Review: Women of Lockerbie

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By Lucía Camargo Rojas

“Women of Lockerbie” is a moving play that deals with the psychological effects of a tragedy. Devorah Brevoort’s script, which hinges on the 1988 crash of Pan Am Flight 103 in Lockerbie, Scotland, tells the story of fictional characters whose grief for the loss of a loved one is transformative.

The play is being performed at the Chapel Theater by the College of Charleston Department of Theater and Dance as part of the Piccolo Spoleto Festival.

Madeline (Ryan Gunning) and Bill Livingston (Peter Spearman) are a couple from New Jersey who travel to Scotland seven years after the crash, hoping to find some belongings of their son, Adam. While the mother looks fiercely for her son’s remains, the father meets a group of women who wants to persuade U.S. government official George Jones (Bronson Taylor) not to burn the passenger’s clothing, sealed in bags.

At the beginning, the story’s pace is a bit slow, with the main characters not getting as much attention as, for example, a scene-stealing Scottish woman with a walking stick. Gradually, though, Madeline, an unstable woman unable to deal with her grief, becomes the center of the story.

Even though Gunning is a young woman, she convincingly portrays a mature mother, and among her finest moments is the delicate way she describes the realization that her son was on the plane.

Indeed, this vibrant role overshadowed that of her husband. One would expect a more dramatic explosion from a father who has hidden his feelings for so many years. Simultaneously, the character of Olive Allison (Brenna McNamara) is quite rigid, although she seems much more vivid when it becomes evident that she has also been affected by the crash.

What is remarkable about this play is the ability to depict the different aspects of grief: fault (“Why did I tell him to come for Christmas?”), anxiety, frustration (“Why did this happen to me?”) and hate, to the point that the audience shares the distress of the characters. The simple stage helps to create a mournful and respectful environment reinforced by a chorus that highlights the pain and simultaneously gives rhythm to the plot.

Even though Brevoort at times over-explains the characters’ pain, she does succeed in showing their need to achieve peace of mind.

The strength of “Women of Lockerbie” is its ability to describe suffering in a way that goes beyond a particular tragedy and applies to any calamity, and also the way it highlights the difficulty of true forgiveness.

With such dramatic scenes, several moments — featuring the chorus; Taylor’s strong performance; Allyson Musmeci’s funny portrayal of Hattie, who works for the U.S official; and especially a scene of the women washing the clothes — are a necessary relief for an audience seeking a similar serenity as the characters.

Published in The Post and Courier on May 27, 2013

Moveable sculpture: Handspring Puppet Company and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’

Image by Simon Annand published in The Post and Courier

By Lucía Camargo Rojas

Handspring Puppet Company has made puppet horses strong enough for men to ride, puppets that fight apartheid in South Africa and much more.

For Spoleto Festival USA, the company will exhibit its latest invention: puppets that recite Shakespeare. They will add a magical element to a fantastical production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the result of a collaboration between Handspring and the venerable Bristol Old Vic company.

“In ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ everything from the floor goes up and sometimes comes alive,” Handspring Executive Producer Basil Jones said. “There is kind of magic in all the objects.”

Magic is central to the South African company’s artistic mission: Objects have the right to live.
“The struggle of the puppet is to live; otherwise, it is always death, and to give it life is the job of the puppeteer,” said Adrian Kohler, Handspring’s artistic director.

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is the first collaboration between Handspring and Bristol Old Vic since their Tony Award-winning “War Horse.”

The Shakespeare play is a new challenge for a puppet company that has helped integrate puppetry into the theater mainstream.

In this adaptation, Handspring experimented with figures they hadn’t made before: more than 20 carefully carved puppets from small birds to enormous masks.

The company is fearless and imaginative, showing the influence of Western Africa in its work, according to Mervyn Millar, author of “The Horse’s Mouth: Staging Morpurgo’s ‘War Horse.’ ”

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is also funny, Kohler said.

“All our plays have been a little bit serious, from political plays to opera,” he said. “We are not great at being comedians, but in Shakespeare’s play, we have broken the mold. There are some wonderful clowns, and it is very funny.”

Jones and Kohler founded Handspring in 1981. They met 10 years before, when they were studying sculpture at the University of Capetown.

Kohler grew up in a house that had a little theater in the garage, he said. His mother was an art teacher who encouraged him to make and perform with puppets. Their influence was evident in his artwork.

Jones, instead, wasn’t very interested in puppets until he graduated and went to live with Kohler in Botswana. During one trip to South Africa, Kohler found some weird puppets. When Jones saw them, he fell in love with them. The mysterious objects had been made in Mali, a region of Africa with a rich puppetry tradition.

When Kohler suggested starting a puppet company, Jones saw the potential.

They began by developing a series of children’s plays but turned to adult audiences in 1985 with “Episodes of an Easter Rising,” a play about people joining the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

“We wanted to be taken seriously in the theater,” Kohler said. Puppetry is a powerful medium and certainly not only for children, he said.

In 1986, they moved to Johannesburg and met artist William Kentridge, who became the director of their next six productions. Four years later, after Nelson Mandela was released from prison and South Africa started to move toward democracy, it became possible for South African artists to perform overseas. With Kentridge, they performed in Germany, France, Czech Republic, U.S., England and Colombia.

Handspring still was characterized as a small company despite this growing success, but that changed in 2008, when it received a call from stage director Tom Morris, who then was working with the National Theater in London. He suggested creating puppets for a theater adaptation of a children’s novel about horses in World War I.

Kohler designed life-size puppet horses made with leather, aircraft and steel cables, and other material. It was the beginning of “War Horse,” a production that would win five Tony Awards in 2011, including Best Play, and enjoy successful runs around the world.

“When you are going into puppet theater, you aren’t expecting to have an international hit play in your hands,” Kohler said.

Now Handspring is in demand. Puppets are produced at a fast clip, and the staff has expanded from seven to 25. In 2010, Jones and Kohler created the nonprofit Handspring Trust for Puppetry Arts to identify and assist the next generation of puppet artists.

Millar said the company creates some of the most beautiful puppets in the world and has a quality of acting not easy to find.

“The level of subtlety that they give to a performance has changed what people expect from puppetry in theater,” Millar said. “They are always looking to make puppets do something people think puppets can’t do.”

Published in The Post and Courier on May 25, 2013

Uncaged: A Q&A with choreographer Mourad Merzouki

Image By Michael Cavalca published in The Post and Courier

By Briana Prevost and Lucía Camargo Rojas

In 2002, young dancers from the shantytowns of Brazil who had been discovered by a French choreographer, took to the Spoleto stage combining a mix of salsa, hip-hop and native capoeira movements into their choreography.

Mourad Merzouki, who has Algerian roots, started the all-male dance group several years earlier. It has since gone on to tour the world. At Spoleto again to perform for the first time in more than 10 years, the group is presenting a new production, “Correria/Agwa.”

In an email interview, Merzouki, the artistic director of Compagnie Kafig, discussed his dance background, his take on combining modern and traditional styles and his impression of the company he started.

Q: What do you remember the most about your last performance in Charleston?
A: We performed the show Dix Versions, I had a really good experience there.

Q: What made you write “Correria/Agwa”?
A: I wanted to tell a story on a universal theme, that means a lot to every people in every country. For Agwa, I wanted to work on a project which was not only linked to what we already know about Brazil, the favelas, etc. Water and running were very interesting to me because they concern dancers and also the rest of the world. In today’s society, we need to run, and water is a vital element.

Q: You started working in a circus and then became a hip-hop dancer. What are the similarities between circus and dance?
A: That is right, I first started with circus. I was an acrobat and I had a passion for performing arts. Hip-hop dance allowed me to bring both together. I also had a strong desire to share and introduce this form of art to the public.

Q: What does hip-hop have that other arts don’t?
A: Hip-hop dance is particularly interesting because it managed to shift from the streets to the stages, without being locked in one or the other. Both styles are developing and are complementary to each other, they still exchange a lot and dialogue together. For me, these two forms of expression are really different but equally important as sources of creativity, and I am still creating for both. In this way, hip-hop is very different from other dance traditions.

Q: What are the advantages and disadvantages of mixing different kinds of dancing and working with people with a variety of cultural backgrounds?
A: The advantages are that dance is a universal language, therefore we do not need words to understand each others. As far as dance is concerned, I only see advantages! Sometimes it becomes more complicated when we get into logistics, but I always find it interesting.

Q: What about the movements of capoeira urged you to include that type of dance in your routines?
A: In this piece, I did not particularly want to integrate capoeira or specific movements, I used the dancers’ vocabulary as a starting point, and, of course, we can felt some capoeira influences. But there are many other influences.

Q: First circus, then hip-hop, then samba, then capoeira. What’s next?
A: My approach is still to bring many different styles and artistic disciplines into hip-hop. I try to add circus, martial arts, visual arts and live music in most of my pieces. There are still martial arts aspects in street dance, it’s all connected. I am always imagining creations with an accent on openness to the world. I just ended a project with Taiwan, but it’s only the beginning. I hope I could have new projects with other countries, such as Japan, etc. I keep working on opening and sharing my way of dancing — hip-hop — to other styles and other cultures.

Q: Do you think the Brazilian dancers in the group have a sense of nationalism performing capoeira?
A: These dancers are very open-minded, curious of the rest of the world, and open-minded dancers. They don’t wonder about nationalism, on the contrary they’re eager to discover the world and they are very generous. Touring the world like they do is a wonderful and unique experience, and they are grateful for that.

Q: What types of cultural influences do you see that style of dance having not only in its country of origin, but also in the places the group has toured?
A: My work is deeply influenced by the artists I meet through my travels and the tours. But once the piece is created, it doesn’t change much, I try to stay as close as possible to the initial work.

Q: How was the experience of working with people who lived in the favelas?
A: I have been introduced to Brazilian dancers by Guy Darmet, who used to be the director of the Maison de la Danse in Lyon and lives between France and Brazil. He knew these dancers very well and as he has been following me for more than 20 years, he asked me to create a piece for them. These young dancers, mostly from Rio’s favelas, were dancing to express themselves, to exist, to survive ... the rhythm and the passion is really present within them. It really fascinated me and I decided to create the piece “Agwa” for them. When I first met these dancers, I really took their vocabulary as a starting point; I took their movements to create the piece. I also gave them “homework” and then my job was to connect the pieces and refine the whole choreography. For them, it is a very special experience because it totally changed their approach to dance. As they were initially dancing in the streets, they now became real professional dancers.

Q: Why “Kafig”? What does it mean?
A: In 1989, with a group of friends and dancers, we created the Company “Accrorap,” among them was Kader Attou, who is now the director of the Centre Choregraphique National of La Rochelle in France. After creating our piece “Kafig” in 1996, I wanted to put together my own project, more personal. This piece gave the name to my new company, Kafig which means “cage” in German and Arabic (in relation to the dancers’ backgrounds): the theme of this piece was about being locked up. We chose this theme because at the beginning, hip-hop was often locked up in one style and one specific representation. The point was to deliver the dance from this “cage,” to push it out of its boundaries.

Q: What are the characteristics of a performance made by Compagnie Kafig?
A: In my pieces, I try to tell stories on universal themes, and topics that mean a lot to every people in every countries. I don’t necessarily want to deliver a particular message through all my creations. For example in my last piece, “Yo Gee Ti” that I made with five contemporary dancers from Taiwan and five hip-hop dancers from France, I worked on the theme of fiber, knitting and building fabrics as if we were “sewing the bodies,” but the point is really to share some poetry and emotions through the piece. The objective is also to spread this form of dance, to make it accessible and also to raise awareness in all audiences. I am always imagining creations with an accent on openness to the world. I keep working on opening and sharing my way of dancing, hip-hop, to other styles and other cultures.

Q: How do you go about choosing the music that’s used to choreograph the dances?
A: I choose music that inspires me, that calls to my mind and reminds me of interesting topics. Then I choose according to what I want to tell. In these pieces, I did not want to choose music that would match too much to their styles, I wanted to push out the boundaries through music and dance, by using different styles together.

Q: What should the audience of the Spoleto Festival 2013 expect from Compagnie Kafig’s return performance?
A: I hope they will spend a great moment of dance with the Brazilian troupe, and that this piece will bring them inspiration, motivation and the willingness to open themselves to the rest of the world.

Published in The Post and Courier on May 24, 2013