Team Effort!
Tramway, Glasgow
This was a "one night only" showing, where no-one quite knows what to expect - and that probably includes the six artists who have been bouncing ideas off one another across a recent twelvemonth Team Effort! artist development project. That interaction will no doubt prove an invaluable seed-bed for future collaborations and individual performances.
What we saw on Saturday, produced by Gilly Roche as part of the Tramway's Rip It Up season, was a multi-disciplinary collage of notions created in a whirl of freefall associations across one week and gleefully given the title The Cult Of The Worst.
Artists Eilidh MacAskill, Fergus Dunnet, Kim Moore, Martin O'Connor, Rose Ruane and Stef Smith - joined, for the night, by musicians Gareth Griffiths and John Lemke - had clustered together their own responses to a beaky-freaky strand where birds were a recurring springboard for text and movement while the arcane togetherness of a cult was nodded at by the long-billed masks worn by all.
Us too, at the end, when a ritual of communal grooving rounded off a very merry mosaic of monologue, banter, film and music. In truth, this array of fragments isn't the stuff of a fully-fledged, reviewable show. But it was packed with watchable moments from everyone involved.
The thrumming underscoring by Moore and fellow musicians - shot through with melodic or malevolent bird calls - really wove the strands together. Brought a primal feel to snippets that played with verbal and visual imagery derived from the elemental forces represented by birds, with everything from Hitchcock to the shaking of sexy tail feathers, puppetry and incantations served up in a "go for it" spirit of shared curiosity.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article