Best of British on stage
By Chen Jie ( China Daily)
Updated: 2004-11-18 08:37

Are you tired of blockbuster shows such as Irish tap dancing troupes and brash Broadway musicals, or the cloned pop gigs by the stars from Hong Kong and Taiwan?

"Roadmetal Sweetbread" performed by Station House Opera, starring Susannah Hart and Matthew Bowyer.

In desperate need of change? Demand inspiration, thrills and a slice of culture? Then think Britain.

The 2004 UK Performing Arts Festival brings to Beijing a new theatrical experience from the shores of an island where keeping things simple on stage has become the new high-tech.

"With theatre productions becoming bigger and bigger, with more and more multimedia effects, the simplest small theatre and solo shows which make up the UK festival can be moving and powerful," said Yuan Hong, artistic director and manager of the North Theatre, a venue famous for promoting small productions and host of the event.

The Random Dance Company's "Ataxia" and "Polar Sequences" kicked off the festival at Tianqiao Theatre last weekend.

As today's leading contemporary dance company in the UK, Random's dancers thrilled Chinese audiences with their visionary approach to innovative choreography and the bold exploration of their physical capability to an extreme and refreshing frontier.

'Throat'

The festival will move to the North Theatre where three companies will present their cutting-edge cross-over performances.

The first is Company F/Z who will perform "Throat," a fusion of dance, theatre, circus, comedy and cabaret till this Saturday.

Anyone who thought circus was just for kids, will have to reconsider after witnessing "Throat." The show is a teasing, erotic hybrid dealing with male identity and the yearning to be loved.

It is a stunning display of physical grace and eroticism, yet beneath its glittering surface it has something profound to say about the human condition.

Directed by Flick Ferdinando, performer John Paul Zaccarini shifts from hilarity to despair, vulnerability to cock-sure, and is suspended above the stage shedding clouds of flour and slithers in the pools of water that rain on stage. As he preens for the audience in front of a mirror, he transforms himself into representations of all levels of sex, love and all that messy stuff in between.

"Zaccarini is a one-man sensation," said Yuan, who has seen the video of "Throat."

Choreographer, dancer and consummate aerialist, Zaccarini was trained as an actor before entering the circus.

He has worked with the DV8 Physical Theatre, appeared in pop videos with Jamiroquai, the Rolling Stones and the Spice Girls, and starred as SkyBoy in the Millennium Dome Show.

His company, Angels of Disorder, produced eight original works for the stage between 1992 and 1998 fusing circus, theatre and club culture.

Zaccarini and Flick Ferdinando formed Company F/Z in 1998. Their reinterpretation of a circus as visual theatre is a unique synthesis of physical and vocal language with emotional intelligence. The writing comes from the collective minds of the performers and directors to create a richness and originality that is key to its success.

Over the years F/Z have created four successful pieces of work including "Philomena's Feast," "Night and Day," "Drowning not Waving" and "Throat."

"Throat" was created in 1998 and developed over four years - and winning a Total Theatre award at the Edinburgh Festival in 2002.

Next up is "Roadmetal Sweetbread" performed by the Station House Opera from November 27 to 30.

In February 2001, the Station House Opera toured with the show to Shanghai where they received wide acclaim.

Written and directed by Julian Maynard Smith and Susannah Hart, the play centres on a couple drawn together by lustful encounters and physical clashes, and find themselves living a domestic life full of violent impulses.

The show is concerned with the mismatches that occur between people: the differences between our private thoughts and behaviour, the success and failure of our conscious selves to deal with our physical predicaments.

The combination of the multi-media tech and the live performance depict the intricacies and intimacies of the love-hate relationship, through a combination of witty-visual stunts rather than plot or text.

"By bringing live art and recorded video so closely together the show opens up new possibilities for performances that combine the real, physical continuity of the body with the spatial and temporal discontinuity of the imagined," said Chinese theatre director Li Liuyi.

Founded in 1980, the London-based Station House Opera has developed into an internationally acclaimed company with a unique physical and visual style.

Over the last quarter of a century, the company has created over 25 productions which vary enormously in scale, appearance and location. It uses "spectacles" to explore the intimate relationship between people and the environment they inhabit.

The company has created spectacular projects in a variety of locations all over the world, from New York's Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage to Dresden's historic Frauenkirche, Britain's Salisbury Cathedral and London's 19th-century Hoxton Music Hall.

'Box Story'

Bobby Baker will be the last to show up at the North Theatre from December 3 to 5. The talented performer will bring "Box Story" to explore issues which radically affect people's daily lives.

Premiered in a sell-out run in London in 2000, "Box Story" was inspired by the myth of Pandora.

During the performance, Baker delves into a selection of boxes containing the ills of the world, and attempts to conquer them with hope and humour.

She was trained as a painter but found it hard to express her ideas turned instead to "sugar and cake" as more expressive media.

She found the best way of presenting these edible works of art was through performance.

During the past three decades she has produced an extensive repertoire, most of which are intimately connected with daily British domestic life.

She is able to see the profound issues that lie beneath the most mundane of existences.

Subject matter of her show ranges through health, shopping and motherhood, seemingly mundane subjects which are explored in an idiosyncratic and innovative performance style.

"Box Story" is the last in a quintet of performances titled "Daily Life," a project first commissioned by the London International Festival of Theatre, an organization that Baker credits for much of the vitality of contemporary English theatre.

Uniquely, most of her work up has been designed for specific venues, most famously the "Kitchen Show," in which Baker opened her own kitchen to serve as a performance venue.

The festival has been organized by the British Council, the cultural and education section of the British Embassy, the Milky Way Arts and Communication Company and Beijing's North Theatre.

"The British Council aims to provide links between artist and creative thinkers in the UK and China and to introduce local audiences to the unique style of the UK's creative industry," said the British Council's press director, Tracy Driscoll.