It sounds like an easy quiz question for an aficionado of the performing arts: “In which Scottish city is the venue that is hosting a new festival of performance art, theatre, contemporary dance, modern classical music, chamber opera, puppetry and film installation?” The answer, one would think, is Glasgow. It is, after all, the city on the Clyde that is home to Tramway and The Arches, the internationally acclaimed, post-industrial venues which regularly host cutting-edge performance.
It is a great tribute to Dominic Hill – artistic director of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh since January of last year – that his new Autumn Festival is offering such a programme on the east coast. The director is certainly delivering on his promise to make the theatre a constant hub of artistic activity.
With the Autumn Festival, Hill is tinkering purposefully with the theatre’s self-defined remit as a venue for “new writing”. In the past that has tended to mean the staging of newly written plays, with clearly defined characters who walk and talk (and often lounge around on sofas). There is, however, a great deal more to the theatre arts than the so-called “straight play”, and Hill recognises that fact with a mini-festival which redefines the Traverse as a home not only for new writing, but also for new work more broadly.
Theatre-goers who have been watching Hill’s programming carefully will not be entirely surprised by the new festival. It was Hill, after all, who brought superb Flemish performance artists Ontroerend Goed to the Fringe with the wonderfully titled Once And For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up And Listen (2008) and Internal (2009). Both shows offered British audiences a form of imaginative, devised theatre which is common in Continental Europe, but which continues to seem like a radical theatrical departure to many people in the UK.
The Traverse Autumn Festival opens with Eleanor Alberga’s chamber opera Letters Of A Love Betrayed (November 17), based upon a short story by Isabel Allende. A co-production with the Royal Opera House, London, brought to the Traverse in partnership with Scottish Opera, it is the kind of ambitious project which reminds one of the sort of programming we used to see at Tramway, back in the days when its owners, Glasgow City Council, had a better understanding of the venue’s towering international reputation; one remembers Peter Brook’s beautiful chamber opera Impressions De Pelleas (from 1993) with continued affection.
Indeed, the Traverse programme draws directly upon work programmed more recently by Tramway’s now former director Steve Slater. Choreographer Colette Sadler’s The Making Of Doubt (a Tramway/Stammerproductions collaboration with companies from Germany and Belgium) combines human performers and life-size puppets in a production which plays profoundly and humorously with the notions of ‘authenticity’ and ‘falseness’ in live performance.
A chamber opera and life-size puppets at the Traverse! Let’s hope that the Autumn Festival is beginning as it intends to go on.
