Tucked away at the end of a dingy corridor is the Arches First Aid Room – not a place I've ever had occasion to visit.
But it's a curiously appropriate space for Beastly (HHH), a work-in-progress (by Deb Jones in collaboration with Rosana Cade and Eilidh MacAskill) that puts conflicting attitudes to female body hair under the microscope, as it were.
There's a flourish of old-style Barnum and Bailey freak show in the way Jones and Cade hustle us into the room. Dressed as bowler-hatted Victorian types – liberally mustachio'd and with Bradley Wiggins sideburns – they promise us horrors, marvels and sights never before seen.
It's larky and funny, with cupboards subsequently flung open on quirky collections of a humorously hirsute kind. But as the layers of false hair (and clothing) are stripped away, what emerges is an exquisite, poetic witness to the skin we're in. Not so much hair-raising but consciousness-raising, and done with tremendous panache.
If ever a version of Macbeth (HHHH) lived up to the description "full of sound and fury", it's the fierce, primal reduction of Shakespeare's text superbly delivered by Black Sun Drum Korps. Like hell, the arch they're in is murky, dark, swirling with mist, hung about with tattered, blood-stained flags and full of shadowy, kilted figures in tribal war-paint who drum like demons on metal railings and boxes.
The sound is utterly pulverising, even with the earplugs provided. It batters through your bones, roots you to the spot, translates Shakespeare's tragedy into a ritual of distorted voices and reverberating incantations that end bloodily, with Macbeth sacrificed to his own ambition and the witches cackling over the onslaught of thrash metal chords.
Was the blasted heath ever like this? You stagger out thinking "maybe - probably -" and feeling as though you've had a brush with raw energies from past history.
TV shows about baking cakes. Magazines chirruping about the virtues of knitting and sewing. At first glance Lucy Hutson's installation Make Do And Mend Myself (HHHH) looks like a shrine to such endeavours. Apron-clad, she's mixing batter or showing a guy how to do some weaving. It's oh-so domestic. But if you tune into the on-screen interviews – female relatives on one monitor, males on another – you soon realise that Hutson is questioning why femininity is still badged with these skills.
Why should a man preface an attempt at weaving with "I suppose I should get more in touch with my feminine side?" given that Hutson's own femininity – and evident creativity – resists definition in terms of pie-making and embroidery? Make Do And Mend Myself is a wonderfully sophisticated, subversive use of everyday objects and conventions.
Funk'n'Love (HHH) finds Solar Bear Deaf Youth Theatre in the groove with electronic/bhangra duo Tigerstyle. They show and tell us just how music inspires them, doing so with humour and vitality – coupled with some film footage and movement sequences that celebrate not only the powers of imagination but the different ways that music can flood into your body.
There's no shortage of imagination in NDGAME (HH), Andrew Houston's take on Beckett. Clever projection (on to his own body) highlights a dependency that ultimately can – in this digital age – be ended at the flick of a switch.
What undermines this fascinating visual interplay is the sheer awfulness of Hamm's recorded speech. This bulldozes through the cadences and pauses of the text with an ill-advised whining flatness of tone. Hurrah for the off switch -
All runs ended. Arches Live '12 continues this week.
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