Andrew Dawson’s Blog

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

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….