in SIGHT arts

16/10/07

Theatre Superficial supernova

Venus As A Boy Scott McGinlay jumps into the deep end with Outre by Aurora Nova

Tam Dean Burn’s solo performance
shows us all that the Glasgay Festival
has far more to offer than campness
and Kylie exhibitions.
Citizens Theatre
30th October – 10th November
£12/£9/£6
Metamorphosis
Steven Berkoff’s adaptation of Franz
Kafka’s tale tells the story of Gregor
Samsa and his family and deals with
relationships and attitudes in the
aftermath of the family discovering
Gregor has been transformed into a
giant insect.
STaG @ Gilmorehill G12
25th-27th October
£5 (Yearly pass to all G12 Studio StaG
Productions)
A
n appreciation of the arts
requires the audience to
set aside preconceptions
of superficiality, pretention,
and inane frivolity and allow oneself
to be permeated by something that
cannot be quantified, nor definitively
qualified. As the terminology of the
previous sentence may suggest to the
sharper minded of our readers, One
has been educated in mostly scientif-
ic disciplines throughout his not so il-
lustrious educational career, and in an
attempt to rectify that, has spent the
last month trying to turn his thoughts
art-ward and convince himself that a
spade need not always be addressed
by such a simple moniker.
How better to do this, I asked
myself, than to throw myself in the
deep end of the ‘Arts’ Ocean that is
‘Physical Theatre’. A lesser newbie Arts
Editor may have eased himself into
his or her new position with a jaunt
to the local Shakespeare production,
perhaps an exhibition or two, but with
the promise of garden tool misnomers

Art
aplenty, physical theatre seemed the
obvious choice. The genre has long
been the reserve of ‘interesting’ types
(people with square glasses and mult-
isyllabic vocabularies, you know who
Feral Kingdom I mean…) and with an agoraphobia-
inducing amount of room for creative
interpretation, the antipathy of real-
Mixing an experimental, turbulent ists everywhere.
cocktail of silk screen poster art, So what is physical theatre? In
film, geometric sculpture, 50s pin- an attempt to answer this question,
ups, electronic invention, painting a little research was carried out and
and tattoo – a sensory overload of one particular quote which was stum-
international work. bled upon seemed to synopsize just
how badly this newbie needed his
water wings in the aforementioned
CCA
artistic ocean. “It [Physical Theatre]
29 Sept - 10 Nov
is the perpendicular which creates
£free
the intersection of the anecdote and Glasgow University Guardian - now in Braille

the event.” Impressively, this sort

of insight and assimilation seems to be an ‘Interestling’ for the night. amongst other ghostly mutants Twin, Battles) and Christian Vogel are

Comedy
to be the currency of the art world,
exchanged between ‘Interestlings’
on a daily basis, however that partic-
ular memorandum did not reach
the Guardian Arts Desk; personally I
Tinselworm blame the postal strikes.
In an attempt to banish the
Wearing the mathematically
squarest spectacles one could muster,
a freakish cavalcade of performers
was introduced to the capacity audi-
ence of about 80 people (any more,
and by definition it wouldn’t be
each took their turns to speak as
eloquently through their physicality
as many could through the spoken
word. Their personas were power-
fully communicated to the humbled
crowd; however, as was the intri-
cacy of Darren Johnston’s chore-
responsible for providing what can
frequently only be described as noises,
while Johnston himself has grafted
them together to form a Frankenstein
of a soundtrack that is as deceptively
coherent as the movements of the
performers.

Bill Bailey, self proclaimed Klingon and

Never Mind the Buzzcocks stalwart,
returns with a new stand up tour of
the UK. Guitar, keyboard and gong
infused comedy inspired by everyone’s
favourite yuletide invertebrate.
Clyde Auditorium
7th-9th November
£25
demons of logical, consequential
thought and allow the emergence of
the ‘perpendicular’ from deep within
oneself, the Aurora Nova Theatre
Group’s production of Darren John-
ston’s ‘Outre’ at The Arches was the
outlet of choice. Bias, narrow-mind-
edness and dogmaticism were all
dropped of at the prejudice crèche
prior to arrival, and with the little ones
playing Nintendo and scrambling
through the ballpool , Daddy was free
A gargoyle and
platinum blonde
transsexual
siamese twins
‘underground’ enough for true ‘inter-
estlings’). A headless being dressed
in a tuxedo, a Spanish temptress with
the face of a gargoyle and platinum
blonde transsexual Siamese twins
ography, the cabaret that unfolded
still maintained a dream-like state,
toying with consciousness for the
entire 70 minutes. The production
is truly multi-disciplinary, seamlessly
portraying dance from a renowned
international cast, electronic multi-
media and animation, and an excep-
tional soundtrack which provides
‘Outre’ with as much foley as it does
form. Sheffield techno label Warp
Records (Squarepusher, Aphex
The nomenclature of Artistic clas-
sification has meant that ‘Outre’ and
Aurora Nova’s other productions, all
of which have been acclaimed world-
wide, are seen by a disproportionately
small amount of ‘art lovers’. My advice,
as a highly respected Arts Editor, and
frequent attendee of Physical Theatre
productions of course, is to stick your
neck out and see if you despise preten-
tion and superficiality as much as you
might think you do.