Hatch at NEAT11: Zoo Indigo/Medium Rare: Opening Hours II (Rain Stops Play)

The final day of Hatch: NEAT was anticipated to be the closing of a circle, returning to its own beginnings in a repeat performance of the opening weekend’s events, but this time bringing together Medium Rare and Zoo Indigo’s previously separate Opening Hours performances on the same day and the same patch of ground. Since both the earlier versions had circular themes, in response to Wellington Circus itself, this made a certain sense, giving the varied events of the past fortnight’s Hatch thread through NEAT11 a symmetry and sense of unity despite their individually self-sufficient nature.

Sadly, the plan was sent slightly awry by the weather, which after a briefly promising morning quickly descended into unceasing heavy rain for the rest of the day. By all accounts, Medium Rare ran their performances as scheduled between noon and 4.30pm, performing their synchronised swimming routines and games of catch in florescent waterproof capes even when the audience was – at one point – a crowd of exactly zero people (I understand things improved somewhat later, and some hardy souls in waterproofs were given golf umbrellas and did manage to experience the performances).

I’m certainly sorry I missed out on what must have been the very strange sight of that audience-less performance running exactly to script and schedule even when no-one was present to witness it, something that I can imagine added a ritualistic dimension to what was already a piece steeped in familiar British stereotypes and character-traits, given that the performance on the first weekend consisted of the five members of Medium Rare in PE teacher costumes putting audiences through their disciplined paces in the fresh air with whistles and a briskly efficient attitude, as though we – or they – were being remodelled as characters from an Angela Brazil novel.

So it was that this earlier sense of British identity, underpinning the first performances of Hatch: NEAT, had been intended as the point to which we’d finally return. But now, as we found ourselves confronted with the stark facts of a day-long downpour and the cancellation of Zoo Indigo’s endurance maypole dance and its attendant side-events, might this actually be an oddly appropriate finishing point? What could be more revealing of British identity, after all, than an outdoor summertime event unceremoniously rained off, or at best taking place in rain-lashed wintry darkness as the lowering black clouds refused to budge from a sky that only that morning had teased us with promises of sunshine?

Saddened to have missed Medium Rare’s sterling (and, it appears, mostly successful) efforts to play on with their three part performance despite the adverse circumstances, and with that disappointment compounded by finding the gates to Wellington Circus padlocked, the rain still lashing down and Zoo Indigo’s Ildiko Rippel confined to Cast with a troupe of game but resigned volunteer maypole dancers come the start time for the evening’s activity, the situation nonetheless offered an opportunity to reflect on some of the many contradictions of Britishness almost as richly paradoxical as the performances themselves.

Identity was the intended theme, the thread connecting everything in the Hatch programme since that first sunny Saturday on Wellington Circus, and here we now were, as the circle closed, in an exactly reversed situation: one that might just have easily decimated the first weekend and blessed the last. He we were, drinking hot coffee in damp clothes and marvelling at the force and consistency of the downpour. It came to seem almost inevitable, somehow, as though it had been engineered, an accidental ‘performance-y’ situation expressly designed to contrast with the opening weekend’s sunshine and smooth running.

I started to make my back through the deluge, feet getting soaked by the rivulets of water running down every pavement between the Playhouse and Market Square. It seemed entirely fitting to spot an illuminated billboard emblazoned on the side of an Angel Row bus-shelter with a near life-size canary yellow lifejacket on it, as though daring me to think I might need one just like it before I made it home. This is exactly the sort of thing a Hatch performance might do, I was thinking: slot something unlikely but appropriate into a place you wouldn’t have expected to see it. To this extent, missing out on Opening Hours II turned out to be almost as much of an experience as seeing it might have been had the weather been different.

Hatch at NEAT11: Hunt & Darton/Leentje Van De Cruys: From Rosettes and Rocinante to Ponies and Polos

After Thursday evening’s performance of Tourist and Gabriele Reuter’s reshuffling of the identity concept that has underpinned Hatch: NEAT so far, the final Saturday moved us away from the national and cultural identifications that had informed such pieces as Krissi Musiol’s Sugar Statues and 30 Bird Productions’ Poland 3 Iran 2 to far more personal kinds of belonging and alienation. To be specific, we had a double bill of performances in which women identified themselves with horses to look forward to, as Hunt & Darton’s Break Your Own Pony shared the Playhouse rehearsal studio stage with Leentje Van De Cruys’ Horse.

Of course, there’s nothing especially novel about female artists taking horses as subject matter. The title poem of Sylvia Plath’s posthumous collection Ariel was about the sense of dangerous freedom engendered by riding a horse, while Patti Smith’s 1976 debut LP (Horses, naturally) featured a long title track in which successive waves of ‘white shining horses…with their noses in flames’ appear to symbolise a kind of visionary ecstasy that overwhelms the song’s narrator. The association isn’t just made by female artists, either: Peter Schaffer’s 1973 play Equus centres on the relationship between a psychiatrist and a disturbed young man who blinds a stable full of horses out of a religiously-inspired fear of their connection with female sexuality and power.

So, not putting too fine a point on it, women and horses have form, artistically speaking. Where some examples of the identification are intense and archetypal, though, the first piece on show this afternoon – the live art duo Hunt & Darton’s Break Your Own Pony – takes a far lighter and much less reverent approach to its subject in a series of vignettes which sees the two performers (Holly Darton and Rachel Dobbs) acting out a series of alternatively surreal and silly skits playing around with the ways in which women and horses find a kind of cultural and emotional common ground.

Scripted as a list of ‘actions’, the various parts of Break Your Own Pony are like the lessons of a riding school tutor, with the duo offering a series of brief demonstrations as we work our way through the options. Some use puns (‘Whore/See’), some ridicule the identification of female sexuality and horses by miming horse-riding as a kind of ludicrous booty-shake, some drag half the audience onstage to walk and trot them round in circles onstage while the theme from the 70s TV series Black Beauty blares out. The duo leap onto tables and hold convoluted poses, perform synchronised gurning sessions, hand out torches and ask audience members to spotlight their George Stubbs Whistlejacket sweatshirts as they scuttle across the stage like moving targets on a fairground stall.

Pretty much every horsey cliche you might think of was slotted in somewhere: clip-clopping coconut shells, polos, carrots and rosettes. Miniature jumps are set up on the stage. Chairs have stirrups, TV shows like Rawhide and The Horse of the Year Show get name-checks. A lot of it reminded me of the horsey bits in Smack The Pony where Sally Phillips or Doon Mackichan would move from being sophisticated career woman bemoaning the immaturity of men before suddenly switching to being six year olds cantering round pretend show-jumping courses, neighing, snorting and giving themselves four faults. In other words, Hunt & Darton’s piece didn’t take itself too seriously and didn’t outstay its welcome.

The second piece, Leentje Van De Cruys’ Horse, was a rather different take on the idea, as a woman, naked but for a pair of red high-heeled shoes and a static but oddly expressive horse’s head mask, appeared on the stage and began to tell us her story. She is a horse, as we can see for ourselves, she begins, but the problem she has is that – while she appears to be a young foal with sleek muscles and a shiny black nose - in fact she believes herself to really be a saggy old mare: and not just any saggy old mare, either, but Don Quixote’s faithful but decrepit steed, Rocinante, as ridden by the delusional knight in Miguel de Cervantes’ great two volume satirical-chivalric novel completed in 1615.

Van De Cruys takes this rather bizarre concept and runs with it, allowing the central thread to accumulate resonances in an unforced way as it goes. The superficial youthful appearance in contrast to the ‘real’ old nag self of Rocinante brings ideas of female body image into play, and the broader story – in which, just to compound her main difficulties, our narrator is also ill at ease in the company of horses, and prefers the human society of the pub, where no-one can get past the fact that she’s a horse who can talk and read for long enough to actually listen to anything she has to say – touches on many ideas, not least those of acceptance and the experience of being an outsider in a culture that isn’t your own.

The sense of Van De Cruys’ alienation from herself is reinforced by the practical set-up, where she speaks through a microphone inside the mask that creates a slight echo and displaces the voice from the body in front of us: her words are amplified through speakers rather than heard coming from her own mouth. At first, it wasn’t entirely clear what the nudity added to the piece, but when a later section takes Van De Cruys into the audience to seek acceptance and understanding it’s obvious that the self-consciousness and mild embarassment her nudity generates is crucial to the effect she’s creating. Were she clothed or in costume, the audience could far more easily appear to accept her for what she is.

By the conclusion, she’s managed to generate a strangely plausible sense of connection with an audience that can’t quite understand her and remains uneasy in her presence, but is prepared to listen to what she has to say for as long as she is willing to confide it. It’s this ability to combine a genuine undercurrent of unease with a gradual acceptance that really underscores the points that Horse sets out to make. It’s a difficult piece to summarise without making those points sound far more bluntly made than they were, but by the time Van De Cruys turns from the microphone and disappears behind a backstage curtain, it’s clear that however extreme her own confusions might be, they’ve illuminated something far more universally human than her own very particular dysfunction.

One reference the show didn’t make directly is to the final chapters of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, where Swift’s hero, Lemuel Gulliver, finds himself in a land peopled by a race of highly civilised horses, the Houyhnhnms, and a barbaric human tribe called the Yahoos. By identifying so strongly with the horses during his stay, Gulliver finds that on his return to England he is forced to become a recluse, no longer able to bear human company, and spends his days in his own stables. It’s not clear whether Van De Cruys has consciously made Horse as an inversion of the same idea, albeit with a less biting mode of satire in play, or whether the allusion to Swift’s 1726 novel is merely coincidental. Either way, the relationship is notable and adds another facet to an already layered performance.

Hatch at NEAT11: Reshuffling The Deck Of Identity Cards: Gabriele Reuter’s Tourist

It probably says a lot about the nature of Hatch that tonight marked a genuine first for the organisation: a conventional hour long performance that took place, by itself, on a stage area inside a regular performance venue. For most people this would be entirely unexceptional but for Hatch it’s actually something of a daring experiment. Clearly, as we pass the halfway point in the Hatch: NEAT programme, it’s time to shake things up a bit.

That shake-up encompassed more than just the presentation, too, since tonight’s offering, Gabriele Reuter‘s Tourist, not only introduced us to the cover star whose image had already become very familiar from the Hatch: NEAT flyers handed out at previous events, but also played a few games with definitions of identity itself, the theme that had threaded all those earlier events together.

Identity here is not about personal grounding in a particular culture or language but inhabiting stereotypes of various kinds. After beginning with a gust of wind, a flurry of snow and the appearance of a baffled arctic explorer on the stage, who looks around, then goes back behind the screen, three women emerge, each dressed in black trousers and vest, the generic uniform of contemporary dance: a uniform that erases the international make-up of most dance companies and reduces each member to a body and a series of movements. 

This means that in most productions, the fact that four identically dressed dancers might be German, Italian, British (or even from Mars) is rendered irrelevant. In Tourist, that tendency is put at the centre as three women attempt to communicate with each other through mimed movement and pre-linguistic sounds: they mime building obstacles to perform around, whimper, mimic drips of water or ticking clocks. Identity becomes the way all three are strangers on this stage and to one another.

This mimed sequence gives way to another gust of wind, sending all three tumbling offstage only to re-emerge as three characters plucked straight from a Boy’s Own annual or a 1940s Abbott & Costello comedy: a parachutist, a desert soldier and that arctic explorer we’d seen at the beginning (interestingly, the costumes suggest a link with some of Chris Dobrowolski‘s old toys, as seen during Poland 3 Iran 2). Now they begin to speak, to the audience and to one another, but while the language has all the form of speech there’s none of the content. We hear the emphasis and inflections, even the accents, but the actual words make no sense.

Within this framework, the characters change identities.  Jane Leaney’s female desert soldier disappears and then returns as Hetain Patel, while Julieta Figueroa’s Elvis-approximating arctic explorer becomes a kind of chorus, stripped of her costume. Reuter drags her silk parachute behind her like a bridal train but later returns to her neutral role as a generic dancer. While these multiple identities shift and slip, a series of broad, gently comic routines unfolds, often rooted (perhaps the anachronistic costumes allude to this?) in silent-era film comedy.

It’s certainly thoughtfully constructed, and there are moments when the light tone deepens a little, as in the closing sequence, where language finally becomes legible and a description of the performance’s location begins with the backstage area, moves outside the building, through Broadmarsh Centre, circles around the city and gradually – passing between the voices of all four performers – moves off into the countryside before telling a story about a receptionist, ‘working late in a grey office block with lots of windows on the edge of a village’ as she goes up in an elevator, along a corridor, then enters a room… 

Just as we reach what appears to be the beginning of this story, the performance concludes, having made its way from mime to language, broad stereotypes to the single defined character of that receptionist: and likewise from the alien space of the empty stage to the tentative beginnings of a different kind of performance altogether. The insubstantial, sketchy feel implicit throughout Tourist is a conceptual plus, seeming to reflect the way we can often find ourselves drifting as we tentatively seek anchors in strange locations, but also a quality that excludes much potential for strong investment in its characters and scenarios.

Yet it’s also in the nature of Tourist to change those characters from one show to the next, always adding a guest performer from the city it’s being presented in, and changing its details to fit each new set of circumstances. In this sense, it’s a very deliberately tentative and uncertain performance, and one that perfectly fits the restless, provisional ethos of Hatch. With the final weekend coming up (including a horsey double-bill at the Playhouse and a return to Wellington Circus) I like to think of Tourist as a gentle breeze reshuffling the Hatch: Neat deck of identity cards to ensure things can go anywhere from here.

Hatch at NEAT11: 30 Bird Productions/Gareth Morgan: Live Action From The City Ground

The third instalment of the Hatch: NEAT programme picked up on fragments from both its predecessors, with 30 Bird Productions promising Poland 3 Iran 2, a show that made an informal connection between Chris Dobrowolski‘s Polish father and Krissi Musiol‘s grandfather (as evoked by Sugar Statues at the Polish Eagle Club last week) while the more general role played in tonight’s session by football seemed to echo something of Medium Rare’s abstract PE sessions on Wellington Circus during the opening weekend. 

The emphasis on football as a thread through tonight’s Hatch had me slightly concerned, if I’m honest. After all, as a British-born working-class male who has successfully managed to achieve the near-impossible and avoid any real contact with ‘the beautiful game’ for most of his adult life, even a few seconds of crowd chanting in the background of a Match of the Day trailer on the TV can see me reaching for the remote with a reaction speed that startles the cat. So it seemed an ominous start when I boarded the Hatch coach and realised Nottingham Forest’s 1978 anthem We’ve Got The Whole World In Our Hands was playing at a fair level of volume, on a loop. 

Luckily the sound of Paper Lace and the 1978 Forest squad soon faded to be replaced with Gareth Morgan’s Births, Deaths & Marriages, a rambling but likeable account of the author’s long and accidental relationship with Nottingham Forest Football Club. While the bus took in some of the key locations from Morgan’s story – the house he grew up in at Elmswood Gardens in Sherwood, the City Registry Office on Shakespeare Street that his father found closed one day in 1988 and the City Ground itself, our final destination - Morgan’s stand-in for the day, Richie Garton, did his best to cope with a challenging script.

The tangle was partly due to Morgan’s absence, since the actual subject of the autobiography was in China: apparently Morgan had committed himself to reciting the tour script to a no doubt bemused audience in Kowloon at the precise time we were hearing it, which in China meant he was performing at 1.30am on Wednesday morning. This left Garton to cope not only with the narration of a rather densely layered story, which demanded the bus arrive at certain locations as we hit exact moments in the tale, but also with making sure we knew which parts of the narration were being related exactly as written by Morgan, and which were the improvisations of Garton himself. 

But whatever confusions arose in the convoluted set-up, Births, Deaths & Marriages was in essence a simple and sweet natured tribute to a football-mad father, who had managed (thanks to that fatefully closed registry office in 1988) to register his son as a Nottingham Forest Supporter a full week or two before his birth had been legally recorded: as Morgan saw it, this technicality meant he’d been a Forest fan longer than he’d been officially alive and Garton handed round copies of the birth certificate and photographs of Morgan’s father holding his newborn son – wrapped snugly in a Forest blanket, naturally - to illustrate his case.

It may have been a less than polished presentation in many ways but at its heart was a touching emotional honesty and a powerful sense that football is just one of the many things British men use to communicate and express affection, in place of actually communicating or expressing affection. As Morgan’s script wondered, while our coach pulled through the gates of the City Ground and passed a sign reading Home Of True Reds, “if I had ever talked about feelings with him, would he still have been my father?”.

This shift between football and family history, and Morgan’s own comments on club affiliation as a kind of cultural identity, led neatly into the concerns of tonight’s main attraction, the two-man show of 30 Bird Productions’ Poland 3 Iran 2. With Mehrdad Seyf and Chris Dobrowolski taking their shared fascination with a 1978 match between Iran and Poland as a starting point, the football quickly receded to being a peg for a wide-ranging series of anecdotes, histories, comic digressions, coming of age stories and whatever else seemed to fit, all illustrated with slides, photographs and snippets of blurry YouTube footage from the 1978 game.

Anyone who saw either part of Dobrowolski’s performance lecture at Hatch: It’s About Time  last year will know the man can talk engagingly and at length, but Seyf managed to hold his own and the two passed the reins of the performance back and forth as they went, building a loosely structured double narrative in which Seyf’s family history – that of Iranian Communists and progressives finding their way between the Second World War, the Shah and the Islamic State under Khomeini and Ahmadinejad – criss-crossed with Dobrowolski’s account of his father’s migrations from Stalin’s prison camps by way of the Caspian Sea to fighting with the Free Polish Army and finally settling in Essex to work (and learn English) on building sites.

These narratives connected directly in places: as Dobrowolski’s father made his way to the UK his unit stayed briefly in Iran, where Seyf’s father was a key figure in the local Communist Party. But the key event remained the one that first brought the two narratives together, the shared experience of watching, on televisions in very different places, that 1978 Olympic staging of a Poland-Iran football game. Within this framework both Dobrowolski and Seyf take any number of digressions, from Seyf’s mother’s attempts to reconcile her Communism with a love of Humphrey Bogart, Rita Hayworth and Hollywood films to his own tendency to miss major historical events by being ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’ – a place that often turned out to be the beach.

Dobrowolski, too, misses out on such momentous events as the Solidarity strikes of 1980 by way of being in Poland (with its news blackouts) but preoccupied with a family visit to relatives, where he insists, instead of taking part in the unfolding of history, on day trips to Hitler’s bunker and Auschwitz, where he finds one of the least appropriate souvenirs imaginable: a candy-coloured Holocaust Viewmaster. The shifts between light and dark, sport and politics, family anecdote and the sweep of history, are deftly handled, and while the structure doesn’t follow that of the football match (there’s no half time, no goals or attempts to win possession of the performance) there is something here that echoes match tactics.

As the two pass the spotlight back and forth, just as team-players keep the ball moving on a pitch, Poland 3 Iran 2 becomes not so much Poland versus Iran as both teams deciding to ignore the score completely and just enjoy the game for its own sake, like kids having a kickabout on a bit of wasteground with coats for goalposts. The resulting show more closely resembles a two-handed lecture or stand-up routine than a conventional theatre piece but it holds our attention to the final exchange of shirts, and leads me to wonder how Gabriele Reuter’s Tourist, on at Nottingham Contemporary on Thursday, will further complicate the threads of that broader theme of ‘identity’ we’ve seen developing so far.

Hatch at NEAT11: Krissi Musiol and Jenna Finch: The Road To Polish Nottingham

What’s the etiquette when you’re about to board a bus and a Roswell escapee holds out a tray of Polish chrusciki-style sweets, then indicates you try one? As in most situations where cakes or sweets are offered, the answer, of course, is to do exactly as you’re told in the interests of good manners and to help avoid any potential intergalactic diplomatic incidents that might otherwise arise. This isn’t the sort of dilemma you’re usually faced with on a sunny Thursday evening so it must be something to do with Hatch, as it makes its way from the very British identities explored by Medium Rare and Zoo Indigo on Wellington Circus last weekend to another world, this time that of Polish Nottingham.

This was why we were boarding a coach that would be taking us from the site of last weekend’s performances to the Polish Eagle Club in Sherwood, via a convoluted route designed to take us past as many Polish clubs, shops and other Poland-related locations in the city as possible. As we travelled, a guided tour under the title Are We Nearly There Yet? by that unmasked extraterrestrial (otherwise known as performance artist Jenna Finch, literalising Czeslaw Milosz’s ideas about the human condition as a state of being alien) would give us a condensed history of Poland with a musical score provided by ourselves on an array of borrowed instruments. As the cymbals, recorders, toy guitars, cowbells, squeaky toys and penny whistles made their way down the aisle, the rules of the performance were explained.

These were simple enough. With each instrument came a single word, and whenever that word was spoken by our tour guide we were to make a ‘sharp brief sound’ with whatever instrument we had. As the bus pulled away from the kerb and headed out through the Nottingham streets I had a set of maracas and the word ‘Poland’ in my hand. At first there was some confusion: did ‘Poland’ mean I should make my noise for ‘Polish’ as well or just stick to the letter of the script? As with that chrusciki-style snack (as it turned out, a cone of biscuit coated in white candy with a hyper-sweet soft filling) it seemed best to do as instructed: I restricted my maraca-shaking to the naming of the country itself and left those things defined by being part of it to themselves.

The result was a slightly chaotic mix of information and absurdity as such key events as the tenth century formation of the first Kingdom of Poland under Mieszko I or the creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the Union of Lublin in 1569 were greeted by a cacophany of noises. The contrast of dark episodes of war and revolution with squeaks, bangs, rattles and whistles made for an entertaining journey, though the echoes of Milosz were only occasionally strong, as when Finch’s account of the destruction of Warsaw during World War Two coincided with our passing a Polish delicatessen called Warsawa and brought Milosz’s lines from ‘The City’ to mind (“The terror and sweetness of a final dissolution./Let the first bombs fall without delay”) or when the sunlight and spectacle of the streets evoked the conclusion of ’1913′:

What strange costumes, how strange the street is,
And I myself unable to speak of what I know.
No lesson for the living can be drawn from it.
I closed my eyes and my face felt the sun…

It seemed Are We Nearly There Yet? was intent on alienating the history being recited from those hearing it, the constant raucous interruptions acting like the noise of the present day as it prevents us properly considering the past. Nothing - whether the Holocaust, Katyn or the levelling of Warsaw – could really affect us in these conditions or even be properly heard. Perhaps it was a microcosm of the media noise of the twenty-first century or the kind of meaningless cosmic joke that seems to haunt so much of Milosz’s poetry? Whatever the intentions, the Polish vodka shots that greeted us on arrival at our destination were a fine signing-off and a perfect welcome to the surroundings of the Polish Eagle Club with their strangely timeless mid-Century, middle-European atmosphere.  

This is also a place that has deep roots in the city, a history that turned out to have some very direct links with Krissi Musiol’s Sugar Statues. There was something wonderfully appropriate about this performance’s arrival here, as the grandfather at the heart of her piece - a man named Kazmierz Kuzminski – was, it seems, personally responsible for the striking design of the nearby Church of Our Lady of Czestochowa (Kościół Matki Boskiej Częstochowskiej) to which the Eagle Club is directly linked. That personal connection and interplay between location and piece no doubt heightened the impact of Musiol’s performance but in truth this was a show that would have gripped and felt emotional even in a branch of Argos or a Post Office queue: the way its language, movement, visuals and content were integrated created something simultaneously richly-layered and spare, intensely plausible yet built on a single family’s histories and myths.

From the moment when Musiol first appears on the white stage in a bridal gown, “a girl in a rotten grey dress searching for a rotten grey man”, the blend of truth and fiction, folklore and history, is seamlessly achieved. As the grandfather loses words, one by one, he turns to a notebook to communicate anything from a desire for bread rolls to such poetic phrases as “we mourned the end of autumn”. As Musiol spins her various threads – ranging from accounts of brutal killings in concentration camps to accounts of her grandfather’s victory over a dragon, from her own journeys through middle-European cities to baking the cakes that come to represent those cities as they are lost to war, heartbreak and hangovers – the effect seems to share territory with writers like Bruno Schulz, whose Street of Crocodiles contains much in a similar vein to Musiol’s own merging of history and folklore, personal and objective truth. 

In the title chapter of Street of Crocodiles, Schulz describes a map of a city “made in the style of baroque panoramas [where] the area of the Street of Crocodiles shone with the empty whiteness that usually marks polar regions or unexplored countries of which almost nothing is known”. In Musiol’s performance that whiteness – from the bridal dress to the ubiquitous icing-sugar with which she endeavours to fill the cracks in her own and her grandfather’s history – seems to carry a similar set of meanings. By the conclusion, with Musiol’s admission that even the true parts of her story ‘didn’t happen’ (a move that is itself as fictive as the fiction it purports to expose) we’ve found ourselves deep in territory where all memory is potentially treacherous, all fiction crystallised around kernels of  truth.

From Polish-language songs describing the baking of sweet cakes to accounts of entire cities “taken apart with the bare eyes” of Soviet and German armies, from promises between a father and daughter to neither die nor marry to accounts of the many ways in which a place might be ‘lost’, Musiol takes us through a playful but emotional labyrinth built from the material of personal and cultural identity. After her performance, the stage is littered with broken cakes, jars of sugar representing statues, a porcelain bridal couple buried in yet more sugar and the faint traces of Musiol’s dress where its hem has dragged back and forth through the branches of a sugar tree sketched on the ground. We’ll be returning to the question of Polish identity on Tuesday evening, when Chris Dobrowolski will put his in opposition to Mehrdad Seyf’s Iranian loyalties over a 1976 Poland-Iran Olympic football match. However that play-off goes, Musiol’s performance has ensured there’ll be some high expectations.

Hatch at NEAT11: Zoo Indigo/Medium Rare: Opening Hours (I)

While Hatch is straying from its usual operating principle of gathering a range of work loosely connected by a theme into one time and location during NEAT11, that doesn’t mean there isn’t continuity with that inclination in the Hatch: NEAT programme. With the linking theme over the fortnight being ‘identity’, the opening weekend’s performances – from Medium Rare and Zoo Indigo – seemed to begin very much at home, with both companies exploring not only aspects of a very British kind of identity, but linking them to the convoluted history of a circular patch of ground known as Wellington Circus, named after the architect of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Formerly a burial ground, and in the 19th and early 20th centuries a gathering point for nannies working in the large households of The Park to gossip and exercise their small charges, more recently the site – located next to Anish Kapoor’s Sky Mirror and Nottingham Playhouse – has been fenced in by railings and padlocked against public intrusions. 

In Medium Rare’s performance on Saturday, the five members of the company dressed in their best PE Teacher outfits and led small groups into one of three exercise routines. Whistles were blown, we were ordered into single file and marched across the green, where we were obliged to take part in a series of mildly taxing physical exercises. The first, “I hope in this time we’ve had together you have realised that we can co-operate…and make something that is really nice”, took its cues  from management training days as we were put through our paces, playing catch with satsumas, while seated in a circle of mismatched chairs. The distance of each throw was gradually extended and the pace of the game became increasingly demanding as it went on: so much so that at one point the satsuma split and began to leak juice.

The second section, “Whatever your squad does, it needs to be uniform”, led us into a different circle where we were coaxed sternly through a series of synchronised swimming positions in the open air. As we knelt, turned, raised arms, pointed toes, formed Busby Berkeley circles of limbs and much else besides, the regimentation involved began to raise questions: was this healthy outdoor co-operation or something more sinister and controlling? I had images in my mind of the mass choreographed displays so beloved of totalitarian states and participatory arts and sports events.

By the time the whistle called us back into single file,  the question of what distance there might actually be between a military drill and a school P.E. lesson, a Nuremberg Rally and an Olympics opening ceremony, was beginning to form itself quite clearly. The third part - “[Team name] x 2 rah, rah, rah (while clapping)” - required us to kneel on small lily-pad shaped circles of foam placed at points on a Baseball Diamond and try to follow the complex but purposeless sequence of marking and standing positions being played out around and behind us. By now, the link being made between sports, regimentation and blind obedience to the authority of a uniform, a whistle and a confidently issued order seemed to be crystal clear. 

But perhaps that was just me. As someone who used to skip P.E. lessons at school and spend those dreaded double periods in the library or a side-room in the art block (thanks to a sympathetic art teacher) I might have been biased all along. Others might have come away with fond memories of exercise and the outdoors, or glimpsed a benign model for co-operative living, an antidote to individualism, in these healthy pastimes. Even so, it’s hard to deny that we live in a culture that invests social and national identity in its sports, measuring dominance and cohesion in Olympic Medals and shared cheering rather than body-counts on the battlefields of Europe, as Wellington did. Perhaps the question is whether that’s a permanent improvement or merely a way of keeping the embers of something more dangerous smouldering away beneath the civilised surface? 

Zoo Indigo’s performance on the Sunday evening raised similar questions from a different angle. The traditional fertility rite of the Maypole Dance was here artificially stretched out into a two hour endurance test that saw the participants slowly circling the green, over and over again, each lost in a private and inaudible world as they danced to looped replays of their own favourite songs. Where Medium Rare whistled and cajoled individuals into undifferentiated groups, Zoo Indigo seemed to be caging participants in what was once a joyously collective endeavour inside their individual bubbles.

As the maypole dance went doggedly but colourfully on, we were invited to take a pram around a circular path, listen to speculation about the dancers’ thoughts and facts about the area’s layered history. We were invited to plant and water a seed. We could listen to ipods and match the number of each song to that on the shirt of one of the dancers: the four or five ‘favourite songs’ I tried out in this way spanned a broad range, from Fatboy Slim-style Big Beat to ‘hang on in there’ power balladry and no particular clues as to who might have chosen what were evident until the numbers were matched and it became possible to read the song we heard into the rhythm of someone’s movements. 

In fact, given the circular theme in both performances and the Wellington Circus location itself, I’d like to imagine someone had chosen one of the many versions of Michel Legrand’s Windmills of Your Mind  (“…like a circle in a circle, like a wheel within a wheel…”) but I heard no evidence that anyone actually had. Instead, as each dancer trudged around the imperceptibly diminishing circle, nodding their heads or pacing steps to the different beats of their own private soundtracks, I was reminded of old engravings of 19th century convicts circling prison yards, or those 1930s dance marathons that offered cash prizes to whichever couple could remain standing longest.  

As the ribbons plaited the pole through the final 30 minutes or so, the dancers were drawn ever closer together, yet always remained isolated from one-another, adrift from the spectacle they were part of. The maypole and its ancient links with fertility and communal celebration seemed both intact and diminished. Perhaps the pram echoed this link to fertility as well as the ground’s history as a recreational area for nannies, in much the same way that the inscribed markers placed over the planted seeds echoed the former burial ground reputed to still be present under our feet.

At the end of the weekend, the dual nature of current British identity – its collective and individualistic sides, its sinister and celebratory sides – seemed to be floating in the air, somewhere, so it’ll be interesting to see how these two performances coincide when both companies return to the same site on June 12, closing the circle of the Hatch: NEAT programme after its forthcoming diversions through Poland, Iran, Germany and many other places with connections to Nottingham. That circle’s next segment will be sketched in with linked performances from Jenna Finch and Krissi Musiol as we head from Wellington Circus to the Polish Eagle Social Club in Sherwood on Thursday evening.

Hatch: Across reviewed and discussed in Incwriters

“A free street party or unique never-to-be-repeated event.”

Great article at Incwriters by Wayne Burrows (of Staple Magazine), looking at how some of the characteristics of Hatch could be applied to publishing and spoken word events (we’re definitely still interested in word-speaking artists ourselves, mind). If you don’t want to read it at the Incwriters site, the full text is beneath the jump. Make sure you read it somewhere though; we think it’s great (but then it is quite complimentary…)

Where Have You Hatched?

Here is the completed version of The Accidental Animator’s stop-motion film, made live at Lee Rosy’s tea shop as part of Hatch: Abroad. It stars members of the audience – were you one of them?

Hatch speaks!

Click here to listen to an audio interview with Michael and Nathan talking to Jennie Syson at Nottingham Visual Arts about Hatch: Abroad and Hatch in general.

(sound only kicks in after about 30 seconds, so watch out for that)

What Would You Like to See at Hatch?

‘What would you like to see at Hatch in the future?’ is a question we’ve been asking audiences.

Most people say ‘surprise me’, or more bluntly ‘you want me to do your job for you?’ Some people say ‘me!’ which is really nice (especially if they also remember to tell us who they are and how to contact them…)

There are a few more specific suggestions though, some of which include:

• more music
• more ‘performance art’
• artistic nudity
• children’s games
• some semblance of realism
• more/less nakedness
• more open mic/comedy stuff
• maybe a poetry night
• Ashley
• even more nudity
• more sexy policemen

So if you’re a musical, poetic, funny, naked policeman who likes to surprise people and play children’s games, you could be just the sort of person our audience are looking for. On the other hand, if there’s something you’d like to see at a Hatch event (or you know who Ashley is), please tell us.