Mime and clowning, mask work and the kind of characterisation that's the hallmark of commedia del'arte story-telling – these, and other skills, have been on the to-do lists for students on the Physical Theatre Practice course that's overseen by the Adam Smith College in Fife.
The recent clutch of Diploma graduates – with students from Greece, Poland and America lining up alongside Scots from a goodly variety of arts backgrounds – is a timely reminder of how universal and inclusive these non-text based forms are.
During July, when the Surge festival takes to the Glasgow streets, a wider public will have a chance to enjoy the humour, craft and imagination that was on-stage, in bite-size showings, at the Arches last week.
It’s the brevity of the individual morsels that, in fact, compromises the overall impact of the showcase.
There are, of course, practical reasons for keeping the dozen or so items in check – it’s that ‘end of term’ necessity to let as many bodies as possible show what they can do. And clearly, as seen in Entre Nous, many of them can devise and present interesting, quirky work. Work that on occasions seemed just about to shift gears in an intriguing way when … blackout.
Though there was the ongoing compensation of the garrulous, prankish stage-sweeper (Ali Maloney) whose flair for the grotesque contrasted nicely with the delicacy and hinted-at horrors of, for example, Emma Brierley’s Hungry Ghost or Maria Bieda’s Kore’s Dream. What did shine through, however, was a belief in the body’s own physicality as a vehicle for expressing the inner-most states of heart and mind that don’t always translate into words.
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