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The Glasgay! Banter
Exploding the issues of gay, bisexual and transsexual lives in a glittering festival of theatre, music and the spoken word, Glasgay! has become an essential date in the cultural calendar of Scotland. Billing itself as the country’s annual celebration of queer culture, the two month programme pairs pop with philosophy and heat with the heart, reaching towards an inclusive understanding of the modern homosexual identity without dissolving into a melted Wicked Witch of regressive stereotypes.
2009 was a challenging year for LGBT people worldwide. Despite the stalwart advance of equality legislation at home, it was a year which witnessed the horrific beheadings of gay men in Iran, Malawians jailed without trial for their homosexuality and the suffocation of progressive same-sex marriages in the United States. Civil discontent breeds art and this art feeds Glasgay!
An hour spent in the theatre can often say more about the communality of the human experience than a lifetime of scribbled diaries. It’s no surprise, therefore, that Glasgay! invests a great deal of its funding in promoting new works by playwrights within the LGBT sphere and reviving pieces historically maligned due to their socially divisive content. Amongst this year’s highlights were a transvestite retelling of Jean Genet’s The Maids and The Bridge, a fascinating new commission from Wendy Miller on the shaping of the teenage self.
Returning to the Tron Theatre following critical acclaim at last year’s festival, Grant Smeaton’s Bette/Cavett is a Chanel No. 5 spritzed love letter to the excesses of celebrity. Entering in dark furs and dark glasses, Grant Smeaton’s Bette Davis is a trashy, diamonique tribute to the seventies; an overblown, yet uncanny, grotesque spectacle that could only be channelled through a man in too much make up.
The CCA on Sauchiehall Street, a hidden centre for contemporary arts on Sauchiehall Street, presented a striking programme of thought provoking lectures and discussion groups. Touching on both local and international issues at the surface of LGBT consciousness, the talks coincided with film screenings at the GFT, opening up the debate on repression, expression and the damaging force of homophobia in the pursuit of an integrated social identity.
For all that the festival is about procreation of identity, it is also about recreation of the spirit. Lock Up Your Daughters returned with its monthly club night at The Flying Duck, throwing its eccentric, eclectic Hella Gay Dance Party of electro/italo riot punk, whilst RPZ presented a pounding Halloween themed Rave from the Grave at Stereo.
Glasgay! has come a long way since its creation in 1993. Treading alongside an international community of LGBT citizens in a slow, careful walk towards gender equality, the festival has been an artistic expression of the frustrations and aspirations shared by many, male and female, gay and straight. This year’s festival is one more step in that irrepressible march, coloured with theatre, comedy and expression.
A Fish Supper With
Eat Your Heart Out...
In a small Edinburgh chip shop, I met two of the most progressive artistes in contemporary cabaret. Scottee, Time Out Performer of the Year, and Myra DuBois, “the Primark of Performance, are out to change the face of performance art. The smell of battered sausage gathering between their black sequins, they answered questions about their art, their message and their tireless crusade against nipple tassels...
“No bad lipsyncing. No bleeding. No burlesque” – what can we expect from Eat Your Heart Out?
Scottee: A cabaret night with new, innovative and accessible performance. That’s the arts head talking. In layman terms, a bit of a show with a politic and a bar.
Myra: We've filtered out the fluff that other cabarets collect. We're the only cabaret in Edinburgh without a "Uke" or nipple tassels.
So what prompted the need to form EYHO?
Scotee: I was bored of listening to covers of 'Mein Heir'. Cabaret is supposed to be an art form that experiments with new ideas, not a celebration of 'vintage', so the need for something progressive was needed.
Do you worry about the direction in which cabaret is heading
Myra: We're not worried about where it's heading; we're worried about where it has already gone. Our show is redirecting the genre back on course. Instead of repeating 60 year old social sentiments from Weimar Germany, we’re engaging with what’s affecting the political climate today. We addressed the rise of the Tories, and predicted their return to power in April with our show 'Return of the Yuppie'.
You’ve come a long way from London. How do you think your style of performance will be received at the in Edinburgh?
Scottee: We're more concerned with the Fringe itself. For too long it has been a festival open to the middle class, high earning, G2 white folk. We think it’s about time the festival was opened up to the world and engage in new ways with its existing audience. We are streaming the show on chatroulette every night, audiences are given our twitter account to post their critique during the interval and they are encouraged to use mobile phones, flash photography and drink throughout.
You’re from a wide variety of places and backgrounds. How does this impact the show’s dynamic
Myra: Well we do have company members from Japan, Brazil, London and I'm from Rotherham. Geographically speaking we cover a lot of ground. But we're all from a working class background; we are managing to create without having to pay for the validation of a drama school to do so. That impacts the dynamic.
What will you show audiences that they cannot see anywhere else?
Scottee: TRUE variety - we're not talking about multiple burlesque acts in different fancy dress, think the Royal Variety show as curated by art school drop outs on 50p.
Do you worry that you might be too avant-garde for some?
Scottee: No. Our whole aim is to create accessible avant-garde. We're not one for audiences being subjected to our work, we prefer creating inclusive shows with a bit of a glitter curtain and a cheap pint.
Myra: Anyone who thinks we're up ourselves has missed the point.
Cabaret and politics have been entwined since the last the 1900s. How well do the two sit together nowadays
Scottee: With us it is integral. All our work comes from very different places but 'a politic' is what binds us, whether it be monarchy, class or sexuality
Myra: Art and politics have been entwined since before the thirties. Cabaret is just one medium that got popular. EYHO has more scope than Cabaret (with a capital C). It's inevitable that the work would be, at times, political.
Do you have any theatrical heroes?
Myra: I do love a wronged woman; anyone who fits that bill.
Scottee: Lisa Stansfield. Nuff said.
Finally, do you have anything to say to the lip-sync artists, the bleeders or the girls out there who are still twirling their tassels?
Scottee: Kill yourselves.
Myra: I'm kissing my teeth.
Posted 09/09/10 - Scott Purvis ©
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Geometry and Grace
Without shape and elegance, an evening at the ballet would be little more than a garish display of feathers, an uncontrolled flounce in ill-fitting tights set to a disengaged, disinterested orchestration. It is reassuring to know, therefore, that Scottish Ballet’s latest gala presentation is a celebration of Geometry and Grace.
Symmetrically aligning three international productions, the programme challenges the nature of space and shape in the choreography of ballet’s most progressive figures. Taking its inspiration from the regularity of geometry, the pieces’ speed and rhythms are pure mathematics, forming complex and intricate shapes across the stage without disconnecting from the centralized humanity at the heart of the genre.
Scenes de Ballet, the season’s major revival of revered choreographer Frederick Ashton’s 1947 work, is perhaps the most infamously groundbreaking of the three productions. In an era in which ballet seldom stretched its pointed toes beyond the moralistic, predictable fairytale, Ashton overturned convention by breaking free from the story-telling narratives favoured by his contemporaries.
By channelling his fascination with algebra and geometry into the movements and rhythms of his dancers, Ashton created something hitherto unknown in ballet: a fluid and coordinated equation, beautifully brought into being on the feet and on the arms of a perfectly aligned ballet troupe. In perfect equilibrium, Scenes de Ballet’s classical Stravinsky score and Picasso inspired costuming combine to create a chic yet astute production, dripping with double-strand pearls strung from the lemon and blue bodices of its elegant ballerinas.
Accompanying Ashton’s seminal classic is Ashley Page’s more recent Fearful Symmetries, a piece which furthers her predecessor’s obsession with formulaic design whilst creating something more abstract, more progressive for modern ballet audiences. This Olivier Award winning production takes its artistic cues from the geometrical designs of Mark Rothko and the New York abstract expressionists, littering the shallow stage with angular, lean choreography and setting it against Antony McDonald’s magnificent backdrop of soft manmade starlight.
The pieces, supplemented by a new work by San Francisco Ballet’s Val Caniparoli, will open at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal on the 18th of September before moving on to Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre, His Majesty’s Theatre in Aberdeen and Eden Court Theatre in Inverness.
Posted 09/09/10 - Scott Purvis ©
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