Andrew Dawson’s Blog

Nice review of the piece from its performance in The Brighton Festival the other weekend….

‘The mind is revealed through the body in this real life account of events in a mental asylum told through a physical performance. Three women in white expose the dark world of twentieth century hospitals that were used to confine women who were considered an embarrassment to their families. The performances are beautiful and touching, subtle against the stark set and shocking events that are played out on the black and white stage. One woman’s relationship with a black GI is recounted, through playfulness at the picture house to a sensual dance. She is subsequently committed, and the scene of her ‘treatment’ at the end of the play is not for the faint-hearted. Mind-blowing theatre that tackles the appalling nature of long-buried events.’

Now I am back in London I can turn my attention to RedCape Theatre and their show that I have devised and directed with them, The Idiot Colony. They have a couple of performance’s coming up and are planning to take the piece to the Pleasance in the Edinburgh Festival in August. From the boys in Washington, I get the girls in reading. It’s a good swap! It’s a fascinating piece inspired by the true stories of women who have been locked up in mental asylums for no real good reason. Their only respite is in the hospitals hairdressing salon; in this haven of intimacy they are able to share their stories with laughter and 80’s pop songs…

It has nice parallels with Amnesia Curiosa as the piece deals with truth, memory and our perception of the self. In both piece the stories are expressed in language, movement and images. Amnesias tag line is “ how strange it is to be anything at all” and The Idiot colonies, is “But for the Grace of god goes I”

The show is at Farnham Maltings on Sunday 4th and Komedia Upstairs, Brighton, as part of Caravan at the Brighton festival on Sunday 11th May

The piece Opened on the 8th April and has now completed its run. It was a huge hit. Its always mad bringing a show up to performance and pulling everything together, but on this one everything was made a lot easier by the dedication and focus of everybody on the team. I hope the show will get further performances; we shall see what interest has been generated in Washington.

Here’s a great review from the Washington Post…..

Watching “Amnesia Curiosa” inspires an off-kilter state of mind. The performance group rainpan 43 creates a droll, deadpan scientific mood that makes the audience happy to be served banana slices on toothpicks while making believe they’re tasting brains.

Or tasting souls, more accurately, or whatever untouchable bit of humanity stores memory and thought. The fleeting nature of consciousness — remembering, and even existing — is the wispy subject of this engaging, oddball entertainment, the second of three shows in the rainpan 43 festival this month at the Studio Theatre.

“It really is amazing to be anything at all,” one of the two performers says in the early going, which features a physical exam that’s almost worthy of the Marx Brothers.

You might call “Amnesia Curiosa” a comedy if it were more traditionally structured. As it is, Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle, who devised the piece with director Andrew Dawson, are performing more of an intellectual sideshow. It begins with the audience touring through a small museum backstage at the Studio’s Mead Theatre, with artifacts displayed on tables and in cases. The first object you see: string — as in the thing you tie around your finger to help you remember.

That’s typical of “Amnesia’s” puckish understatement, although Lyford and Sobelle aren’t above pure silliness. Examples: the “shh-shh” sounds they make when opening make-believe sliding doors, and the absurd fun they have with fake mustaches.

But as they move back and forth between being examiners and the examined, they also lay claim to poignancy, with mortality as a sober motif. This theme is often literally in Sobelle’s hands: He economically evokes a dying bird and a misremembering grandmother with the neatest of gestures. The grandmother, in particular, appears like a trick up his sleeve.

Lyford and Sobelle share an attractively low-key style. One-liners are served very dry, and they keep the mood loose and relaxed as they do their pseudo-scientific thing. The atmosphere is faux 19th century, never losing the museum/surgical theater vibe it establishes early, even when the dialogue and gizmos (a tape recorder, most notably) are more patently modern.

And despite its old-fashioned trappings, it is ultramodern — ironic, disciplined and unbound by the usual dramatic conventions. In one typical slapstick/mystical bit, Lyford and Sobelle distort their bodies as they step through an imaginary wall and seem to enter another dimension. “Amnesia” is a curiosity, all right — a light but considered tidbit for audiences seeking something completely different.

I am developing an idea for a book with Matilda Leyser. She writes the poems and I am illustrating it. Its fun to work in a different medium, we shall see where it will take us. Heres one of her poems….

How much?

First there are all the name-able fears
like whether my tree might not topple on me
or whether I might not topple from it
like whether the seas might flood the land
or the world might fall into the sun
and apparently it will, it’s just a question of when.
But even so I cannot believe that I have
no choice in the matter of any of these things that
matter to me.
But how much?
I pour out the sugar and spoon out fruit for
making jam and
watch the scales see-saw into balance,
And I wonder
how heavy fate is
how easily could I tip the scales?
would it take the lightest of finger taps
or my whole weight
my life
to make a difference?
And sometimes just a little more sugar to make sure
to make sure
it’s sweet enough
can send the scales
nodding up and down
up and down
sagely telling me
‘I told you so.
Don’t try so hard’
But how do I know
when is enough
or too much
to keep us spinning
in space
in time

And that’s just the name-able fears.

WW 29/03/08

I am home, back in London this week and heading back to Washington DC at the Weekend when Amnesia Curiosa will open at the studio Theater on the 8th.  This week Rainpan 43 open their other show ‘All Wear Bowlers’.

Returning to the piece had been really interesting as we now have a set and the piece is in a dedicated theatre space. The studio theatre have been very accommodating allowing us to build and rehearse in the theatre, we also are constructing a museum, our own cabinet of curiosities backstage. The audience enter the theatre via backstage and come through the museum; they then find themselves on the stage where they see Trey Lyford’s head in a glass box, he is the central exhibit.  They then make their way to their seats.

Returning to the piece always allows us to deepen our understanding of what we are trying to make. It’s a challenge not just to present a new piece but also to be our own authors. Together with Geoff and Trey I have discovered some very nice images, they have written some great text and together I hope we touch on theme of memories and how our own minds are a kind of cabinet of curiosities.

“We amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrievability of its moments and events.” Geoffrey Sonnabend

Making this work is a little carving at stone, you have an idea of what is in there but until you start chipping away you have no idea what will come out. For me, in live theatre, the transitions are always places where we get stuck and then become our most inventive. The work lives and dies I these transitions. No good having 2 great set pieces and then not pay attention to how to get from one the other. With Geoff’s skills in magic and Trey’s keen theatrical eye we have come up with some cool ideas.

Its interesting to me that some ideas that go right back to the early development work we did in New York in the spring of 2006 find their way back into the piece. Good ideas always surface if your patient enough to let them come to the surface.

A Couple of weeks ago I was in Belfast teaching a workshop ‘Feldenkrais and the art of performance.’ I had a really nice group of young dancers and I really enjoyed working with them. I have been developing ideas of using memory and movement to create instant chorography. It’s an idea that started in the early development work on ‘Amnesia’, and worked very well. The dancers I think go a lot out of the work.

Hi this is the first blog that I have posted, so is a bit of a test. I am in Washington DC at the moment directing and collaborating with Geoff and Trey from Rainpan 43. They brought ‘All Wear Bowlers’ to Edinburgh in 2005, which is where I met them. The show we are working on is Amnesia Curiosa, we first made this show in Philadelphia in 2006 in the surgical amphitheatre at the Philadelphia hospital. Here we get the chance to put it in a normal theatre and have a set designed ect. The show will open on 9th April and is at the ‘Studio Theatre’ so far its going very well, re writing, focusing and making sense of complicated themes of memory and cabinets of curiosity’s.

Will add more later but just want to see how this blog is looking….

Welcome to the new section of Andrew Dawson’s website. Here you will be able to keep up to date with all of Andy’s activities!

Watch this space for the first post…