Huntly Halloween 2012- images by Jan Holm

Gordon Black in the shop window.

Deborah May dancing in shop window.

Cathi and Gordon fight scene.

Paul enters the crowd with giant robot arms.

This Side of Paradise was performed at Huntly Halloween in Huntly town square re-located to an old florists shop with the audience looking through large windows. Paul finally emerged with his club arms to scare the crowd before making his way down Duke Street. As usual many people came to the Halloween Festival with a diverse array of things happening at the castle and square. A great turn even with the threat of snow.

Glue Factory pictures by Lisa Craig

Video games were invented using military technology to simulate battle situations - we wanted to explore how torture and violence are used in entertainment, film, video and gaming. Where do we draw the line between reality and fantasy ? 

In October 2012 This Side of Paradise was located at the Glue Factory in Glasgow. Dudendance rehearsed the piece within the site and created a walk-though environment peopled by mutant creatures who created and destroyed themselves with wads of stuffing. The piece was set into adjoining spaces allowing the audience to see several spaces at once.

The morphing action builds into a slow motion full- scale fight choreography - the creatures eventually  smashed by Paul Rous's giant robot arms.  The piece ends with the creatures re-forming into mutant robot type figures continuing their never ending cycle of violence. 

Deborah May stuffs herself into hideous mis-shapes.

Cathi Sell moves through the floor unable to stand up.

Dora de Andrade manipulates and smashes a dummy before turning on the others. 

  

Slow motion fight....

Paul destroyer arms.

Mary Brennan Review for Glue Factory performance 15th Oct.

This Side of Paradise, Arches@TheGlue Factory, Glasgow

Dance critic

Last October, this was a work-in-progress at the Arches. ****

A year on, Dudendance returned with a new version of the work, tailoring it to suit the dank chill of the Glue Factory. The film noir sub-stories were stripped out, leaving the nameless, faceless threat of black-clad mutants – lumpen, mis-shapen forms with robotic gait – to invade the dim-lit rooms, like vengeful escapees from some war-based video game.

Their blindly relentless aggression wasn't aimed at us. But the uncertainty hovered: what if technology went rogue? Our gizmos turned against us? An evil genius manipulated machines that wouldn't die, but reactivated to keep on killing? The stuff of such sci-fi nightmares astutely taps into the primal fears we harbour still. And even when the soundscore edged into cha-cha-cha cheesiness, or Paul Rous (co-director of Dudendance, with Clea Wallis) lumbered on like a manga slayer, one arm a huge hammer the other a club, the black humour was countered by four battered creatures reviving in order to start another cycle of destruction between us and the exit.

Glasgow Dates

• A group of mutant characters assemble themselves using wads of stuffing and removable limbs. Stiff with the technical language of war, an isolated voice offers help, providing them with instruction on how the body fits together and operates. Each action brings them closer to violence. Cartoon grotesquery and dark humour collide in this site-specific performance installation from experimental dance-theatre company Dudendance, first shown as a work-in-progress at the Arches last October. Performances from t he 11th-14th October. 7.30 pm The Glue Factory is a ten-minute walk from Cowcaddens subway (follow Garscube road) or from St. George's Cross subway along St. George road. Tickets available from the Arches website, or to reserve from the Arches box office. http://www.thearches.co.uk/events/arts/this-side-of-paradise-2

The Glue Factory

22 Farnell Street, G4 9SE Glasgow, United Kingdom

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More dates announced

New production from Dudendance

Rehearsals are going well! Our work over the summer on 'This Side of Paradise' is to be put into the space in Glasgow in a weeks time, bringing the piece from our rehearsal base in Aberdeenshire to the Glue Factory in Glasgow where we will perform later in the year for four days, from the 11th of October! Put it in your diaries! Its going to be a good one! Photo by Jan Holm

Dudendance at The Living Museum Alford Old Mart and Heritage Centre July 2012 - work-in-progress

The Living Museum dD

Performance Installation

Alford Heritage Centre

Mart Road

Alford 

Sunday 22nd of July

12:30pm, 2:00pm, 3:00pm

DTel: 01975 562 906 for tickets.D

Casa das Artes Embu

We arrived at the Casa das Artes in Embu after an intensive week at LUME theatre and a weekend spent in Sao Carlos.

In Sao Carlos we stayed with producer Patricia Souza Ceschi from Ayembere Productions who took us to an organic Fazenda (farm) where they are creating an ambitious project working with the children of the farmers with performance, art and circus. The local young people have access to a beautiful purpose built space including an outdoor theatre, a huge play area, a kitchen with clay ovens for cooking and an indoor performance space. We were impressed by the ambition of the project and exchanged our experiences of teaching young people in the rural environment of Huntly. We also looked at potential spaces in Sao Carlos and planned how we could combine a workshop at the Fazenda with performances of This Side of Paradise in 2013.

The Casa das Artes residency centre is owned and built by film-maker and former Cirque du Soleil artist Kris Niklison. The impressive living/working space is combined in an open plan structure with high walls to accommodate trapeze and enormous wooden doors with panoramic views into the Atlantic rain forest. In rehearsals we were frequently joined by snakes, frogs, chicadas and stray dogs hiding from strong electric storms that threatened to hit the house. Sharing the residency with us were two clowns Daniel from Circus Zani and Danilo from Juego do Quintal.

Dora de Andrade exchanged her experience of working with her group in the favela of Ilha de Conceptcio in Rio. Dora has been working with teenage boys crossing a “gorilla“ group of traditional carnival characters with hip hop and site- specific performance.  She has developed ideas with Dudendance through a long distance project and as part of her PHD thesis on collaborative process.  

Cathi, Gordon and Deborah arrived from Huntly in the second week and spent a few days adjusting to the climate. The colonial town of Embu, a 30 min walk away, famous for it’s arts and crafts market, provided us with a typical slice of Brasil. Only 40 mins from the mega city of Sao Paulo, Embu feels like a world away and is a popular day trip for tourists who visit the workshops of craftsmen and artists based there.

Our days were divided between training sessions in yoga, dance and voice, improvisation and devising. During the three week process we carried through the idea of the characters manipulating each other and transforming from human into hideous machines.  We wanted to push the noir clichés into an exaggerated cartoon-like world and at the same time search for a truth behind the Americana façade.   With so much nature and wild sounds surrounding the house we worked with being part animal and creating imaginary habitats. Cathi, Gordon, Paul, and Deborah wrote noir inspired text’s as voice-overs for their characters- each lone figure narrating their own imaginary movie. Fabiana Galante, composer and musician from Argentina joined us in the last few days to record the  sounds surrounding the house and  texts to be incorporated into a sound-scape.

During our time in Embu we learnt a lot through interchange with our Brasilian peers. There was a refreshing interest in our work process which we shared through workshops and open rehearsals in LUME and Embu. The young performers from Scotland also had the opportunity to see first class Brasilian shows in Sao Paulo with it’s vibrant dance, physical theatre and circus scene.

On the whole the process in Brasil was an amazing opportunity to exchange and be inspired by a different culture and gave the group a re-newed excitement and inspiration to create work. It was fantastic to be exposed to such an open, dynamic and warm-hearted arts community with physical performance at it’s heart. A famous saying is that Brasil is the land of improvisation. The experience in Brasil taught us to be adaptable to different audiences and be ready to perform a variation of work in a variety of spaces. We really look forward to strengthening our ties and bring the finished piece back in 2013.

We also created links for Brasilian companies to come to Scotland.  To date we have connected LUME Teatro to Glasgow based Conflux for their 2012-2016 interchange and music group Sambasupercollider from Rio with Deveron Arts in Huntly. Dancer Flavia Fernandes who took part in our workshop will join us in the summer for a cultural exchange and film-maker Felipe Barros is planning a film with Dudendance in the arid desert of north east Brasil in 2013. 

www.ayembere.com.br 
www.jogandonoquintal.com.br
 

Why Brasil?

The connection to Brasil started in 1992 when Dudendance were invited for a residency at the Imperial Palace in Rio. This led onto an invite from the International Festival of Theatre in Campinas to ran a large scale workshop at the university where Lume are based for the performance faculty of UNICAMP. Out of the workshop the company created a site-specific piece “Sphinx Hinter Gittern” which subsequently toured to festivals and was supported by the PT (workers party) to bring culture into shanty towns. The extended tour, which ran for two years, included a cast of four members of Dudendance and eighteen university students. 

The experience in Brasil was life-changing and has had a strong influence on the way Dudendance have worked in the rural town of Huntly over the past ten years. Subsequent visits to Brasil have included the production of two short dance films and workshops and residencies at the Centro Coreografico in Rio. Dudendance have established a network of dancers and performers with whom they collaborate on a regular basis.  

LUME: Dance Theatre Workshop

The context of the workshop was to share the starting point for This Side of Paradise by exploring the theme of physical manipulation. Dudendance have created a movement technique where the body is "moved" and manipulated like a life size puppet. Inspired by the silent movies of Buster Keaton, who is moved by elements outside of himself (the wind, rocks, water, machine) what develops is a physical struggle - a movement created by invisible forces. The group for This Side of Paradise used this in developing their noir influenced characters that are metaphorically locked in a struggle with their own fate.  During the workshop ties are attached to the body allowing the person to be moulded into “simple” tasks such as sitting, standing, walking, getting dressed etc. This passive state is slowly replaced by an increased motivation to break away resulting in a playful fight between the performer and the manipulators. Once the ties are removed the performers repeat the whole process alone, recalling the “sense memory” of the task.

The Arches

 

'Every so often the Dudendance folk - Clea Wallis and Paul Rous - turn up at The Arches to give their followers a taste of what they get up to in their own base of Huntly.

This showing, not so much a work-in-progress as a selection of ideas that are bubbling under their work, picked up on themes that emerged during a recent summer project with local young people. Three of those Young Dudes – Deborah May, Cathi Sell and Gordon Black – are now immersed in a melting pot of text, movement and film sequences which play around with aspects of characterisation and behaviour.

The mood is film noir, but given the Dudendance penchant for skewing familiar icons and introducing some shape-shifting and an element of animalistic behaviour, the cinematic genre gets an intriguing upheaval. There’s a degree of physical distortion: torsos are grotesquely puffed up with cotton wadding that cuts across any glimmers of glamour in gun-toting gangster, moll or law-man. Movement, too, alters the imagery. Black and Sell, lip-synching as no-goodniks on the run (Bonnie and Clyde, perhaps) wriggle and squirm like snakes, albeit through clumps of white wadding. Rous, padded and hatted, like a Desperate Dan look-alike, is the tippy-toed predator-gumshoe who subsequently interrogates the wonderfully fragile, butterfly flittery creature (Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard?) portrayed by Deborah May. 

As a starting point, it could go anywhere. What shows already, however, is the value of what Dudendance achieves in Huntly through a bold and ambitious programme of workshops and site-specific community pieces.'  Mary Brennan, The Glasgow Herald, 21st of October. 

This Side of Paradise  The Arches, Glasgow

Stills

Into the Wild

Into the Wild was a public art project initiated by Dudendance in 2010, looking at what the woods means to local people, the place of 'wilderness' in the collective imagination and the importance of having 'unmanaged spaces'. 

For Gordon Black and Cathi Sells, this was their first taster of working with Dudendance.

This Side of Paradise's work process

For the devising process we are using film-noir themes in a broad sense. The desperate and animalistic quality of the characters, their survival instinct and deluded nature, draws us into their underworld. By watching classic noir films such as Sunset Blvd. - including spin-offs by directors such as Scorsese and Cassavettes, we have acquired a feeling for the emotional journey encountered by a ‘typical’ noir character. 

In improvisation each performer creates their own series of scenarios linked to emotions, objects and situations that form a stream; a non-linear narrative. The emotions, based on the ‘noir motives’ of greed, paranoia, seduction, fear, doubt and revenge are played out using guns, cigarettes, money, telephones and drink. Padded cushions are beaten up and the contents used for stuffing, bloating the characters into hideous, cartoon-like versions of themselves.

We find ourselves repeatedly questioning ‘why noir?’, ‘why use these clichés?’

The clichés of noir surface time-after-time in different guises because they have a ring of truth. In our celebrity-obsessed world we are fascinated by fallen icons – lost souls with big dreams, whose fate ends in the gutter. The naïve aspirations of the American dream no longer seem relevant, and the anti-dream/ anti-hero still holds strong because most of us don’t make it onto X factor.