Rhapsody in Blue

The Abre-Alas blue cloths get an airing. Photo by Marcelo Sousa Brito

I was going to call this post The Secret Life of Objects, and then I remembered someone else had already filched that title (could it be Naomi Silman and Yael Karavan, do you suppose? Their workshop with that title starts at LUME late February).

So anyway, this post is called something else, but it is about the secret life of objects – specifically, it is about that box of blue cloths tucked away in the LUME cupboard. And we are in the middle of the Abre-Alas February workshop, so of course the box has appeared, and the cloths have been allowed out to play.

It didn’t take long. They arrived in our space on the second day of the course, and the first encounter was a session of free play. Reflecting on my own choices, and watching other people in their play, triggered some thoughts on object manipulation and animation, and on the relationship between costume and prop. A simple blue cloth can be used in so many different ways and can become so many different things…

It can, for example, be used purely as a choreographic prop, its movement an extension of the body’s movement – so if I am holding the cloth in my hand and I move my arm, the cloth ripples. Or I can throw the cloth in the air and catch it, or throw it to the ground and lie on it.

This choreographic intention can be developed in numerous separate but inter-related ways. If, say, I place the cloth around my shoulders and run, it flies behind me like a cloak. If I extend my arms, it becomes less cloak-like and more like wings. If I wrap it round my torso and legs, my movement becomes Geisha-like, restricted. If I immerse myself in it totally I move as if blind, slowly and cautiously, feeling my way. In all the above examples, choreography and theatrical intention are intrinsically linked: I don’t need to pretend to be a Geisha – no acting required – the cloth binding my legs make my movements ‘Geisha’.

I have for a long time been interested in the relationship between choreography and costume – in the intrinsic qualities of cloth (or other materials that surround the body) and how they these can add or take away flow. I’m thinking, as a few examples, of the work of Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer with his extraordinary dancers clad in glass dresses; of Pina Bausch/Tanztheater Wuppertal’s work, where cloth is often used as an extension of the body’s movement; and of Mummenschanz and their ‘whole body mask’ that creates images through containment; What all these very different companies share is an interested in how a movement of the body can be extended or restricted by the physical material that envelops it. The Belgian movement theatre company Mossoux Bonte, French visual theatre supreme Philippe Genty, and the Russian company BlackSkyWhite also use objects in general, and costume in particular, in interesting choreographic ways – often creating illusion and confusion, so that we struggle to understand what we are actually seeing. Is this person moving forwards or backwards? And, actually, is it one person or two? Of course, much of the illusion is created and maintained by the physical skill of the performer – that is a given – but it is interesting to note how the fabric plays its part.

And so, back to Abre-Alas. What else could these blue cloths be and do? In the honourable tradition of ‘poor theatre’ a simple piece of cloth can of course dress a king, a priest or a goddess – so it wasn’t long before the LUME garden was full of high-ranking folk sporting togas, turbans, cassocks, ball gowns, veils, and Vivienne Westwood style puff-ball skirts. Some of us chose the other end of the social spectrum: I spent quite a while dragging myself around the space as a one-eyed beggar woman, and out of the corner of that one good eye I saw a street-dweller huddled in a bundle of rags.

As earlier in the day we had been working on bird motifs, I also saw a whole flock of feathered creatures strutting and flying round the LUME studio and garden: long-legged cranes and herons, preening flamingos, comical chickens, and cheeky little sparrows. Probably a whole load of Brazilian species I wouldn’t recognise, too. My bird was a swan – who knows why, that’s the beauty of improvising, these things appear and you have no idea why you picked them. My swan is rather vain and very bad-tempered. Do they have swans in Brazil, I ask Naomi later. Probably one or two she says, although she doesn’t sound too convinced. Oh well, they have them in fairy-tales so that’ll have to do. I’ll be a mythical swan.

I then became interested in the ‘whole body mask’ possibilities, hiding inside the cloth with just one hand or foot extending, or moving round the space as a ghostly almost-formless swathe of blue, or stretching the cloth across the face and biting a big section to create a grotesque mask face. Bored with that game (after getting tangled and half-blinded in some bushes in the garden – perhaps the fact that I’m reading Jose Saramago’s Blindness at the moment was having an influence), I felt I wanted the cloth as far away from me as possible, although I knew that I couldn’t take a break  – remembering from last year Ricardo’s maxim on seeing anyone looking like they are about to give up: ‘now is not an interval’. Solution: keep the cloth at arm’s length, dragged along the floor. At this point, the cloth is somewhere between choreographic tool, costume and prop – it’s somehow simultaneously an extension of the arm, perhaps clothed in an elaborate sleeve; a tail; a dead body dragged across the ground; or a dog on a lead. After a while, I found myself occasionally using it as a whip to beat on the ground – aha you dastardly cloth, blind me and strangle me, would you? I get my revenge!

So now we are talking about the power of objects in general (and these pieces of blue cloth in particular) to take on theatrical rather than purely choreographic values in a way that we could call ‘puppetesque’. We are not using the cloths as puppets per se: they are not modelled into obvious figures, but they are being animated by our movements to create forms that tell theatrical stories. Some have ambivalent meaning – the dog/sleeve/dead body above – but some are simpler and read (probably, anyway!) as the same image to everyone viewing. For example, at one point I roll the cloth into a bundle which I hold and rock in my arms. It would be hard to view it as anything other than a baby…

A tool for movement, a neutral costume item, a character costume, a fantasy creature, a prop, a puppetesque animation. Is there more a blue cloth can be? There is – a set. At a one point, a number of us our hold the cloths up in what becomes a forbidding wall. Oh and as percussive instruments, as the cloths are whipped on the floor

Over the next few days, these blue-cloth figures and forms are developed in different ways, and on Tuesday (we are now around two-thirds of the way through the course) we get to play in public in a small square just off Barão Geraldo’s main drag, the Avenida Santa Isabel – creating a short scene that makes use of all the above methods as the ensemble weave from a procession to a circle, cloths transforming from fluttering abstract objects to cloaks to walls to whips and more. Only three more days and they will be ready to play their part in the Abre-Alas cortejo – as costume, props, set, instruments and even characters… Look out, the Blue Meanies are coming your way…