Like a Circle in a Spiral: the Windmills of Younge’s Mind
22 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Beren Belknap, Handspring, Janni Younge, Jason Potgieter, The Baxter Theatre
Boy meets girl. Boy leaves girl. Girl sticks it out. Man deals with his past. Woman copes with her future. Man and woman grow old. Woman dies.
Simple, hey?
The catch? It all happens at the same time.
Relax. This review has no ‘spoilers’. The end, as one might gather from the title’s cyclic Egyptian reference, is right there in the beginning. Ouroboros is the story of meetings and chances, opportunities (both taken and missed) of healing and hurting, searching and finding. It’s not the story of absolute meaning, concrete plot, obvious narrative conclusions. If you’re looking for the latter, you’re in the wrong place. If you’re intrigued by the former, you need to see Ouroboros.
Quite simply, though, Ouroboros is also – thanks to the wonderful possibilities of physical theatre – a story of whatever you make it. Evocative music by Neo Muyanga and Dan Eppel, dazzling, magical puppets by Janni Younge in collaboration with Handspring, sensitive and skilled manipulation by a host of talented puppeteers, rich animation and some quirky shadow puppetry swirl together to give the perfect backdrop to putting your own imagination centre stage.
In true Handspring tradition, the manipulators are fully exposed, their presence highlighted in neutral-coloured, loose-fitting outfits. Their presence – both clearly apparent and yet carefully backgrounded – adds the final link in the chain of narrative expression. Their breath, their movements are perfectly sympathetic to the wooden creatures they give life to. The life, however, is all in the puppet, the manipulator’s role is to subtly mirror – a tilt of the head here, an intake of breath there – the puppets’ every emotional response. There are some very skilled manipulators in this production – look out for Jason Potgieter (a Handspring veteran), Beren Belknap, Chuma Sopotela and Cindy Mkaza, amongst a host of other talent.
As for the narrative, there is a thin line between being too obtuse and labouring a point. Generally speaking, Younge works this balancing act extremely well. Some of the audience will be lost throughout, some will ‘get it’ almost instantly; such is the nature of physical theatre. Ouroboros builds narrative through layers of animated imagery, evocative music and choreographed movement. This works well, though I thought the performance would perhaps have benefitted from a tighter edit – some of the simpler animated imagery tended towards overuse and motifs that were highly effective the first time became, by the end, slightly overdone for me.
With that being said, the show was everything I was expecting: magical, intriguing and very beautiful indeed. If you get a chance to have the Ouroboros experience again – and I very much hope this will be the case – I would urge you to take it with both hands.
A Must-See, Second Time Around
23 Dec 2010 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Alicia McCormick, Jason Potgieter, Kim Kerfoot, The Intimate Theatre
Hey, I’ve got an idea! Let’s go to the Intimate and see two-hander about a relationship break up.
Uh….no, actually, this time it’s different. Really.
Jason Potgeiter (playwright and actor) takes on the standard indie theatre formula in The Things You Left Behind and gives it more than a small twist of originality.
The Things You Left Behind isn’t a love story. It’s the story around a love story. It’s the story of all the heartbreaks, little and large, that affect others on the periphery of the lovers’ grand love narrative. In a series of five monologues, it takes on the unexpected, the unexplored – often far more interesting – perspectives on the age-old tale of relationship break ups. From the perspective of the drag queen upstairs to the only white car guard in the city, we circle tantalisingly closer to the love story, filling in information by default as we learn of other lives, other stories.
I really loved the opening and closing monologues of the white car guard and the upstairs drag queen. Alicia McCormick was at her best playing a sexy ‘seen it all before’ paramedic, though I felt my attention waiver slightly in her, admittedly tricky, portrayal of the conservative mother. She is a talented actress we don’t see enough of on stage and I look forward to watching her in Paul Torsio’s ‘Hitched” at the Kalk Bay Theatre in early 2011.
Potgieter has the uncanny ability to nail a character before saying a word. Although he has a relaxed stage presence, his body seems to communicate a nervous energy that he can play either up or down and which imbues his characters with a vulnerability, a breakability that is, paradoxically, powerfully emotive. I loved seeing him on stage, especially performing his own work. I want more.
Director Kim Kerfoot took a stripped down approach to the staging, focusing more (and rightly) on the monologues themselves, making good use of the actors’ range and adding some clever eye lines and witty moments of fourth wall audience play.
Potgieter is also one of those rare creatures: an excellent actor with a gift for text. He has a real sense for narrative energy, where and when to use rhetorical devices and, most importantly, when to stop using them. His innate understanding of what makes a narrative interesting – the small observations, the seemingly trivial quirky anecdote – combines with his ability to lull the audience comfortably with light humour, then yank them almost bodily into unexpected, sharp pathos. It is wonderful craftsmanship.
The Things You Left Behind reminds us that every all-consuming passion happens in a context. It shows us the subtle, profound bonds life forges between complete strangers, the hundreds of coincidences and connections that happen each day without us realising it.
Seeing new writing come to life is exciting. Seeing excellent new writing is rare. The Things You Left Behind was both. Sure, it probably needs a bit more development – it felt slightly short to me and seemed to need something subtle I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I reckon, though, that it will get this over the course of next year and have an even more exciting second run.
In fact, I’m counting on it.
