The Venus Labyrinth has been getting some amazing reviews – in the Herald and The Scotsman – but also from the public who have been posting their comments on the Facebook event. What I like about it most is that it has been a huge undertaking for all involved, and yet the intimate nature of the women’s performances isn’t lost. As soon as you enter her room, you are, mentally, a million miles away from anything and anyone else, and a step closer to your own thoughts. Very powerful.

The Conflux Maximus parade also went really well, and I was genuinely elated with the number of people who followed it right to the Arches and stayed for the Highlights event.

After listening back to a few video clips I finally found one where you can hear the performers rather than a 14-year-old girl, apparently called April, gleefully shouting a mouthful of expletives behind them. It turned out fine – what April didn’t seem to realise is that, after appearing in public dressed as a kind of transvestite Roman emporer with a 5 o’clock shadow in a pair of bright red crocs (surely the most embarrassing part?), some mild abuse from a 14-year-old is not going to phase anyone. These guys can give as good as they get, believe me. A proper Roman theatrical showdown if you ever saw one.

The huge crowd of kids seemed to love the gladiator battle (which ended when Innocence – a woman dressed as a baby – had her dummy victoriously knocked out of her mouth by a caveman-esque Brawn) and didn’t even seem too perturbed by the arrival of three perfomers from The Tide Machine – the performance-installation at Broomielaw Quay by Oceanallover. In fact, the only person who seems slightly perturbed is the guy in the background in the yellow t-shirt.

It had the beautiful effect of reminding me that the Arches, as a venue, means something very different for a lot of people, and if events like this can open it up as something even more eclectic and prolific then that can only be a good thing. As I was walking away I heard a man say to his two young sons, ‘Did you like that? Wasn’t that fun!’ They didn’t answer him, but continued staring back at the entrance to the Arches, their faces shadowed by the hulk of the Heileman’s Umbrella, their small worlds having clearly grown that little bit larger.

It’s the last chance to see Red Bastard and experience the Cabaret Club nights tonight, so I hope you make it down if you haven’t already.

Rosie x

Probably one of the worst videos I’ve ever taken there.

Notice how I put this text UNDERNEATH the video. Hopefully you’ll already have watched it, and so this won’t put you off, depending on how big your screen is and how short your attention span is – if you’re anything like me you’ll have already skipped to the end of this post. Actually, you’ve probably not even opened it in the first place after refusing to wait more than 0.2 nanoseconds for it to load, so hopefully, I’m only talking to people unafflicted with ADD here.

To be fair, I got the video after someone grabbed me at work whilst on the way to do something, and said The Chain was starting that minute. I had my camera in my bag in its trusty pink trainer sock (the receiver of many a disgusted look as it exchanges hands. It’s CLEAN, dammit) so I ran down and set up in front of the impromptu stage next to an official-looking photographer.

The feeling of generalised insecurity that comes with carrying around a tiny Flip camera in an old sock usually stops me from standing at the back with the big guns, and their array of  heavy cameras, tripods, and those sticks with furry bits on. You wouldn’t park your Morris Minor next to a Porche without at least a small pang of inferiority. Especially not it said Morris Minor was ensconsed in a pink trainer sock from Tesco (8-14 years).

So yes, anyway, I ‘set up’ (read: extracted camera from sock) next to this girl, and started filming. Two minutes later, I had no idea what was going on – the photographer woman (an actor, it turns out) had done a kind of rolling jump into the side of me, I’d gone sprawling across the floor, felt the sensation of a large quantity of water land on my head, then felt a sudden blast of heat and light as the pyrotechnics went off. At which point it happened all over again.

It took about four repetitions for me to realise what was going on, and then a further ten mintues to recover from that horrible post-stress embarrassment when you realise your initial reaction was completely disproportionate to what’s just happened, everyone’s clocked your panicky yelp, and made a mental note never to be next to you in an emergency.

The performance was the result of a week of masterclasses with Richard Stamp (from dotComedy). He can explain the idea behind it better than I can, and I managed to keep the camera still for this one, so, enjoy…

 
For those of you who were concerned, the sock is now dry and making a full recovery in the sub-tropical climes of the Arches marketing office.

Rosie x

The cast of Used To Be Slime get dressed for Glasgow's press

On Friday I attended the press photo call for Used to be Slime – where I tried my best to look professional and look like I knew what I was doing, but unfortunately my equipment made me look a little under prepared – compared to the pros.

A nice camera. I.e, not mine.

Whilst dodging the professionals – getting the inside scoop on how these ‘shoots’ work – I started pondering what separates those in front and those behind. Having an extremely snap-happy mum I am always on the look out for household objects to duck behind but she always finds a way! Yet, the majority of performer friends I know are the complete opposite and the cast was no different, using this opportunity to show how flexible/strong/comical they were.

Bendy.

Some would call this the ‘look at me’ syndrome, but I find that rather too negative. Yes, sometimes it can be a little overbearing, but isn’t this why we pay to see actors, performers, dancers, and circus clowns in the first? And good for them – they are brave enough to put themselves out there and be judged.

Kelly x

Used To Be Slime: the aliens have landed.

Picture two screens upon which symmetrical scenes are projected; it is as if two mirrors have been placed at right angles and the two sets of images reflect identically. Henson’s installation has multiple effects upon the viewer’s eye. The folding images trick the eye into merging the two screens into one so that two adjacent trees morph into an Elk-like figure with a gaping mouth. Hands and feet multiple and spread across the screens like butterfly wings as if sprouting from the middle of one large screen instead of two.

What is striking about the installation is that there is constant movement. Like the beads and glass particles of a kaleidoscope the images of Country Incarnate twist and turn, a body, hands, feet, hair are constant in their tapping, swishing, swaying. An ocean and gold sand merges into a blue rippling quilt and swaying blonde hair. Even within the journey of trains, water and sand the pauses are moving.

Anna Henson is a graduate of Glasgow School of Art and an interdisciplinary artist that works with video, live production and theatre design. As part of the Surge Festival Anna presents her latest video installation Country Incarnate.

 I caught up with Anna at the Arches for a dialogue on her creation…

Ceri: Watching Country Incarnate was like being taken on a journey…

Anna: Yes absolutely, it is about a journey. It is split into two concepts, what happens to the mind and the reality of the body. The video flits between two worlds, the outside world which are the physical locations such as the train and beach and the inward world represented by the woman in her bedroom.

Ceri: How did Country Incarnate come about?
Anna: It came out of two very different periods of travelling: one a short term trip, and the other the four years I have spent living abroad. In this video, I was meditating on trying to identify where I was, both in terms of physical location and in terms of being an American and in a culture that is not yours. The film was shot while traveling in Spain and Italy, and also in my bedroom in Glasgow.

Ceri: How do you think your work will translate to your audience members?

Anna: I think it is relevant to anyone that has travelled; anyone that has taken a journey, and anyone that has tried to read maps. While it came from my personal experience of Scotland and other European locations, I think that the installation translates into a universal message for those who have found themselves in a foreign place, unfamiliar surroundings. This video explores the geographical country, the physical body, the mental space of the individual, and the ways in which these three things oppose and assimilate one another.

Ceri: Do you find that questions of identity tend to arise once you have left home?

Anna: That’s true! Now that I’ve been away from home for four years I’ve learnt that my roots do affect the way I am. My sense of identity as related to my ‘American-ness’ has become more obvious to me than it was when I was living in America, but I have also found that this sense of identity can be translated to fit in with another culture.

Ceri: Do you foresee yourself expanding this work?

Anna: Yes, I have tons more footage to play with. I love multi-screen installations; I envisage creating a whole room, essentially a 360 degree video. You can call it a total immersive video!

As I watched Henson’s work, I found myself reflecting how life is a series of movements which blend into one another. I found myself drawing comparisons with Cunningham’s novel The Hours, and how both of these works cause you to zoom in on details with microscopic intensity. The title I found curious. I turned to my colleague Rob Mullen and asked him, ‘Why Country Incarnate?’ And he astutely replied, ‘We are born out of the earth, die and return to it’.

By Ceri Restrick, an Arches review for Surge Blog 20th July 2010

A Used To Be Slime performer warming up/showing off (delete as appropriate)

I think what impresses me most while watching the Used to Be Slime rehearsals is the control the performers have over their bodies. The ability to manipulate contorts and hold their bodies in many unusual and almost  ‘unnatural’ poses.

Headstand

In my youth (yes, I know I’m only 24, but still), in my youth I was capable of a mean cart-wheel and championed many a hand-stand holding competition. But sadly those days are now behind me. Watching the Used to be Slime cast reminds me of the joys of past butterflies – for those who can’t remember, it involved you and several of your friends doing hand-stands against the wall over each other - and brought the realisation home of no longer being flexible enough or even brave enough to do such things anymore.

So I implore you all – hand-stand like you have never hand-standed before!!!!

Kelly x

The Arches basement gets the Venus Labyrinth treatment

If being at the Briggait is like working in a suspended bubble of weightless light, then this is like working in a giant womb. The lamps in the corridor – normally what I’d class as Alien Film White – have had the techies’ gel treatment in preparation for the Venus Labyrinth, which starts a week yesterday. (I.e. Tues 20th July, for those with a more date-centric mind).

And, like in an alien film, I swear it’s getting darker. The fuschia is deepening. (Note to self for possibly award-winning film pitch: Deepening Fuschia, starring the Arches marketing team. It will be a thriller, in every sense of the word.)

Things keep appearing, too, with no sign of how they got there. A bath tub, a collection of sofas, a bed head. There’s various signs on doors throughout the building – Temperature Regulation, Auditory Memory, Sexuality. The latter was stuck on a door just off the main toilets corridor which I swear I’d never seen before, and which opened to reveal a tiny, eerie bedroom.

The air had a musty, sour tang and a bare lightbulb swung from the ceiling over a cracked bath tub, hidden by a Chinese frame. It was so, so odd against the familiarity of the Arches toilets.

The (fairly) sensible explanation is that Venus Labyrinth crew are transforming 28 spaces around the building into a representation of one of the known chambers of the mind. Each room will have one woman in. The participant - entering the maze alone – will determine which rooms they visit by selecting a series of objects. You’re in there for fifteen minutes, and what happens will never be seen by anyone else – it’s totally unique. Your experience will be yours alone – and, of course, the woman’s.

The alternative explanation is that we have contracted a team of oompa loompas* to work through the night, creating a kind of oompa-wunderland which they will eventually come to inhabit after the installation has finished its run.

I’ll leave you to decide which one it is.

*Unfortunately, due to oompa loompas being contractually bound to Willy Wonka related films and ongoing budget constraints, any loompa roles in Deepening Fuschia will be played by shorter members of the Arches’ tech team ‘working’ a bottle of spray-on tan from Poundstretcher on Union St.

Rosie x

In no particular order:

(1) Sometimes seemingly small things can take huge amounts of preparation. The piece revolves around a group of ‘out-of-towners’ who have arrived in Glasgow with no concept of anything or anyone. Today’s rehearsal focused on the aliens’ first step out into the public. This was far more complicated than it sounds and managed to involve debate concerning performers’ natural tendency to work individually, the position of the ‘alien’ in society and the reclaiming of the word ‘inappropriate’ to mean something that is not appropriate, rather than something implicitly sexual.

(2) In the arts, seemingly small things always take a huge amount of preparation. See above, and times by a hundred. The finished product always encompasses so much more than you’d imagine.

(3) Light + space = a really, really nice place to work.

Conflux's home, The Briggait: It's really nice.

(4) There’s something really cool about women playing trumpets.

(5) I cannot, and will never be able to, do this:

Or this:

Or any of these:

Rosie x

I remember that it was free because it helped assuage some of my confusing eight-year-old guilt (it started young) over the fact that I hadn’t enjoyed the day. Or, rather, I had positively hated it and burst into tears when I got home. As an eight-year-old vegetarian and budding animal rights activist (I know, I know, my long-suffering parents), my memories of the day seem to come back to me in a Daily Mail-esque montage of images of suffering animals – skeletal dogs, a haggard looking lion, big panda eyes staring dolefully beneath a tiny fez.

I don’t know if any of that actually happened. In fact, it probably didn’t. It seems unlikely that a panda would make it through customs at Manchester airport when my Mum’s nail scissors invariably caused a full-on security alert every summer. What I definitely DO remember was that the circus tent was cleverly wedged between a rammy of burger and hot dog vans, and a pie factory. A distinctly meaty pie factory.

It was such a shame. Whichever way the wind blew, it carried with it the strangely sweet, sickly smell of marinating meat fat that I would later come to associate with music festivals. But, until then, it was the Smell Of The Circus.

My first acquaintance with Conflux’s work was at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe. I’d just started working for the Arches, who were (fully) enjoying their residency at St. Stephen’s church in Stockbridge. Read over that sentence again; if there were any wafts in the air, it was the delicate scent of good quality fair-trade espresso, possibly a batch of gently browning macaroons, and certainly not rancid hot dog meat. And, instead of abused animals, there was intriguing, quirky, physical performance, and I came to associate ‘circus’ with something altogether different.

On my first day there, I was about to go into the church when a girl, fighting with a tight, brightly coloured jumper which appeared to have swallowed her, emerged from the top of the steps, seemingly unaware of anyone’s presence, and scuttled down like some kind of insect. I looked behind me – there were loads of them, writhing and kind of fluidly inhabiting the space around them. I later found out it was by a company called Jukka, supported by Conflux. Whatever it was, it changed my perception of what “physical theatre/street arts /circus” could stand for.

This three-pronged approach to genre is probably the most useful way of describing the sort of work Conflux supports; like an acrobatic trio, if you leave one out, they all fall down and you’re left with a lot of flailing limbs. You can see at a glance that the SURGE programme reflects this, from the charming crew of developing street artists in Used To Be Slime to performances to international companies and artists such as Dramaten (Germany), Cantabile 2 (Denmark) and Red Bastard (USA). But you can check that out for yourself.

This blog intends to give you a sneaky peek into how the performances are progressing, with backstage content from the performers, the practitioners and the professionals and also, hopefully, a glimpse into what I personally find the most fascinating part of a festival: the semi-organised mayhem that is putting one on. If only to make the end result look even more impressive…

Rosie