cubo, by France’s Betti Combo – consists of two men and one woman attempting to balance white buckets atop one another to form a tower. This is far more entertaining than it sounds. In fact, it evolves into a clumsy, comically discordant ballet of sorts: impromptu object manipulation turns the buckets into tools of the actors’ childish rivalry. This rivalry, subsequent bucket-trick showing off and a somewhat faulty stepladder makes building the tower a difficult task, and the expressive ability of the performers (which is without speech) means their unsuccessful efforts are met with sighs of sympathy and the eventual success merits a well-deserved round of applause. Then there’s the strange moment when the two male actors start simulating a whirlwind with the female actor's hair as a prop. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a theatre company so adept at displaying awkwardness on stage.
The second piece, Tao Te (from Hungary based dance and physical theatre duo Ferenc Fehér), is of a much more sober nature but no less engaging. The stage opens to show a lit rectangle in which two men in suits sit cross-legged eating bread. A techno dance track starts and the two men suddenly begin a series of intense karate meets quasi-hip hop freestyle dance sequences. The eerie soundtrack loops through sounds of gurgling drainpipes, loud droning, pulsing electronic beats and discordant jangling as the pair’s ‘fight’ escalates into increasingly physical and even animalistic patterns before the two can find any form of harmony – or equilibrium.
After a fifteen-minute interval, the last and most conventionally theatrical (i.e. including actual speech) of the acts takes the stage. Next Door, by Denmark’s Out of Balanz, centres on the charming and nostalgic storytelling of Ivan and his friend Pekka. Exploring Ivan’s feelings and memories when his next-door neighbour dies, only for Ivan to realise he barely knew the man at all, Next Door is a comical but thought-provoking assessment of the things that can bind us universally, regardless of who we are or where we come from. It’s an ethos that really sums up the BE Festival as a whole.