variance

Yesterday evening I went along to see Variance at Huddersfield's Lawrence Batley Theatre constructed and performed by students on the university's MA Ensemble Physical Theatre. I also went to last year's performance.

Physical theatre is broadly theatre which tells its story through primarily physical means. So movement of the body which can be dance and vocalisations which might be song but which don't have to be linguistic. This is a very rough sketch of what is not a homogenous practice.

This year's piece as you'll be able to read for yourself from the images below had its starting point in rehearsals with Bach's Goldberg Variations. The structure of the variations led to a piece which begins with a birth and follows through the events that arise in a life. Or lives.

Here it's probably as well to get the criticisms out of the way first. For me there were two problems with this way of structuring the piece:

Firstly by splitting the piece into thirty numbered scenes there was a sense throughout of clock-watching, of always being aware of where you were in the drama with relation to the beginning and the end. This wouldn't necessarily have been a problem if it had been somehow made a feature of the piece.

Secondly this structure tended to smooth out any deliberate discontinuities of style and narrative. The effect of this was to make the piece appear much more linear than it actually was. Perversely this caused a loss of focus. I think because it made each scene wholly dependent on all the preceding scenes. The effect being that rather than atomising the drama into thirty or fewer miniature dramas each clearly self-contained but contributing to the whole, the tendency was to view the drama as a coherent whole travelling from one point to another.

This need not have been a problem. The scenes themselves, the recurrence of certain motifs, the moments in lives already developed were quite strong enough to comprise a much better piece of work. Had the ensemble altered the sequence of the scenes - including the numbering - perhaps starting with 1, then moving to 14, 27, 8 or whatever then the work would have been more rewarding, and more importantly it would have helped bring the performances into focus.

And there were a range of physical and vocal techniques and simple staging solutions on display that were worth watching. Not just for techniques' sake alone, but because they usually contributed to telling the story. There was a combination of tableaux, single dramatic incidents focussed in a small area of the stage, and numerous miniature dramas happening at the same time. These last were sometimes entirely separate from one another but more often all contributing small elements of a larger whole, rather analogous to a piece of music. In terms of sound there was dialogue, sometimes directly addressed to the audience, there was song, there were percussive and other sounds generated by bodily contact with the stage, breaths, and both verbal and non-verbal vocalisations. These sometimes imitated speech or common communicative sounds and sometimes were more abstract than that. And again these were sometimes discrete and apparently disconnected while at other times they formed parts of a whole.

There was also the music, the variations themselves providing an additional scaffolding in the background.

This show is well worth seeing if you have the chance. If you're in Manchester or within easy reach of Huddersfield tomorrow Friday 25 September there are two showings. You will need to concentrate because the structure does rather mimic that of a more conventional play, but if you watch it in that way you might miss something.

And it isn't a sterile technical exercise. It's not something that will only be understood by theorists and practitioners. You don't need to be familiar with Bach or the Goldberg Variations. Above all it's not as humourless as I may have made it sound. There are funny moments. Quite a lot of them actually. And it's a pleasure to watch - there's always something joyous about any artist doing something very well, whatever it is they're doing. That's certainly the case here.