The Mechanical Animal Corporation is due to present an extraordinary site-based performance of Howard Barker's Und, at C Soco, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, from 14 to 29 August 2011, 9.30pm. We would like to appeal to you to help us to do this.
Originally performed in a vast ex-industrial warehouse in Bristol, February 2011, to critical and public acclaim, the Mechanical Animal Corporation re-conceives the production within the smaller, but no less challenging, coordinates of C Soco – this time providing an even closer, tenderer window onto Und’s fascinating mind.
SELECTIONS FROM REVIEWS:
**** Venue
“a visual masterpiece… ‘Waiting for Godot’ in the arctic” The Play Group
“The production as a whole, and Annette Chown’s arrestingly multi-faceted performance as Und manage to bring to the fore, with admirable integrity, questions of identity, sexual desire, dominance, complicity, and survival.” Aesthetica
THE SHOW:
A lone Jewish woman waits for a cryptic lover, engaged in unspecified wartime activity. She screams orders to a servant who never appears. The bell repeatedly rings and yet, curiously, she remains seated before a tea tray.
As a sharply focused etude on the human experience of desperate expectation, Und thrusts its audience into one woman’s bewitching mind games. Denials, excuses, confessions and desires abound in Und’s nuanced discourse before a china tea set; played out against an unsettling, uncertain background of mechanized killing and anti-Semitism. Tinged with dark comedy, the production is an incisive exploration of solitude and hope, a study of the dynamics between eroticism and terror.
An exceptionally sensitive solo performance by Annette Chown is further brought alive by an unsettling atmosphere of torchlight and an original, live soundscape – designed to resonate Und’s distracted, unhinged experiences of love and loss. Mirrors, shifting trays, teapots, piles of earth and landscape painting comprise the abstract backdrop against which the delicate frame of Und acts out her struggles, like a moth before light.
HOWARD BARKER:
Howard Barker is renowned as one of Britain’s most skilled and prolific playwrights. Over the last 40 years has developed a unique practice of tragic performance, the Theatre of Catastrophe, one of the most innovative new stylistic forms in recent British playwriting.
“Howard Barker packs more into the slenderest play than most playwrights manage in an epic.” (The Guardian).
WHO WE ARE:
The Mechanical Animal Corporation is a new, Bristol-based performance company. It looks to create site-responsive performance, theatre based on raw encounters with language, and performance engaging with evolutionary biology. Und in Bristol was their debut production.
For the Edinburgh production, the team includes:
Director/ Designer: Tom Bailey
Performer: Annette Chown (Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama)
Lighting: Anna Barrett
Sound design/performance: Matt Chilton (Vultures Quartet) / Seth Guy (London Concrete).
Assistant Director: Igne Barkauskaite
Co-designer/ costume: Eli Siles Jimenez
We’re a mix of people from all over, with a desire to make quality theatre. Tom’s work is supported by the Bristol Old Vic Ferment artist development programme.
For further information visit our website www.mechanimal.wordpress.com
WHY IS WHAT WE ARE DOING INTERESTING AND NECCESSARY:
We decided it would be an interesting idea to take a complex, yet beautiful, Howard Barker play and make a site-responsive piece out of it. It worked well. The company works with strong attention to formal scenographic detail – kind of like theatrical calligraphy. Attention to stylistic detail and composition is the company signature.
WHY WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT:
We want to take this show to the Edinburgh Fringe as it’s an ideal opportunity to give the show and the company further exposure. We believe we’ve created a work of art that has a rare quality, and want to share this with more people.
As a new, young professional company, funding has been hard to come by. We are looking for your kind support to help fund the core costs of taking the show to Edinburgh – venue hire, publicity and performance rights. Any money you can give would be invaluable in helping us on our way.
If you like what you see, please do help us out.
