Light, Ladd & Emberton: Caitlin

Posted: August 10th, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Performance | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Light, Ladd & Emberton: Caitlin

Light, Ladd & Emberton: Caitlin, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, August 5

Eddie Ladd wrapped around Gwyn Emberton in Deborah Light's Caitlin (photo: Warren Orchard)

Eddie Ladd wrapped around Gwyn Emberton in  Light, Ladd & Emberton’s Caitlin (photo: Warren Orchard)

“My husband was a very famous poet and I was going to be a very famous dancer,” says Caitlin wistfully at the beginning of her eponymous show as she revisits the ambitions and disappointments of her life with Dylan Thomas. It was a famously unfaithful, fractious yet inseparable relationship recorded in Caitlin’s Leftover Life to Kill and in numerous biographies of Dylan. In their recreation of the relationship, however, the team of Deborah Light (director), Eddie Ladd (Caitlin) and Gwyn Emberton (Dylan) decided not to follow the well-trodden textual paths but instead built a high energy, highly physical language to convey the passions of these two lives to the point of overflowing. It is not a pretty work of artistic-romance-turned-alcoholic-upheaval but a brutally subjective reconstruction that makes use of the dispassionate, mass-produced folding chair as an extension of the body to express the rage, subservience, servitude, consummation and consumption that infused, confused and ultimately broke apart these two lives for ever.

The folding chair is in itself emotionally neutral but something happened during rehearsals for Caitlin to make the folding chair a central metaphor for the entire story. Upturned and backwards, it becomes a low highchair on which Emberton turns quietly reading Agatha Christie and stuffing sweets; it is used on different occasions as a straightjacket, a noose, a yoke, even Dylan’s penitential cross. Folded, stacked and loaded on Ladd’s back or balancing on her head it is her intractable burden; laid on her supine figure it becomes a self-imposed grave and tombstone on which Emberton lays his manuscript in hommage. It is a token bed, a dais for Dylan’s recitals and unfolded and precariously stacked, a fêted throne from which he topples and crashes. The chairs are also thrown, scattered, refolded and stacked like pieces of a desperate game in tune with the narrative tide.

As we arrive in the studio at Chapter, however, the red or grey chairs form a harmonious circle in the centre, a stasis. We occupy only the twenty grey chairs; on some of the red ones are assorted plastic cups, sweets/pills and a rumpled manuscript. The circle takes its inspiration from the form of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with which Caitlin became familiar some 20 years after Dylan’s death in 1953. “My name is Caitlin and I’m an alcoholic,” says Ladd at the end, but the end is a lifetime away from the beginning.

Emberton is sitting in the circle as we enter to take our seats. He is dressed casually, inconspicuously, and looks as if he is waiting, like us, for the performance to begin. Ladd walks in with an almost imperceptible flounce in a red tartan skirt and an embroidered velvet top the colour of blood (costumes by the subtly imaginative Neil Davies) and sits on her hands to deliver her matter-of-fact opening line. She engages her audience directly, looking around at us as if we are all complicit in her situation, knowing we know what she knows but determined to refresh her side of it with grim familiarity. Emberton is immediately drawn to her as if he is seeing her for the first time and runs to plant his face in her lap. This is the connection that sets their fate; he will return to this place as often as he needs absolution, forgiveness, reassurance, sex. ‘It was going to be a truce between his brain and my body’ she says as she wraps herself around his head like a scarf, his mouth filled with her thighs. They collapse, not for the last time, under the weight of each other’s passion.

This is Caitlin’s story, her circle of chairs and we are her guests; Dylan is merely the argument, the flashback, the colour and flame in her story. Emberton’s focus is fixed on Ladd; his eyes are dead to all but her. She is the one who engages us directly with her eyes and irony: “He wrote three poems that year; I gave birth to our third child,” she bristles, her motherly activities contrasting with the famous husband standing on a chair silently intoning his immortal words. “We were supposed to be equal”, she adds, withdrawing a chair rudely from the circle while Emberton pushes his to the centre. The harmony of the chairs is broken and the domestic tension breaks with it as they both bounce off the walls in inebriated, screaming abandon and crawl on all fours with the empty plastic cups held tightly in their teeth. The soundscore of Thighpaulsandra manipulated by Sion Orgon punctuate the action with unnerving accuracy.

After more drinking and pills and vomiting the chairs go flying; ours are the only ones left in the circle. “That year he went to America for the first time” Ladd informs us, rocking a chair like a cradle, while Emberton spins dizzyingly outside the circle. In between building his throne of chairs on the other side of the Atlantic (from the wreckage of chairs in the family circle) he returns to Caitlin to be ‘tickled by the rub of love’ which inevitably turns into a brutal battle, reconciliation, head rubbing and departure on yet another North American tour. At four chairs high Dylan’s throne finally topples and Emberton crashes to the ground; Ladd in a circle that has suddenly lost its tension falls to the floor in shock.

The difference between Dylan and Caitlin is that Dylan was able to transform his desires into words that gained him immortality while Caitlin remained unfulfilled outside her family circle. All she knows is that without her Dylan would not have succeeded. Resigned to this and proud, she thanks us for listening. What she cannot see is that Light, Ladd & Emberton have made her a gift of her chosen art in providing her with a rich body of language she was unable to develop during her life with Dylan.

Caitlin was commissioned by National Library of Wales and funded by Arts Council Wales. It is supported by Volcano, Chapter, Aberystwyth Arts Centre and Borough Theatre Abergavenny. It will be at the Edinburgh Fringe from August 21-30 at DanceBase.

Deborah Light: HIDE

Posted: February 27th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Performance | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Deborah Light: HIDE

Deborah Light, HIDE, Chapter, Cardiff, February 22

photo: John Collingswood

Rosalind Hâf Brooks in HIDE photo: John Collingswood

Since she left Laban in 2001, Deborah Light has been researching the notions of inside and outside, what is revealed about a person and what is hidden. She would have agreed with the painter René Magritte that ‘There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us.’ Using the body and mind as material, Light is concerned with the deeper layers of the human psyche; the program note for HIDE says it ‘delves beneath our outer shell, revealing internal worlds, and exposing the multiplicity of human nature.’ The three performers (Jo Fong, Rosalind Hâf Brooks and Eddie Ladd) have already marked out significant journeys in dance theatre and their experience is a vital ingredient in HIDE. They work close to that boundary of fearful and fearless, following the notion of abandonment of inhibition as a way forward.

The three meanings of ‘hide’ are printed in the program and become immediately apparent in the auditorium: Fong stands naked on a pedestal on stage as we file into our seats. From our darkened hide in the audience we see her hide that she cannot hide. She may be shivering from the cold air, but she is definitely out of her comfort zone, and we witness her struggle as she experiences that psychological barrier between clothed and unclothed, private and public. If she cannot hide her body, what is she revealing? That metaphysical question — and its obverse — is a central theme in the work. While Fong is on her pedestal, Ladd is kneeling with her back to us writing on the floor something we cannot read (and which she later rubs out) and Brooks is facing the back corner crouching in her underwear on a loudspeaker. All three women are materially visible, but their internal worlds are obscured. In the course of HIDE these three charged characters collide like atoms in an accelerator releasing in the process facets of their own inner worlds that interact and reform as new layers of experience.

There is an element of Huis Clos here: three characters confined in one space without the possibility of leaving. The stage (designed by Neil Davies with lighting supplied by five mobile studio lamps manipulated by the performers) is their cell, and over the course of HIDE their initial detachment breaks down into a mutual dependence (as in climbing into each other’s clothes) that is broken only when Fong abruptly announces ‘I’m off’ and leaves. Unlike the Sartre scenario, there is a way out of eternity.

The soundscape by Sion Orgon is a driving, frenetic electronic score with a quality of crossed wires that weaves in recorded sounds of children in a playground, distorted voices, dream-like fragments, birdsong, cavernous Morse code, and Bach’s Mass in B Minor. Given its non-narrative, almost random nature, it is all the more remarkable when the score, the choreography and the characters suddenly coalesce to create a moment of extraordinary power and beauty like an ascending mountain path that suddenly opens on to a breathtaking vista. Ladd is describing, with appropriate sounds and words, the cutting up of a carcass, hanging from its two back legs, while we hear repeated snatches of Bach’s Crucifixus from the B Minor Mass that Fong seems to control as she swoons and sings, twitches and falls. Brooks, to whom reality is revealed through her olfactory sense, is endlessly sniffing around like a fly around the carcass. Magical.

Ladd puts in a powerful performance, acting as the central narrator (in both official languages); perhaps it is her personality, or the force of her presence, but she anchors the dramatic action. She weaves aspects of her life story through the work, from the length of her hair over the past decades, to changing her name to learning how to walk like a man — all strategies for hiding, it seems, but she carves her way through the performance with blinding confidence. As she says at the end with quiet determination, ‘I am a Welsh speaking female. I should not hide.’ Fong has a fluid quality — like water to Ladd’s fire — that flows from wild abandon to introspection and Brooks is air, breathing out animal exhalations like a dragon when she is not taking in the scents around her.

Some of HIDE’s material comes from Light’s solo work: one can recognize idioms from Cortex in Brooks’ crazed scrabbling on the floor, her fluttering hands in a gesture of abandon, in the references to animal behaviour, and the flirting with nakedness. In HIDE Light has taken her research to another level, an original voice with a stark, uncompromising vision and the ability to coax out of her performers the material they need for their long journey — one that is never quite finished because, as Magritte points out, ‘Everything we see hides another thing.’

Fong finally turns the performance on its head, demurring that ‘It’s not me you came to see. You came to see a show.’ She leaves and Brooks disguises herself as a powerful inert image in black (see the photo above), part animal in platform hoofs and part hooded human. With no further interaction possible, Ladd is left to turn out the remaining lights, one by one, clothing us all in darkness. And with nothing left to see, we leave our hide.

What a lovely printed program: well designed by Marc Heatley, with no hype, lovely photography by John Collingswood and just enough text…even if the proof reader missed the printing schedule.