It Happens… explores the meeting point between body percussion and movement. In a mix of tap and contemporary, the performers work at times in unison and at times separately, using the body as their main instrument.

Rhythms come and go as sounds are transferred from hips to back and from hands to feet. There are some strong dramaturgical moments in the performance in which characters and situations begin to emerge from the sounds created by the body. The most interesting sequences are those that allow the same sound to travel, breaking and recreating the same tempo.

It Happens… has its gripping moments, but it would be interesting to see the company play more with situation, tonality and volume, changing the context of their sounds.

Big Beef Dance Company aims to make dance accessible to a wider audience, working with simple patterns and popular music. TAT (Together Alone Together) TAT TAT is a series of sketches that mixes comedy, dance and music to create a new context for contemporary dance – one that purportedly, can be understood by everyone.

The show is a big mix of pop culture, with dance ‘sampled’ from The Macarena, 5ive and that party classic, the ‘Chicken Dance’, all performed in white jumpsuits, and intertwined with knock knock jokes and Celine Dion sing-alongs. It certainly has energy and commitment from the performers, and, aside from its vague intentions and assumptions, it is entertaining at times.

Brought together under the theme of ‘co-existence’, half the material of the piece was apparently generated and learnt via video recording, but there seems to be a lot of unison and togetherness in the choreography, leaving the dramaturgy somewhat unclear.

With more clarity, TAT TAT TAT could be a humourous take on the more popular language of contemporary dance.

The movement in this piece is derives from an extraction of rhythms and structures in the poem may i feel said he , by ee cummings, aiming to translate poetry onstage. Beginning with a rhythm maintained by clapping, two female performers, Marie Chabert and Vera Tussing, delve into their movement, slowly building the poem alongside JS Rafaelli and Saul Eisenberg. At the end, all we hear is the poem, a dialogue between a man and a woman caught in a love affair.

May I is a witty description of a sexual act, and its patterns form the basis of the movement in the performance piece. The poem is characterized by some unique features, particularly the eight sets of parenthesis and hidden rhymes that are translated onstage through a sequence of movements that transforms as we get nearer to piecing the poem together.

In translating these poetic devices into movement is the potential for thematic collisions between the poem and the movement dramaturgy; inventing a language that neither poetry nor movement can speak on its own.

An intriguing exercise in movement, May I carried through a strong yet abstract relationship between the patterns and structures of the poem and its words, creating a language of simile onstage in the relationship between the two female performers.

Mass Exercise
With Nadia and Olga Sokolski

Devised and performed by Performance Klub Fiskulturnic
Concept, direction, performance: Olga: Lara Ritosa Roberts
Aristic collaboration, performance: Nadia: Ivana Peranic
www.fiskultura.com

Exploring the relationship between ideology and body culture, the piece takes its material from the archetypal Eastern European gymnasts of the 1970s. Based on Fiskultura, the theory and practice of physical culture practiced during Soviet communism, Nadia and Olga walk us through a series of warm-ups and simple exercises that eventually persuade us to join in the mass dance-exercise-celebration (and who cares what we’re celebrating?).

Olga (Lara Ritosa Roberts) is Nadia’s (Ivana Peranic) instructor. Using text based on speeches by the former Yugoslavian leader Tito, and sound from military parades and Ex- Yugoslavian music, Olga talks Nadia and us through the warm ups that progress into dance sequences. I am encouraged to wave a flag (red, white and blue, the former Yugoslavian flag) and, without even realising, I’m up on stage joining in some dance-celebration.

Based on a very simple progressive structure, packed with double meanings and two very well rounded characters, Mass Exercise is a piece that challenges the notion of identity and the embodiment of ideology. It alludes to a socialist realism that links body and ideology, transforming the body into a mechanism that can be owned and controlled.

The movements taken from Fiskultura pamphlets are simple, robotic, architectural and, well, educational. The dance the audience is invited to join in contains sequences of movement with names such as ‘propeller of change’, ‘greet the revolution’ and ‘fight the enemy’. It’s not only a look back into an archive of physical experience, but a satire of collective art (we are reminded during the performance that we are a community of comrades who wish to collectively create better art) explored through a physical text.

Vulnerasti
By Lo Commotion Dance Company

Four performers unfold the story of a relationship behind a photograph in this short dance piece. Intertwining monologue with dance against extracts from Dietrich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri, the piece explores the turmoil of a ravished heart.

Vulnerasti is the second part of Ad Cor (meaning ‘to the heart’) in Dietrich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri, and a biblical extract from the Song of Solomon. The lyrical and tragic atmosphere of the song is directly reflected in both the languid, fluid dancing and the very detailed description of the story and emotions behind the photograph.

Although beautiful to watch, Vulnerasti seems to follow a single line, despite the different textures of the spoken language and the effort of the skilled dancers. Tragedy is enforced in all the elements of the piece, and too much of the text is illustrated, leaving little for the audience to uncover. For this reason, Vulnerasti falls short of dramatic tension, leaving the mysteries of this relationship in the hands of the storyteller, not the minds of the audience.

After Cinderella
By Liz Chan and Daniel Weyman
(work in progress)

Inspired by the meeting point between fairytale and real life, After Cinderella is a short physical theatre duet exploring the world beyond the ‘happy-ending’.

Liz Chan and Daniel Weyman both performed in Cinderella at the Lyric Hammersmith, which inspired them to work on the ‘afterlife’ of the fairytale. The two performers work beautifully together. They demonstrate interconnectedness in their movements, and a dramaturgy to their synchronicity whereby each new sequence of movement alters the one before.

It’s riveting to watch two performers transform their bodies from raw material to dancing figures in a dark fantasy world. Repetition and deconstruction play key roles in this piece as the same movement sequence that opens the performance is re-enacted at the end. The difference is this time the two bodies are not separate, they work as a single entity.

There are a number of moments in the performance that have a dangerous but beautiful quality – shifting between violence and tenderness – and that is something I would like to see develop in establishing the stage language of a fairytale lost in its own future.

I’d also like to see the duo play more with the darker side of the happy ending, adding a wider range of movement and vigour between the two performers. As it stands, After Cinderella is a grippingly raw, physical exploration of fairytale.

Violet Smile
By Sweetshop Revolution
(work in progress)

A piece with a great sense of humour, Violet Smile is a physical monologue that explores the experiences of a waitress in Transylvania. The performer, Tamzen Moulding, plays with plates, ropes and sticks in an energetic performance that goes through the emotions of a vampire waiting for its prey, from lust and greed to desire and attack.

The piece integrates circus and movement with vigour and breadth. Tamzen arranges and re-arranges her plates, moves around them, climbs above them and balances her weight, skilfully descending in the space of play and danger she has created. There is a balance between instability and equilibrium as she goes through the different qualities of a vampire, building upon her routine as a waitress.

The physical storytelling in Violet Smile and the playfulness of the situation is not fully explored. The two guiding emotions of the piece, sensuality and innocence, are too closely knit. Where Violet Smile could really excel is entering the uncharted territory it so strongly wants to toy with.

I find that they provide a mysterious perspective on the inner workings of a theatre. In the case of Yukio Ninagawa’s Twelfth Night, the set changes engendered an unexpected mood of cathartic mise-en-abîme. A sense of infinite regression heightened perhaps by a back-drop of mirrors on stage where, if I had been more attentive, I may have seen Lyn Gardner idly taking notes in amongst the sea of voyeurs.

Lyn Gardner wrote a piece about the performance for The Guardian (she didn’t like the set changes). I invite you to view the source code of her article (toolbar > view > source). Google sucks up the syntactical nutrients contained in this story within a story and spews out the title and a short description of the article on the search results page for ‘Shockiku Grand Kabuki’. Being included in the first 10 links returned, based on a Google search is the search engine optimisation (SEO) sweet spot and the Guardian’s ability to reach it consistently is no coincidence. The Guardian employs SEO specialists to make sure that the Guardian’s online pages appear relevant to Google. You are not the primary audience for the article nor are you the judge of its relevance or quality. This is Google’s privilege.

In their headlong rush to survive, online newspapers have exposed the rocky truth of their existence: they thrive by spamming Google (and a host of other smaller but collectively important referral sources). Lyn Gardner’s true purpose at the Guardian is to produce search engine friendly copy. Google’s opinion on the performance is the only one that counts in this instance. The backbone of new media is not the content but the code.

A small degree away from the dark art of search engine logic, there is the minefield of web-analytics. Web-analytics is the bucket that processes the ‘cognitive surplus’ of the Internet; the system that trends the ebb and the flow of online traffic over time. If you click on one of the links above (effectively a request for the page) it will, amongst other things, run JavaScript code in your browser which in combination with an invisible image request and a tracking cookie will send data back to a remote server where it will eventually be pushed to a reporting interface. This process is commonly called ‘page tagging’.

Page tagging allows the Guardian’s web-analytics software to faithfully record the fact that something has requested a file defined as Lyn Gardner’s article. If you have never visited the site before, you will be counted as a unique visitor to that page. ‘Unique Visitor’ is a euphemism for an Internet enabled device. It is assumed that a person is controlling the device but it could just as well be an automated script. The nature or rather quality of the visit is irrelevant: the quantity of visits is what matters.

At some point, behind the scenes coding became more important than the journalistic front of house authoritative first take on daily events. This is a world away from the beauty of Ninagawa’s vision but just like set changes, it has to be considered.

The resulting family psychodrama centres upon the surpassingly cruel ease with which Richard and Helen’s children, reared in the shade of their mother’s sorrow, are drawn towards their father’s sunny unconcern with the shadows of the past.

Robert Cavanah’s Richard exudes boyish charm, and childish inability to believe that he might ever fail to be beloved, indulged and forgiven. Mark Field, understatedly brilliant as Nate, responds with a hesitant courtesy that slips into a dazzling, defenceless hunger for paternal love. Cressida Trew’s Erica, bristling with suspicion and youthful moral certainty, is a tougher proposition, but the fact that her seduction by a father she initially loathes takes place offstage leaves her character feeling oddly disconnected in the latter stages of the play.

As the drama inevitably darkens, it’s Nate who bears the brunt of the tragedy, disastrously torn between conflicting loyalties and loves. The bloody work of a night leaves him utterly transformed, a stranger to himself, trying to make sense of an altered world. Madeleine Potter’s Helen has the big speech of the evening, delivered with ferocious clarity and intelligence from the crumbling porch. But her son’s hardening eyes and taut, tortured body guarantee that the bloodletting isn’t over.

There are some oddities in this modernised version of an ancient play. Kate Sissons works hard to make an appealing figure of hapless Lucy, but a waitress with a habit of spectacularly putting her foot in it is no doomed prophetess Cassandra. And it seems odd to place a bathtub centre-stage, and then be so squeamishly coy about is uses.

Still, Fiona Morrell’s production manages to replace much that’s lost in translation with a painfully detailed and compassionate portrait of a desperately fragmented modern family. In the lakeside stillness, beautifully lit by Ben Payne, everything that’s hidden gets drawn into the light, and once conflicting truths have been spoken aloud, nothing can avert the coming tragedy.

I quite liked the fact that Jason’s Argonauts were dressed like something out of Blake’s 7. I quite liked the comedy footy match played out between opposing armies (with both taking dives). I liked the whirl of ribbons and lights that took us to a marketplace in Medea’s vaguely South American homeland. I was game for a sing-along and a play-along and a dance. I even joined in to the extent of confirming my suspicions that professional handmaidening must be a pretty tedious job. But what I really couldn’t stand was the officious and incessant pestering of supposedly ‘hidden’ actors who made up a sizeable portion of the alleged ‘audience’.

These egregious nuisances – easy to spot because they know the words to the songs – were evidently under the impression that their job was to chivvy and/or bully the rest of us into compliant communal enthusiasm. I tried as hard as I could to lurk among the non-joiners, politely embarrassed, like the kid at a party who’d rather read a book. Unfortunately for me, my persecutors weren’t taking the hint.

If I want to do dance-aerobics in the middle of the night – well I don’t. But if I did, the idea that my goodwill might be engaged by much grabbing of my hand and vigorous shoving in the ribs (some of which actually hurt) seems pretty far-fetched. I’m prepared to believe that no-one meant to offend me (and certainly not hurt me), but this over-zealous evangelism left me grinding my teeth, thinking vaguely vengeful thoughts and longing for a way out.

In all fairness, the last four hours of this marathon all-nighter may well have been amazing. There were certainly hints that events might be about to take a turn for the darker, with a bloody-mouthed Medea wandering through a dramatically-lit rave, dispatching her brothers/bodyguards/army in her overpowering passion for Jason. I’m afraid I’ll never know – having escaped at 2am, bruised, exhausted – and with an overwhelming sense of relief.

Participatory theatre is hard. Especially when the audience don’t want to play ball. But I remain to be convinced that relentless pestering, emotional blackmail and the odd physical shove onto the dancefloor is the answer. There are many engaging and entertaining and striking things about Hotel Medea, all sadly undermined the amateurishly aggressive attitude of certain participants towards innocent, and justifiably underwhelmed punters. Upon mature reflection – maybe I should have taken my grandma.

As Besouro, Daon Broni is cool and elusive, speaking eloquently but giving little away, except his unshakeable, invulnerable self-possession. By contrast, Greg Hicks hurls himself bodily into the role of Gordilho, the corrupt chief of police responsible for the shooting of Besouro’s mother. He stalks the stage, swaggering, snarling and paranoid, erotically fascinated by the death he deals on the streets.

Noah Birksted-Breen’s production sometimes seems haphazard, but its rough and tumble minimalism can make resonant symbols of the most simple objects. Frances Viner’s text throbs with images of passionate surrender to the sensuous pleasures of love and hate and vengeance, though some passages of exposition slow the show’s pace to a crawl. The most powerful moments are often almost wordless, as the chorus makes a circle of music and whirling bodies, tumbling and crashing like waves.

In Blood reaches a crescendo of Dionysiac intensity as Gordilho, achingly vulnerable in borrowed street-clothes, is lured into the dizzying street-fights of the roda. The subsequent frenzy of flying bodies and earth-shaking rhythms is gripping, unearthly, unpredictable and palpably dangerous. So dangerous, in fact, that enthusiastic use of a smoke machine tripped the fire alarm, and we all had to be evacuated to the safety of the nearest pub.

Perhaps inevitably, everything that followed was a mite anticlimactic. But with a fearless company of astonishing physical power, a compellingly gritty setting, and pulsing, spine-tingling music, In Blood is a sensitive and thrilling response to the hard questions and total theatricality of ancient tragedy.

In Blood: The Bacchae is at the Arcola until January 31: www.arcolatheatre.com

Watch the video trailer on YouTube.

Photograph bottom: Photo by Alastair Muir

Celebrated American artist Julian Barker (Martin Bendel), a contemporary of Warhol and Bacon, is dying of pancreatic cancer. While Julian attempts gamely to continue painting, drinking and shagging until he drops dead, politicians, admirers and former lovers emerge from the woodwork to squabble over his legacy – both financial and emotional.

Each has a genuine claim over Julian, whether as a commodity, an inspiration, a benefactor, or simply as a friend. Which of these claims, the play asks, is most valid? To whom does a public figure’s legacy rightfully belong – to himself, to his public, or to his bereaved?

Julian is a largely offstage presence, cloistering himself in his studio and allowing his devotees to fight amongst themselves. Director Adam Spreadbury-Maher resists confrontational histrionics in favour of calculating nastiness, enabled by some delicious turns of phrase from playwright Daniel Reitz. Julian’s current and former lovers, Chad (James Holmes) and Marcus (David Price), have an especially honest and vicious enmity.

Beyond these enjoyably frank exchanges the play is heavy on flimsily motivated exposition. Backstory details are revealed in monologue to the subject, who presumably already knows his own life story, but sits through the lecture anyway for the audience’s benefit. Spreadbury-Maher’s directorial understatement allows the dialogue to shine when it’s good, but leaves the stage too static when exposition slows the pace.

Stylistically and thematically, Studies for a Portrait breaks no new ground, but it does attempt to sow something worthwhile there. Every play like this one is another step towards relocating non-heterosexual people from the LGBTQ Theatre bracket into the artistic mainstream. It isn’t an overt call to arms, but it’s one more raised fist in an invisible revolution.

Tombstone Tales is a graveyard cabaret, part ballad-opera, part burlesque and part clown show. Writer and director Carl Heap has made a cadavers’ vaudeville that focuses on the lives (and deaths) of the unglamorous and unsung of the American Old West. There’re shadow puppets, magic tricks, folk dances, a motley array of accents, cowboys, bandits, apaches and a masacree – but (despite the presence of Wyatt Earp and his brothers) not the gunfight at (or near) the OK Corral. Miriam Nabarro’s set is shabbily atmospheric, and its saloon bar and stage give the boisterous cast acres of space to muck around in. Heap’s rhyming verses and Joe Townsend’s score jog along with inventive homespun charm and morbidly wicked black humour.

This show made me laugh out loud, the company are talented and tireless, and The Song of Gold Dollar is worth the price of admission in itself. The latter stories are more sombre, with the poignantly pathological tale of The Golden Stairs, and even a suspicion of a socially-relevant moral. But if you thought that what The Masque of the Red Death lacked was a cross-dressed bar-room catfight, then you’re in for a treat with Tombstone Tales. It’s an uncommon and outlandish festive offering, fusing audience participation and sing-along with a light-heartedly lugubrious tour through the forgotten grave-dwellers of Tombstone. Check your guns at the door, grab a glass of sipping liquor, pull up a chair, and enjoy.

Tombstone Tales and Boothill Ballads is at the Arcola Theatre until 20 December.

A young poet leaves his home, and wanders miraculously unscathed through a world of chaos and trauma. He shares an eccentric romance with his friend in an imagined desert, and then, abruptly, vanishes. Other pairs of lovers meet, and dream, and dance, but their idylls collapse as easily as their impassioned word-games. The dead, and those who have insufficiently lived, haunt the margins of the piece, unexpectantly pleading for second chances. Lovers are not apples, a girl confides, they’re infinitely more piquant and complicated. But in the shifting symbolic landscape of Sueño Lorca, both lovers and apples are sensory pleasures to be savoured.

The effect of all this is oddly dreamlike. Nothing that happens seems to be the logical consequence of anything that happened before, and the show’s meandering structure and pace deny any conventional sense of dramatic climax. At times, the cast of five seem like children, playing at telling stories that inevitably tend towards death, although none of them believes that death can be real. The corpse always pops out of its box, ready to play again, but the show’s pervasive melancholia belies the vulnerable brightness of the players’ smiles.

If a basket of spilled apples is just a basket of spilled apples, then Lorca Dreams probably isn’t for you. If, on the other hand, they can sometimes be a fragrant cascade of unfulfilled dreams and half-told stories – then it just might be. Its fragments of narrative and unexplained symbols are intensely, sometimes frustratingly, enigmatic, but Lorca Dreams carries its abundance of potential meaning with deceptive and graceful simplicity.

Lorca Dreams is at the Arcola until September 6: www.arcolatheatre.com