Traverse Theatre Archives - Page 3 of 18

12Feb

By Jessie MartinNo Comments

Scotland

The Wood Paths – Traverse Theatre

Tired of watching paint dry? As an alternative, Manipulate Festival offers The Wood Paths at the Traverse Theatre. Beginning with thirty straight minutes of performers and co-creators Rūdolfs Gedinš and c chopping into large wooden logs in silence, this show is certainly off the wall. Produced by Latvian company, Theatre on Gertrude Street (ToGS), The Wood Paths is an abstract and eccentric piece of performance art that is both mysteriously aloof, and affectionately playful. Directed and co-created by Andrejs Jarovojs, Rudof Bekič is another co-creator alongside Samĭtis and Gedinš. This certainly was a unique performance, and while some may say its reeks of fine-art ostentation, it can’t be denied that The Wood Paths is absolutely intriguing. The performance was in ...

9Feb

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

The Rite of Spring – Traverse Theatre

At the Traverse Theatre, as part of the Manipulate Festival, Dewey Dell’s The Rite of Spring announces itself as a work that expects, and repays, sustained attention. Running a concentrated fifty minutes, this is not a production that courts easy admiration or quick interpretation. It is slow, deliberate, and insistently moody, drawing the audience into a sealed weird world that unfolds according to its own internal logic.The original scandal of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring lay in its pagan brutality, Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes presenting sacrifice as the necessary price of renewal. In Dewey Dell’s reimagining, conceived and directed by Agata Castellucci, Teodora Castellucci, and Vito Matera, that focus subtly shifts. As a monumental red flower opens to reveal a prot...

Don Quixote (Is A Very Big Book) – Traverse Theatre

9Feb

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Don Quixote (Is A Very Big Book) – Traverse Theatre

There’s a moment early on in Don Quixote (is a Very Big Book) where the performer suggests the entire show sprang from a serendipitous eBay purchase, a suit of unlikely, clown-footed, articulated armour. It’s a charming idea, but frankly, it’s nonsense. The armour is far too central, too embedded, too perfectly calibrated to the rhythms of the piece for this to be anything other than myth-making. And that’s no bad thing. Don Quixote, after all, is built on glorious delusion. What matters is that this is an almost perfect one-man show, and that’s a bold claim, but a justified one. One-handers often get tantalisingly close to perfection because of the sheer control involved, one body, one voice, one mind shaping the entire theatrical universe. What’s remarkable here is that this sh...

6Feb

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Coffee With Sugar – Traverse Theatre

There are moments in Coffee with Sugar at the Traverse Theatre when the senses are so thoroughly engaged that conventional critical distance simply gives way. Smell, sound, movement and image collide in ways that feel genuinely intoxicating, even overwhelming, in a production that prioritises sensory immersion over narrative drive. The show forms part of the Manipulate Festival, one of the many festivals Edinburgh hosts throughout the year, and arguably one of the most consistently rewarding. Dedicated to visual theatre, puppetry and experimental performance, Manipulate reliably delivers work that foregrounds audio visual invention and formal risk taking, and Coffee with Sugar unquestionably lives up to that billing. The piece is led by Laia Ribera Cañénguez, who also created the wor...

The Cathode Ray & Electrical Melting Company – Edinburgh Traverse Bar

3Feb

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

The Cathode Ray & Electrical Melting Company – Edinburgh Traverse Bar

First up in the night’s intriguingly titled diversion were the aptly named Electrical Melting Company who proceeded to meld, with great affection, their many late-60’s influences. Being quite the event for Edinburgh musical alumni the trio consisted of ex-Spooks Ron Doo Ron, AKA Scott Fraser (bass & vox) and Peach McNulty, AKA Pod Kennedy (guitars & vox) supported on drums by longtime associate and ex-Ringo Graham Bodenham. Kicking off with a Neil Innes quote, ‘here’s a medley of hit’ their clutch of tunes landed upon almost every Austin Powers reference point; The Beatles Revolver-era ‘Suburban Bourbon Man’, the Traffic/Donovan/Barratt-inspired ‘Mile High Strawberry Pie’, a straight cover of The Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ (apologies, ‘straight’ is an insult in this context), some r...

22Dec

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

Finding Balance – Traverse Theatre

Five writers, five directors and twenty five actors come together for the inaugural event from Balancing Act Theatre. Scratch nights are a little like winter allotments: the soil is cold, the beds are uneven, and what you’re really being asked to admire is not the harvest but the intention. Finding Balance, Winter, hosted by David Gardner and Benedict Hoesl, wears that honesty openly. This is an evening about writers finding their feet rather than actors polishing their shoes, and the Traverse’s Traverse 2 becomes a kind of rehearsal room made public, scripts in hand and possibilities hovering. The temperature of the night is best described as promising but baggy. Five short works in progress make for a long evening, and the cumulative effect can feel diffuse, particularly w...

15Dec

By Greg HolsteadNo Comments

Scotland

4Play – Traverse Theatre

The Traverse’s 4PLAY has form, a new-writing pressure cooker where short pieces are aired, tested, and occasionally launched into something much larger. Last year’s Colours Run was proof enough that this collective can produce work that grows real legs. This year’s quartet, though, is more uneven, with flashes of real quality offset by structural quirks and the odd misjudgement. The evening opens with Chips by Ruaraidh Murray, a micro-play in every sense. Running no more than seven or eight minutes, it dramatises a real-life Edinburgh gangland robbery, not for cash, but for microchips, with a premise that promises much more than the piece has time to deliver. There’s energy and intent here, but it barely gets started before it’s over. As an amuse-bouche, it’s intriguing, as drama, it’s ...

8Dec

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Dancing Shoes – Traverse Theatre

Unbridled joy. A tonic. In an almost panto-style atmosphere this brilliantly written work of Edinburgh-based duo Stephen Christopher and Graeme Smith is brought to life in celebratory fashion, complete with audience participation, and the themes (NOT memes); addiction, isolation and depression. Still with us? The set is comprised of five chairs and an Eric’n’Ernie curtain through which, eventually, reluctantly, steps our Byrne-esque hirsute hero Donny (Stephen Docherty). ‘Dancin’ Donny’ encounters Craig (Lee Harris) and Jay (Craig McLean) in a local community centre where amongst the Craft Workshops, Yoga (and Baby Yoga) activities on offer are sessions for recovering addicts. With Maggie, who always takes the central chair and alternates the direction of conversation depending on the d...

2Dec

By Roger JacobsNo Comments

Scotland

Bee Asha – Traverse Theatre

As part of The Soundhouse Winter Festival we’re treated to a vibrant set from poet, spoken-word, rap, jazz, dance, multi-faceted artist Bee Asha, but more of that in a minute… Support is no less than erstwhile keys player for The Vaselines, Carla J Easton, playing a clutch of songs from a forthcoming album that started life in a small recording booth in Nashville. With Brett. Dignifying a Fender Mustang (ok, could’ve been a Jaguar or Jazzmaster), peppering the set with anecdotes ranging from buying said guitar from Glasgow’s salubrious West End, to adventures halfway up a Norwegian glacier with Mr Hefner himself, Darren Hayman, she’s accompanied by ‘the best-dressed man in music’, Paul Kelly on acoustic. He was well-attired but a touch of glitter wouldn’t have gone amiss. What reall...

16Nov

By Dylan MooneyNo Comments

Scotland

Through the Mud – Traverse Theatre

Spanning past and present, Apphia Campbell’s Through the Mud explores racism in America during the Black Panther movement as well as Black Lives Matter. Filled with a gospel and blues soundtrack, sung live by the performers, this is a show with a strong message but some struggle of identity. With only two actors, we follow the stories of Assata Shakur (Apphia Campbell) during the civil rights movement and Jim Crow laws while flipping back and forth to Ambrosia Rollins (Tinashe Warikandwa) a college student wrapped up in the Black Lives Matter protests in 2014. Both actors also play smaller, secondary roles in their counterparts' stories. Initially, these changes between past and present can feel confusing, trying to keep up with what time period we are in. Accent changes are quite subtl...