Andrew Dawson’s Blog

Just gave 2 performances of Space Panorama in Washington DC at the Kennedy Centre as part of the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. It was a great success 2 full houses. It has been such a treat to perform in such a beautiful theatre. It has been a manic few days since landing on Wednesday with TV & radio interviews and a fabulous piece in the Washington post.  I have performed this piece for more than 20 years. I would never have imagined that on the 40th Anniversary that this is where it would end up.

More remarkable is the fact that when I made the piece I didn’t have a son and now I am here with him, Roman (16) and he was my stage manager and called the cues for the show.  Such a cool head.

Last night we went to the air and space museum to the annual John Glen lecture and saw the 3 Apollo 11 crewmembers, Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin. Neil Armstrong gave a very engaging speech. A very rare moment indeed to see the 3 reunited, I may never see that again.

How we head to Los Angeles to teach a short workshop and then holiday with the rest of the family.

great review for my season at UCLA live in Los Angeles
Andrew Dawson has the whole world in his hands. For the moon, though, it takes a torso.

This quirky British choreographer/performer/director/hand artist returned to Macgowan Little Theater Wednesday night as the final presentation for this year’s UCLA Live International Theatre Festival. Seated with Sven Till behind a black-draped lectern, he performed “Quatre Mains,” an hour and five minutes of mesmerizing hand dances. After intermission, Dawson returned alone to re-create the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing.

Dawson created both works in the late ’80s and has gone on to grander spectacles. Most recently he choreographed the Metropolitan Opera’s problematic new production of John Adams’ “Doctor Atomic.” Intimacy and low budgets clearly suit him better.

The marvel of these two pieces, in fact, is their ability to create so much with so little. When it comes to high tech, UCLA lately lacks luck. One evening last month, the equipment in Robert Lepage’s “The Blue Dragon” broke down, and the audience was sent home halfway through the show (I still don’t know how it ends). Wednesday night, the university lost heat. Earlier in the rainy day, water had leaked under the seats, creating rivulets along the aisles. Although mopped up in time for the show, the hall was dank and freezing, creating the atmosphere of attending theater in the Third World.

But that also added a sense of urgency to  Dawson’s remarkable ability to produce expression through nothing more than hand gestures and lighting, accompanied by odd selections of recorded music. From the loudspeakers came moments of Hungarian avant-garde, noirish bits of film music by Bernard Herrmann, goofy mood music of Roger Roger, some Jazz Passengers jazz and a little Astor Piazzolla. But “Quatre Mains” ends in magic, the “Moonlight” interlude from Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes.”

Through it all, two men with beautiful hands found a thousand surprising ways of connecting. Their fingers were little men walking the lonely streets on a dark night. They were sea anemones in an underwater ballet. Digits became a geometer’s lines. Hands in choreographed motion were dancers, acrobats, aircraft. Once or twice, Dawson and Till pulled up their sleeves and allowed forearm action. But that’s as far as it went for their bodies. They remained close lipped, expressionless, throughout.

Although Dawson was still only seen from waist up in “Space Panorama,” he here acted as mime in the 25-minute blastoff from Cape Canaveral, landing on the surface of the moon and reentry to Earth. A lively recorded narration told the sequence of events. Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony was the soundtrack.

Written in 1953, the symphony is a portrait of Stalin, the grotesque despot. The music is angry, moody and reaches into the depths of hopelessness. It ends, though, in triumph. The dictator is dead.

In “Space Panorama,” Shostakovich confronts the space race. What was angst for a Russian is the excitement of gum-chewing American can-do. To music of dramatic anguish, Dawson becomes the astronauts’ cocky driver delivering them to their spacecraft on the morning of the launch.

But even more impressive is the way, in Dawson’s hands (literally), desolate Shostakovich becomes delicate, mysterious moon music.

Dawson gets it all. His stony face suddenly becomes elastic. He is President Kennedy one minute, an aw-shucks Neil Armstrong the next. Dawson’s magnetic hands mimic the Earth, moon and starry sky. They are lunar module and orbiter uncoupling.

Although this was the West Coast premiere of “Space Panorama,” of which Jozef Houben is the inventive director, Dawson has made the international theater festival rounds with it, from Beirut to Costa Rica to Singapore. Apollo astronauts have seen the show and sent back their publicity blurbs. Their theater criticism is credible.

Better still, bring the kids. “Space Panorama” shows what Americans can do. It shows what theater can do without a lot of technological wizardry. And it’s good for classical music at a time of the year when the “Nutcracker” needn’t be ubiquitous.

– Mark Swed

“Quatre Mains,” UCLA’s Macgowan Little Theatre, UCLA campus. 8 p.m. today, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday. Ends Sunday. $36. (310) 825-2101. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

Another stunning review in METRO

Endlessly inventive and eerily low on dialogue, Lisle Turner’s The Idiot Colony would be an ideal show to sit quietly in the dark and gawp at - but you can’t just gawp when your emotions are working overtime. Told in a volley of flashbacks, this is a thoroughly disquieting look at the institutionalised lives of three women, all unfairly committed to asylums in the 1940s.

RedCape Theatre’s Claire Coaché, Cassie Friend and Rebecca Loukes do a brilliant job of portraying three diverse personalities, both before and after their incarcerations. Based on real-life testimony and set in the shared haven of a 1980s hair salon, it chiefly tackles the womens’ fragmented memories of an echoing hospital ward and the innocuous love affairs that landed them there.

Psychoactive drugs, experimental brain surgery and intrusive hygiene regimes are all starkly evoked in gorgeously choreographed, almost balletic set-pieces. One particularly emotive sequence involves a miniature rainstorm erupting over a supine patient, an effect created with just a twisted wet towel and a silvery backlight. It’s stunning; a potentially complex visual metaphor rendered with such startlingly simple clarity, you can’t help but catch your breath.

While other segments (notably a night out featuring The Birdie Song, and a sexual awakening in a wartime cinema) provide welcome bubbles of humour, they tend to burst rather quickly. This is well judged, as it’s the dreamy, doomy atmosphere pervading every cranny of this piece that gives it real edge. Anyone familiar with Peter Weir’s Picnic At Hanging Rock will be similarly haunted by The Idiot Colony’s sinister aesthetic; those who are not will just be very glad they came.Mark Powell

Its a very exciting time as I head to New York this weekend with my family and begin work on the Opera Dr Atomic at the MET. Meanwhile in Edinburgh the 3 girls of Redcape Theater are doing so well with their show the Idiot Colony. I am very proud of them as Edinburgh is not easy and takes a lot of work and courage to take a piece like this up to the festival, you can never be sure its going to work. I am sad I don’t have time to join them but New York beckons.

The Herald ****

How sensitive should theater be to real-life taboos without becoming didactic or resorting to shock or sensory overload? In the case of The Idiot Colony, an impressionistic depiction of three women’s incarceration in a mental hospital, attention-seeking tactics would cheapen a delicate work of damaged poetry and slow-moving grace.

This debut show by the RedCape Theatre company starts with a trio of women lined up in a row, their hair covering their faces like they’re escapees from a Japanese horror flick. When they come out from under their fringes, we’re allowed a glimpse inside their minds from the safety of the residential hair salon which provides sanctuary of sorts. One woman works through the styles of movie femmes fatales and remembers how she had her first orgasm in the cinema. Another recalls a far more brutal sexual awakening. Then, beyond the heightened sexualisation, there’s the silent girl who sheds leaves from her hair and spits out jewelled pebbles.

Devised by the company and based on first-hand accounts, such material in less capable hands could have ended up a shrill piece of madwoman-in-the-attic realism. RedCape, though, are more interested in exploring the subtle physical nuances that make up the women’s everyday rituals. Under the guidance of director Andrew Dawson, whose Herald Angel-winning Absence and Presence tapped into the intimacies of loss a couple of years ago, the result is beautifully accomplished.

Its precision and overriding poignancy, however, are leavened by the comforts of 1980s pop and a stab at the Birdie Dance before sheer terror takes hold. As played by Claire Coache, Cassie Friend and Rebecca Loukes, the women present some devastatingly effective stage pictures, made even more startling by their horrifying simplicity. One is a drowning, the other a lobotomy. As harrowing as they are, both images point to some kind of release in a remarkable debut that promises much, however heart-rending the subject matter.

Great review in The List…

The Idiot Colony *****
Beautiful, shocking indictment of an all-too recent past.

The opening scene of this intense, beautifully constructed piece of physical theatre lingers, unsettlingly for days afterwards. Three girlish figures in pretty white dresses, perfectly in sync with each other, sway to a ragtime number, their faces completely obscured by shinning, glossy curtains of hair so it looks like their heads are on backwards. As an image, its reminiscent of the iconography of Japanese horror movies. What follows has more in common with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but the horror is a very specifically British one, made all the more chilling by its mundanity.

The Idiot Colony, a damning indictment of the system which branded hundreds of women in the 1940s and 1950s “moral defectives” for grievous crimes like homosexuality or having a baby as a result of childhood rape, locked them up and forgot about them, is full of similarly beautiful, stark moments. Joy, Mary and mute, suicidal Victoria are left to fuss over each other’s hair in a mocked-up salon, enacting only the tamest aspects of female sexuality in bum-shaking dance routines. All three performers convey whole worlds with their faces, expressing sheer bleak confusion and sharp comedy with tiny, perfect grimaces.

The horror comes with the gradual recognition that these women have been suspended in time. The stories they reveal in flashback or reminiscence are at odds with the 1980’s pop music they dace to an the chatter over the pearls in Lady Di’s wedding train, and then you realise, with a jolt, that these are not women in their late 30’s, as the ages of the actors would suggest, or their teens, as their mannerisms indicate. They’re old. They’ve been locked away for 30 or 40 years, as though someone pressed pause on their development at the point where each was institutionalized. (Kirstin Innes)

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