Last night Ben and I went to a Notting Hill theater a few blocks away from us on Hereford Road for an evening that was (pardon the cliche) unforgettable.
The Print Room is a non-profit arts venue and performance space in Notting Hill for theatre, music, dance and visual art. This month, they are offering a special program featuring young artists' work--"Devil's Festival," since it's "diabolic" (so they are suggesting) to offer such daring fare--and since Isabel had a sleepover, off we went.
I'm not sure what we were expecting. I'd walked by the Print Room many times and it looks fairly unprepossessing from the outside, inside even more so (during the day), with a courtyard cluttered with dustbins and ladders, peeling paint, and no one on hand in the office when I came to collect our tickets. No matter. We've done relatively little theater in London, and this evening offered a lot of bang for our artistic buck: two short plays, a dance performance, a light and sound installation ("experience"), and a photography exhibition.
I won't say the venue was transformed when we turned up that evening, but it had cleaned up nicely, its cobbled entrance and couryard lined with candles and with a charming ivy-shrouded side garden opened up for the audience to stroll in between performances. As it runs out, it was "neighborhood night," which meant there was wine and sparkling water and some hors d'oeuvres set out when we arrived, and we mingled before the first show with a fun and eclectic crowd of what Ben has taken to calling "Notting Hillbillies" (I don't think he coined this phrase): an intriguing mix of artsy gay men (young ones on dates, and longer term partners); wealthy empty-nesters dressed ever so smartly; eccentric looking older couples (probably also well off), the women in crumpled linen and orthopaedic shoes, the men with funny glasses; and the distinctly international set that is a hallmark of Notting Hill. "Bea" (for example), gorgeous in her high heels and encrusted with some serious bling, was a diplomat's daughter with an indistinct accent (Brazilian, it turns out) and kids in the best Holland Park school. The theater itself was started by two women with impressive theatrical resumes, Anda Winters, originally from Croatia and Lucy Bailey from the UK. We also met Anda's "best friend," a Japanese American pianist who flew in from NYC.
Enough with the scene-setting!
Performance #1 was a dance piece titled Kanaval, choreographed by Hubert Essakow, and inspired in part by photographs by Leah Gordon of Haiti's Carnaval and Voudo traditions. The piece and performance were mesmerizing. Four youngish dancers -- two men and two women -- with simple masks and sometimes using chairs, doing incredibly graceful and athletic moves. The music itself was mesmerizing.
Performance #2 was a short and not often performed Chekhov play titled Swan Song, about an actor at the end of his career drunk after a benefit in his honor and reflecting to his prompter on his life in the theater. I thought the actor was terrific, full of bombast and very poignant at times. The play itself is a slip of a thing and a bit of a bore, in my opinion. But so great to see this guy tearing up the scenery.
Performance #3 was another short play, this one by Martin Crimp, Fewer Emergencies. Ben and I had been most excited about this one because Crimp is known for his caustic, non-narrative pieces wherein anywhere for 5 to 10 actors opine sharply and often humorously on the idiocies and tragedies of modern life in the First World. His pieces feel something like a Mamet play, but with only the smallest of narrative through-lines, with the actors sitting or standing around commenting on events and people not seen but shaped as these actors talk about them. The Mamet-like part is the rapid-fire delivery of lines back and forth and repetition of certain key phrases, in this case "That's a good question", but also a repeating back of a line from one character to another as first, a statement, then a questioning of that statement, and then a confirmation of that statement, as in, Actor A: "He's been getting up to all sorts of things." Actor B: "He's been getting up to all sorts of things?" Actor A (nods head emphatically): "He's been getting up to all sorts of things."
Whatever else one thinks, this piece was terrifically fun to watch, riveting really, as the comments and statements flew back and forth ping-pong like, and a story about a couple and their son and a few other details emerged. Actually, now that I think of it, it reminded me somewhat of Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" with the snapping back and forth delivery of lines and the fact that the son referred to isn't there. Well, actually, nobody is. It's just the four or five actors sitting around the table drinking wine and eating fruit and talking about a family we never see.
Performance #4 I think Ben and I both voted this "the piece we would most have liked Isa to see" (though, indeed, she probably would have enjoyed all of them). This was a sound installation created by Petra Jean Philipson called Of The Things We Do Not See. The audience was asked to don light white hazmat type suits with hoods and booties for the feet. We then entered a white tent lined with comfy white pillows -- this set up inside the performance space -- where we were asked to lie down and make ourselves comfortable. Audio of birds gently chirping eased us into a soothing mode as yellow, red, and blue lights slowly dimmed overhead and a bizarrely soothing audio which sounded like Australian aboriginal music throbbed (it was vaguely Tibetan, we later learned, and one of the voices was the artist's). I'm not sure how long the whole thing went on. The lights changed from red to orange to blue (I think) and I'm guessing a good percentage of the audience, bellies now full of wine and good cheese and crackers, may have dozed off. I couldn't get into it because too crowded up against people on all sides. Ben had more room and lay blissfully still, soaking in the sounds and light. The artist makes claims for the healing properties of this experience and told us all to drink a lot of water to rid ourselves of the toxins when we got home. I'll have to ask Ben if his pulled hamstring feels better this morning.
All in all, a wonderful experience. I think what struck us both was the happy intimacy of the space and the scene and a distinct lack of pretentiousness. There was good, at times even excellent, art happening, and genuinely intellectually engaged people turning up to appreciate it. After the performances, the actors and dancers changed and came out to have a glass of wine and a bite and mingled unobtrusively with the crowd. The impossibly youngish looking Dan Ayling who directed the Crimp play was there with his proud mum. The dancers were having a drink and a "fag" in the garden later on, and we were able to ask the actors in the Crimp play if that was real wine they were drinking? -- no, grape juice. They joked with us that they should try it with real wine and see how it went.
