Dylan Malik Orchard's Blog, page 22

San Tuo Qi Company – Around The World: My Journey Continued After You Left

You know how it is right? You’re walking around in a hungover fug, liver desperately trying to filter away the contents of Sainsbury’s drink section. Dull and bloodshot eyes looking for a corner to curl up and fall asleep in… and then all of a sudden you find yourself in a magical wonderland. Where an absurdist Chinese version of the cast of Glee are entrancing you with the heart touching story of an ageing couple looking back through the mists of time. Back to that time they got caught up with a gang of muggers-cum-insect cultists while out hunting for a magical butterfly. Sure, sometimes it feels like every Saturday morning just goes the same way eh?

No? Well, you’re all missing out then.

Around the World: My Journey Continued After You Left, running for I’ve no idea how much longer up at the Edinburgh Festival is a grand slice of the unpretentiously absurd in the middle of the city. Performed by what I’m guessing is a fairly prestigious group from China, it’s a perfectly staged, hour (or so) long hit of oddness which does all you need to qualify as happily strange without ever trying too hard.

Dialogue is eschewed in favour of a handful of random sounds which still manage to tell a story worth hearing. Mostly made up of (word free) song and dance numbers so polished that they’d probably really impress someone who knew more about those things than I do. As a layman though I certainly spent most of the show sitting there with an idiot grin on my face as beautifully poised dancers knocked out hyperactive songs without once thinking ‘this is getting on my nerves’. A miracle really given that I seldom manage that even when I’m sitting alone in an empty room.

I’m not going to go all that deeply into the plot. In part because I wouldn’t want to spoil it and in part because how you find yourself following it is a bit of a personal experience. Though I will say that the insect cult and the fat butterfly were personal high points for me, but then they might pass you by completely. And that’s the best bit about Around The World, the agenda free absurdism of it. Without trying to be odd or ‘zany’ it manages to create a properly immersive pallete of sounds, costumes and movement. One which you can sink into without once feeling that the creators have set out to be weird solely for the sake of it. And at the end you do find yourself being genuinely touched by the cast of monosyllabic, occasionally inept but always affectionate characters.

The only comparison I could really make for context would be to some of the efforts from Studio Ghibli but even then the medium is so different and the crowded simplicity so undemandingly giving that it isn’t one that stands to much. So perhaps I’d be better off saying what Around The World really isn’t despite what you might imagine it to be at a passing glance. For all the dressing up, enthusiasm and energy this is a million miles away from the sort of ‘aren’t we zany’ first year drama students attempt at surrealism. All of the magical wonder and indulgent immersion here is the product of a lot of work and talent which culminates in absurdism being done as it should – which is well – rather than as it so often is, which is as an easy cop out to building something complete.

Anyway, in summary, go see it if you get a chance. I managed to blag a free ticket but they were £12 otherwise and at that price I’d say it was well worth it. And now I’m off hunting for an overweight butterfly, hell, I may even sing as I go…

Dave Chawner – Normally Abnormal

Probably my favourite thing about real life is that it’d make a really shit piece of art. The plot is usually paper thin, character development is random at best, the actors barely seem to understand their roles and the dialogue is usually shite. Like some of the more unfortunate shows at the Edinburgh Fringe real life only ever gets any sort of audience because it’s free and people can’t think of anything better to do. Unlike some of those shows though you can’t sneak a bottle of cheap rum and a plastic cup into the venue of reality so the whole affair can really start to drag. But stick with me here, because I’m still talking about why all of those failings amount to some of the best reasons I can think of to stick around until everyone gets chucked out at the end.

Y’see unlike any piece of art, be it literary, visual, performed, crafted or keyed onto a toilet door, life can, while being really badly put together, give you more, better and more interesting experiences than anything else you’re likely to find – even if you have Net Flix and Amazon Prime both. And the best art or comedy or music knows that as it walks away from anything fancy like plot or coherence and just slaps down before you the jumbled ridiculousness of life – which is the one universally translatable force for us all. And that’s why after barely having had time to recover from the trip back I’m sitting down to make my first post-Edinburgh Fringe recommendation – ‘Normally Abnormal’ with Dave Chawner.

Normally Abnormal is without doubt a stand-up one even with the big slab of human awareness that it’s built on. Dave is an anorexic with experience of depression, a negligible sex drive and a fondness for one night stands of spooning. All of which are shared and talked about as part of the heart of the show but none of which end up feeling like the focal point of it. Which is the clever part really. The declared subject matter here, the bit that for a lot of stand up becomes, in one form or another, the defining factor of a show is here just a composite part of the person on stage.  A testimony to all the honesty that Dave obviously aims for in his set.

Issues which could quite easily be held up over the show as being the point are subsumed into the beautiful mundanity of human experience and regurgitated as well crafted comedy. There’s no attempt to weave a plot line or neatly summed up narrative from the subject matter. No grand moral conclusions are reached, no profound motivational speeches are given, nothing is neatly packaged at the end of the night because as I said, life is too poor at plots and structure for anything like that to work.

Instead Dave offers a funny and thoroughly human insight into the sort of aspects and issues of life that for all of us defy any grandstanding or definition. He doesn’t take socially taboo subjects and try to present or define them, he’s simply honest in himself. Which when so many people talk about wanting to ‘normalise’ or open up debate on issues of mental health and long denied experiences is genuine relief. Because here they’re not being normalised or opened, they are normal and Dave is open about them.

The Fringe isn’t far from being over now, so it’s a bit late to be plugging his show there but no doubt he’s going to be gigging out there, somewhere before long for you to catch him. In fact going by the Scrabble players wet dream of acronym based charities and groups that he seems to be involved with I’d be surprised if there was an evening of the year where he isn’t on a stage somewhere saying something. So add him on Twitter (@DaveChawner) and keep an eye out but if you are around Edinburgh at the moment I know for sure that you can catch him at The Loft above the Counting House pub on West Nicholson Street until the 30th. Which, as a pro tip, also has an offy around the corner and no bag checks so already the show’s got one up on most parts of life.

Edinburgh Fringe 2015

Well, I limped home yesterday from my flying four day visit to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. A grand time was had by all, too many drinks were drunk, good shows were seen, terrible ones too, many miles were walked and far too few cheap meals eaten but then Guinness is sustenance enough for a rugged individual like myself, right?

Having seen some great shows I’ll be posting some reviews over the next few days to cherry pick a few favourites and big up some fellow struggling artists. Not that any of the gobshites will buy my books in return of course but it’s nothing if not a cold hard world. Except in Edinburgh apparently, where it’s a humid and sweaty one full of people desperately forcing fliers onto you and begging you to follow them up dark staircases to dingy attics.

On a side note though there’s even been a little talk/drunken conjecture about the possibility of me taking a show up next year. Not as a full fledged, month long endurance test but perhaps a reading or too with some underpaid associates. Why should comics and actors have all the fun after all? Writers like people too, honest, we do.

Anyway, check back for more.

Sonic Distillation

Distilled into each exhalation

is you;

heart, body and mind

eager to feed

effect

and flavour my life

our lives

and everything inbetween

But what’s recieved is nothing

just cruel, muted waves

soft on the ear

but echoing with an emptiness

where you’ve disappeared

and cold creeping nothingness

reverberates onwards

The Return of Our Lord and Saviour

Tristram rested a hand on the pommel of his sword. He could afford the comfort of calmness now, he was home, at last, in sight of the great white cliffs of Dover. At the peak of which lay the crown of his expectations.

On the estates and farms, in shops and factories, branches of Waitrose and office blocks, his people awaited him. Desperate to break the shackles cast upon them by the Usurper, the thief, the rabble rouser who’d driven out their one true leader, him.

Yes, the time of his absence had been hard on them. Yoked to the plough of Corbyn, forced to dark Labours by his rabid followers who held no regard for the ancient rights of their betters. Bullied by uncouth barbarians in donkey jackets, flat caps and conspicuous by their refusal to wear a tie like they should. How could they not dream of his return? Singing the forbidden hymns in quiet moments, hidden from the heavy glare of thuggish union boot boys culled from the degenerate masses. Reciting tracts of virtue and Agas smuggled to them by the resolute exiles of Comment is Free as if the beacon of civility could keep them warm in their long, hard Autumn of discontent. Oh what triumphs would be declared! What exultations of joy would be heard when their rightful ruler delivered to them the treasures of sensible private sector involvement and true consensus government in the realm!

And to the traitors? The agitating barrow boys, reckless youths and belligerent peasantry? A swift death. For a true ruler could not be without mercy. And the ten thousand screaming Guardian readers at his back would see that their resistance would be but fleeting. Recruited from their poor exile in Provence with barely half a tonne of Quinoia and a copy of ‘Unspeakable Things’ to their name their blood-lust shocked even Tristram himself.  Especially that of the Lady of Kendall, who by her own hands had already shed the blood of many a Corbynite whilst he himself had sought refuge in exile, alongside the Lord Chukka and his strange coterie of tabloid intriguing adherents. But their loyalty was treasured and did they not have cause enough for revenge? Was it not their investment properties that had been rent controlled? Their free schools that had been handed back to the vile masses? Necessity demanded that they be offered flesh in payment for such slights. And, as ever, justice was a ruler’s duty. As was resistance.

Tristram smiled to himself. The end was nigh and things could only get better.

London

Clarity is hard to come by from a London point of view. If you’re from here, you are here, very hard to get perspective from that deep buried position. But anyway, this city is my home, as it is for a lot of others. It’s not a lifestyle we choose or an experience to be had, it’s what we wake up to every day. It’s friends and family, those experiences we’d rather forget and those we revel in. It’s hard to reconcile that with all the people to whom this city is an adventure, a lifestyle choice, a test of themselves or whatever.

Y’see we, as native Londoners, get split. On the one hand we have our home, which we know to be a magical, wondrous place, just as everyone says it is. But on the other it’s ours, it’s familiar, no more special than Kent or Norwich or Leeds is to you. And as the fight for the soul of the place grows harder, as gentrification and civlization drives us out in favour of someone elses dream, we have a hard time connecting that. Because our home is the place where we go down the shop, drink in the shitty pub, get by in the flat we can afford. Why is it so special as to need stealing from us? It’s just home, right? But of course it isn’t. It’s a warzone.

One where I’ve heard people say ‘be nice, don’t be intolerant of change’ and ‘fuck change, kill them all’. And that’s a question Londoners face. I’m not including some struggling Somali refugee or desperate seeker for a safe life and a safe home. Nor the people who come to build a life as they are, rather than demanding a new image in the city of who they want to be. I’m talking about the immigrants to London who are making a vain choice, those coming from the home counties, or the EU, or the US, the ones who want a lifestyle. Why should we give that to you? This city is a product of the people who live here, not the money you can wield to buy a bespoke experience.

At a certain point we need to choose how far we’ll go to defend that. Foxtons in Brixton had their windows bricked three times in the last year – good, to be honest. I don’t like a lot of the incomers to London but I’m indifferent to even more of them. Right now though, right here, it’s a conflict of my home vs your dream. And to be quite honest I don’t give a fuck if you feel scared or uncomfortable in this city. If you feel excluded by hostile locals or sneering jibes at your little purchased islands of ‘culture’. You should. Because the people selling it to you don’t give a fuck about the effects of their actions. We do. And we need you to check yourself before you start saying things about ‘Nunhead Village’ or gentrifying Lewisham. It’s our home after all. Maybe not always as magical or beautiful a place as was advertised to you, but still.

London has always been here for those who need to build a life but why should it be here for those who just have enough money to play at one?

The Weight of History

The frozen parade of granite faces stared down at them, though those observed seldom stared back up. There was no need, no benefit in acknowledging the immovable presence of the past. If anything it was a self-imposed torture to try, an opening up to acidic intrusions on lives lived in rough and tender skin. The past had left the stone faces. Stern monoliths in vaguely human form engraved into an inhuman surface. A cryptic message or judgement or warning, hewn from the cliff face by hands whose owners, certain as they may have been in their work, had left no clues to inform the uninitiated of its purpose.

It made the faces both impossible to ignore and hard to care about. Especially as the immediacy of life lay at eye level. Readily demanding without the need to crane necks in search of mystic incomprehension.

And it was as the stolidly current humans faced all that was on their level that the past decided to collapse on them. A plethora of faces were scattered by tremors forcing their way out from even deeper in the rock of the landscape than they were. All sent gurning, screaming and roaring down from the cliff side to smash into the present. Rolling to staring halts before half-hearted observers, suddenly forced out of their once all consuming time and place and knocked into confusion by the past’s sudden invasion. Long neglected granite eyes now laughing, scorning and longing for the descendants of their creators.

No one died. Not through the avalanche of rocks at least. But life was left bruised and rattled by the ominous collapse. Through uncertainty questions proliferated, through discomfort they went unanswered. Was some distant point buried beneath their own ancestry angry at their habitually averted eyes? Disappointed at the level stares of lives lived solely in the present? Even enraged at what they’d seen through inert irises during their long and silent observance? Even now the faces blockaded and punctuated the movement of the living they gave nothing away but their presence.

People drifted away after that. Shying away from their ignorance to the wants and desires of their oppressive inheritance. Whatever the past was, whatever it wanted, they could find no way to serve it.

Inertia is all

an absolute for fleeting drama to play against

Trees forming on tired rock

people walking on tired land

novelties to impress the unimpressable inert

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Feast of Humanity

The creature we all feed on

feeds on us in return

turning poisoned teeth of humans

into emotional concerns

not always loving missives

not always hate filled curse

but a necessary living

to complete the human verse

But the feeding turns to cruelty

when we clamp down to the bone

covering with greed’s laughter

the slowly dying moans

And if the feast continues

‘til gluttony is done

we have an empty carcass

a vision of what will come

So feed and gorge and satiate

your human needs and wants

but leave the breathing being

to which we all belong

Featured image by Ashish Das.

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Bring the Future

Bring a hundred thousand people

bring a hundred thousand more

bring the armies of the faithful

bring the legions of the poor

bring all of those belonging

and the ones who are left out

Bring the children of tomorrow

and those aged with crushing doubt

bring all of the resistance

to the cruelty of the few

but start with that one humble voice

the one that comes from you

Featured image by Guilherme Kramer.

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Rat Run

What do you call this future? The one at the end of the rat run you’ve built out of today and into tomorrow? The one we can see as a pin-prick at the end of the tunnel, a pin-prick of grey light and confinement. Why do you want us to go there? Really, why? What motivates you to shepherd us with threats, prods and promises of milk and honey which sound bitter even as you speak them? We’re still playing in yesterday’s rubbish after all. Our attentions are all hooked on sun faded Tango cans and empty crisp wrappers we left as a legacy from our childhood to remind us of the way home. Maps formed of artifacts from our own antiquity which we’re more than happy to struggle to decipher because at least we know the juvenile cartographers drew those lines without guile or malice.

Why should we, why would we dash into a clean and compressed passage which leads to nothing more than sterile light and a dream you can’t explain? A dream where all the rest has been swept away?

How are you going to make us?

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