Performance

Into The New, Arches, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

Graduation is looming large for the final year students from the Contemporary Performance Practice (CPP) course at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, so Into the New - a showcase of devised work that's been open to the public - is a stepping stone towards an uncharted future in performance making. As ever, the range of work reflects the chameleon nature of the word "performance" - for some it's a matter of personal text, for others it lies in movement and physicality while. for Louise Doyle, it involved puppets and objects and film and people.

Her piece, Living in the Dim Light (FOUR STARS), was gloriously rampant with whimsical invention and a Blue Peter approach to making props that even extended to the instruments held by her live band - a brown paper saxophone, anyone? On a leafy-strewn floor, Doyle - and her team of splendidly deadpan assistants - unfurled a tale of lonely searching by a... a toothbrush. Tiny at first, on a long and winding road (a toilet roll), but with a leap of imagination and a lot of craft-skills, re-emerging larger than Doyle herself and articulated, like an anglepoise with a brush-head. Cue the ritual of the toothpaste anointing, the dream of owning a shiny-glossy bathroom of one's own - adorably witty, but underneath it all, Doyle was busy questioning the nature of reality, and how we shape our own perception of it. Is it all a matter of make believe? Like the imitation card-board guitar or the tooth-brush people or any of the other artefacts conjured out of cunningly-recycled everyday discards. Reality as creativity as performance - huge complexities of ideas, delivered with music and humour, charm and a dash of hand-knitted ingenuity.

Was it ingenuity or just a face-saving dodge that saw Peter Smart bottling out of presenting his own work by getting a friend to do it for him? Isaac Smith did it one night, but I saw Connor Smith step up to the microphone for Front End/Back End (FOUR STARS), holding a script he'd never seen before let alone rehearsed. At first, the saga of the immoveable pink paint stain - inflicted by Smart on one of the 'Toire's expensive dance floors - seemed little more than an in-joke peppered with staff e-mail exchanges. The health and safety risk assessment of using methylated spirits as a cleaning agent - oh, those intoxicating fumes! - became a pre-occupation. Now: did the paint stain ever really exist? No photos were projected behind our reader. Not even when he stood, silent and endearingly discomfitted, through tracks by Gary Numan and the Bee Gees. How could you, Mr Smart? Simply because of wanting to question the bedrock processes behind making performance work by turning accounts of those processes into the performance itself. The real joke is how serious the investigation into form and audience susceptibility is.

More deconstruction and then haphazard reconstruction in Jack Stancliffe's Half House (THREE STARS), where his encounters with an amateur dramatic group are juxtaposed with screened snatches of Abigail's Party and the building of a similar drawing room set. Lots of dots, here - memory as the script of our own daily performance, alongside the realistic perceptions intrinsic to Mike Leigh's creative processes - and though they don't all join up, the truths that do emerge are interesting. Bodyhoods (THREE STARS) found Bel Jessica Pye grappling with issues of disability, stripping away layers of common assumptions along with her clothes to question what defines an individual as able-bodied or not. A lot of Into The New seemed rooted in the supposed opposition of "heart or head" influences. Pye attempted to bring both together, as she danced across the quicksand of politically correct attitudes using the words and experiences of unseen, disabled others.