Review: Best of BE Festival, Tobacco Factory Theatres @ Circomedia

As the former co-founder and joint artistic director of Birmingham’s ‘genre-bending’ BE Festival, Tobacco Factory Theatres’ (newish) AD Mike Tweddle is starting to broaden his theatre’s  artistic offer by bringing a trio of 30-minute tasters of European shows from last year’s BE Fest to Bristol, as part of TFT’s out-of-building BEYOND season.

A disembodied and slightly mechanical voice on an off-stage mic announces what we’re about to see, getting the evening in Circomedia’s already curious church-meets-acrobat auditorium off to a surreal start.

First up is Situation with Outstretched Arm by hotly-tipped emerging artist Oliver Zahn (Germany), which examines the history of a contaminated gesture in classical art and social history: the saluto romano, better known as the Hitler salute. Presented in the form of a voiced-over lecture in German with English surtitles, it features solo performer Sara Tamburini who holds the salute throughout, with only short breaks. The voice too takes brief breaks from the lecture to ask Sara how she’s doing.

We, the audience, are so intent on following the surtitles that we hardly notice Sara’s growing physical discomfort – a metaphor for the audience’s discomfort at seeing a Nazi salute performed publicly, and one which also seems to reference the German populace’s general indifference to the persecution and suffering in their midst under the Third Reich. Performing a Hitler salute in a public theatre in Germany is a provocative and controversial act – and one that got performances of this show cancelled in Bavaria – more so than, say, in Britain, where the gesture has also been appropriated for comic effect as part of general post-WW2 lampooning (think Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Peter Sellers, Charlie Chaplin and Dad’s Army).

And that is the strength of this show: that it will have a different effect in each country it’s performed in, raise issues, prickle cultural sensibilities and pose questions like: Why do shock and laughter feel so close together? Is it ever okay to laugh at a fascist salute, considering the unfunniness of history and the global rise of neo-Nazism? And how on earth does Sara manage to keep it up in the show’s full-length version?

Four-strong Florentine physical theatre group Sotteraneo are next up with Overload, a high-energy, high-jinks romp that ‘explores the concept of interruption central to Beckett’s philosophy of failure and its benefits’ (“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”) This is light, dynamic and visually amusing work inspired by the sheer speed of the modern world – a series of comedy sketches glued together in a hyperactive fashion, but delivered with impeccably stylish comedy timing.

We all have to put our mobile phones on to alarm setting to go off in 20 minutes, and some kind of barcode blooper keeps going off loudly throughout each time an audience member stands up. It’s a fun show, but in the same way that eating candyfloss is fun: it’s sweet but ephemeral. The work is reminiscent of experimental Dutch collective De Warme Winkel, who stage messy anarchic happenings in large municipal theatres and who are currently being feted by the Dutch arts council at a time when older more established text-based companies are being cut.

I bump into Sotteraneo the following day outside Tobacco Factory market and chat to them briefly, asking if the arts funding situation is as bad in Italy as it is in the UK. ‘E purtroppo… non è un bel momento…’ says one of them, understatedly: to be honest, it’s not a great time for arts funding. So, that’s something we still have in common with Europe, then.

After a short interval, the evening ends with Vacuum by Companie Philippe Saire (Switzerland), ‘a transcendental performance in which movement and visual arts converge.’ This is really intriguing: ethereal shapes gradually form and dissolve like mist on what appears to be a large black hole suspended between two neon strip lights.

The shapes become more figurative, until we are looking at two nude male bodies that present sideways on, so that we appear to be looking down on them from above. Smooth muscular limbs and torsos with the odd bearded head come and go seamlessly in the mist and gloom, appearing and disappearing like floating ectoplasmic spectres in a Victorian séance. The impression is still and meditative, like staring at male nudes in huge classical canvasses by Caravaggio or Titian, or the frescoes of gods, angels and men depicted on the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel.

It’s evocative and strange, almost mesmerising, and plays with one’s sense of time, space and perspective in the same way that looking at, say, Dali’s famously haunting depiction of Christ of Saint John of the Cross does. Sadly, I wasn’t able to stay for the Q&A after the show, when the audience would no doubt have discovered the technicalities behind Vacuum’s illusions.

All in all, Best Of  was a good snapshot of the kind of contemporary work to be seen at BE Festival, and one which perhaps augurs more ‘vizzy-fizzy’ (visual and physical) performative-style work being brought to Bristol through Tobacco Factory Theatres. But in a city that already has Mayfest and a range of more arthouse performance-based work at Arnolfini (also with its own brand new artistic director), it’s important to keep Bristol’s theatre offer balanced by nurturing and developing top quality text-based work alongside it – resonant, durable work that explores big themes through the medium of words and dialogue, and can stand the test of time.

Best of BE Festival was at Circomedia on Friday, May 5 and Saturday, May 6 as part of Tobacco Factory Theatres’ BEYOND season of off-site productions.
For more on BE Festival, visit http://befestival.org/
For Tobacco Factory Theatres’ forthcoming programme, visit www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com/whats-on

Read more: Tobacco Factory Theatres: new appointments