The BE in the title stands for Birmingham and Europe, and the links forged have undoubtedly been strong in the annual Midlands festival that brings together daring work from emerging UK and European theatre-makers. Taking some of this work out on tour is more problematic, in part because “the best” of something tends to make you ponder what “the worst” might look like too.
More importantly, despite their potential individual strengths, this trio of brief shows doesn’t feel like a programme that has been curated with an eye to how the pieces inform each other. It’s a mixed bag, and even the interval meal – such a feature of the Birmingham festival – doesn’t work in the canteen situation of the Barbican. It needs to be properly communal if it’s really going to bring audiences and artists together.
Best of the three pieces is Milán Újvári’s From the Waltz to the Mambo by Radioballet, a 10-minute performance where Újvári’s movement always works against a found text taken from a 1960s ballroom dance manual promoting “grace, taste and professionalism”. It’s a snippet, but a neatly packaged, beautifully performed one that suggests that it’s better to throw away the manual and respond to Pina Bausch’s cry: “Dance, dance, or we are lost.”
Julia Schwarzbach’s Loops and Breaks requires the participation of the audience members, who are each given instructions on how they must individually intervene to create the performance. A neat idea, but it’s not enhanced by the Pit seating arrangement, and the underlying structure isn’t robust enough to give meaning to the chaos. Waiting, created by Mokhallad Rasem, uses projections on torn sheets to explore what it means to wait. The strongest moment comes when a refugee talks of waiting two years for the papers that never materialise. The gaps between the between the torn sheets creates a jagged scar across his face, his life.
