When starting etude, I wanted to offer the chance of guest contributions so as to ensure it’s not just suggestions of what to watch from me over and over again. This week sees our first guest curator, Ben Kulvichit. He is a theatre maker based in Bristol who creates work alongside Clara Potter-Sweet in Emergency Chorus. We had a chat about theatre and how he became a fan of the form. I then asked him to share a few of his favourite shows and performances he’s looking forward to seeing.
a chat with ben
Josh: How did you start enjoying theatre?
Ben: I would sometimes go to West End shows when we were visiting the UK as a kid. I always enjoyed it, but I think I really started properly getting into it when I was 16 or 17.
I remember that I'd seen Let the Right One In at Christmas one year, after it had transferred from the Royal Court to the West End and I looked at reviews of it, cause I really liked it. And I found the Postcards from the Gods review and it was very different to all the other reviews or kinds of reviews that I read in broadsheets and mainstream media, I just kind of like read basically all of Andrew Haydon's blog and discovered a lot of stuff through that. I read about lots of different kinds of work, obviously all of the European work that he wrote about and also discovered other theater blogs through Postcards. So I discovered Megan Vaughan’s blog, Maddy Costa, Matt Truman, Catherine Love and Dan Rebellato, and all of those people.
I guess I became clued up about what was going on in UK theatre and in European theatre through those blogs. I sorta became very interested in theatre as a form, not through watching it, but through reading about it.
I particularly enjoyed Meg's writing about live art which , I guess that was my first encounter with live art. So I was reading about something that I hadn't had any experience with, or I hadn't really heard of before. I think she writes about stuff in a way that's visceral; like it's so much about how it makes you feel in the room. So it sort of does feel like experiencing it in a way, even though you aren't.
I think that taught me how to watch stuff in that way, because I think often live art is something - if you've not encountered stuff like that before. Your first time encountering it can be a bit like, “you know what, I don't understand what's going on. I don't get it. It's not for me.” because you're sort of trying to intellectualize it.
I think a lot of what that did was to provide a framework for watching stuff, which was primarily emotional and about how it made you feel - and therefore any kind of response is valid and you can get whatever you get from the thing.
Josh : How do you find out about the more obscure stuff?
Ben: Usually an internet rabbit hole. So maybe I'll see something, somebody that I follow, retweet something that's going on at a festival. And then I'll go click onto that, then that festival will have loads of artists and maybe I'll follow one of the artists, then see that they've collaborated with this other artist who looks cool and I'll go to their website and they've been to this space or wherever. So it's just like following lines of connection and collaboration.
Josh: Has how theatre and performance been documented affected how you work?
Ben: I think slightly probably, I think it makes me steal a lot of stuff. Sometimes unconsciously, even, I don't mean that in a, like a stealing in a bad way, at least I hope not.
Josh: More in a steal like an artist kind of way
Ben: Stealing in a more composite way where you've taken an aspect of this image or an aspect of movements that you kind of reassemble in a way that's your own.
I think it also makes me hyper aware of that sometimes as well. Sometimes you'll have an idea and then “Oh wait, somebody already did that. We can't do that”. I was sitting in Dan Bye’s R&D for a week and he was writing a bit of his new show.
He read it out to the room and they got halfway through and was like, Oh no, this is like, exactly the same as that bit from Chris Thorpe show Status with the coyote, cause it was like, it was about somebody running away from something and then they meet like a talking Wolf.
And he was like, no, that's exactly what the coyote does. So now, like I kind of refer to those things as coyotes.
It's like, “that's a coyote. We can't do that”
The other way that I think it's maybe affected how I make, which is more difficult to put my finger on is that - it's not exactly this, but it's something to do with this - I've watched a lot of theater trailers.
I really love watching trailers and after watching trailers I wish that there was the full documentation that I could then go and watch the show online. But I think it's often good that there isn't the full show online because a trailer offers this sort of promise of what the show could be.
I feel like it often feels more impressive. And the show has more depth and complexity than it probably does, or is possible to have, you'll see a trailer, a show, it'd be like, wow, I can imagine that show just being like the most mindblowing, amazing thing ever because the trailer has this kind of mystery about it.
And it's only offering the surface of what is a much deeper experience. So it sort of magnifies the speculative depth of that experience.
How does that affect how I make? I don't know exactly, but it's not that I'm making stuff and thinking, “what would this feel like if it was a trailer?” Maybe that is kind of it, but like how do I make something that approaches the imagined depth of what I felt those shows had’
Josh: You're not exactly saying how do I make an hour long show that has 30 seconds of really good bits in it. It's that more abstracted way of that form of impression a trailer can offer? What's the one trailer that's really stuck with you then? Or what is one show you’ve never seen, but has made that impression on you?
Ben: This is How You Will Disappear. Yeah. With the forest and the fog in the forest and the gymnast, somebody with an arrow, a bow and arrow, someone's bleeding and then there's like a tent and there's like somebody with long hair and a hoody.
Josh: In my head that show is God tier when it comes to trailers because there's so many little things that stay with you
Ben: It's so visually striking, I think that's what leads to really being impressed with that trailer. I think another example of a trailer that's definitely stayed with me is pretty much every goat island show.
They’ve influenced my work a lot, but I've never seen one of their shows at all. I've seen their work through clips and the trailers that are online. I think because they employ similar methodology to a lot of what I do, collaging different source materials to make up lots of quite discreet parts, which are quite loosely linked and then it’s up to the audience to make the connections and stitch them together and complete the work by joining the dots.
ben’s selections
Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster by Nicola Gunn
(archive, 1hr 18 mins)
This was the show that really launched Australian theatre-maker Nicola Gunn into international success, and I've been wanting to see it for literal years. It's a rambling, stream-of-consciousness monologue about confronting a man in a park in Ghent who was throwing stones at a sitting duck, unravelling philosophical questions about conflict and culture. Whilst speaking, Gunn performs this unrelenting, meticulous choreography, with a boom-box (ghetto blaster) accompanying her.
Heavens What Have I Done by Miguel Gutierrez
(archive, 42 mins)
I picked this because it shares a lot of similarities with Piece for Person with Ghetto Blaster. It's another meandering monologue, underscored by constant movement, but where Nicola Gunn's is mechanical and precise, Gutierrez's revels in its messiness, off-the-cuffness, chatting-to-an-old-friend intimacy and high-key chaotic energy. It's no less virtuosic for that, though - the chaos is calculated, and not a word is out of place. Gutierrez is an irresistibly charismatic performer.
Adaku's Revolt by Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born
(archive, 56 mins)
I always think there should be more family shows by contemporary performance makers. Kids, after all, don't have the baked-in expectations and preconceptions that can lead to people finding experimental work difficult to approach. This show is an ensemble piece led by Okwui Okpokwasili, who made the brilliantly strange, unsettling Bronx Gothic, looking at Black hair and resistance to normative beauty standards. There's some really beautiful design, choreography and music.
Plue by Elinor Lewis and Joe Garbett
(live, 11th December)
I've not seen Elinor Lewis' work before but I love the look of it - always relying on a simple, striking design concept and exploring the many possibilities it provides; whether that's dancing in a field of dangerously easy-to-topple poles in Orchard or manipulating unwieldy wooden frames in Timber. This work-in-progress sharing is for a new show about queer relationships and queer (in)visibility in rural settings, featuring some fetching blue and pink costumes.
(film, 1 hr)
Ang Kia Yee is a friend and collaborator of mine based in Singapore. Her performance-for-camera is about objects and objecthood (I like the double meaning of the title - 'to love things' and 'things which love'). I suggest watching it on a rainy day - it rains a lot in the film, and it unfolds gently, unhurriedly, spaciously. Like taking a walk after rain clears, watching this made me feel like there was more air around me, the world a little lighter.
a few more…
live this week as chosen by Josh
Holiday Sauce…Pandemic! by Taylor Mac
(Saturday 12th December)
Christmas as calamity – 2020 Ibsen Award winner and MacArthur Fellow Taylor Mac and his long time collaborators, designer Machine Dazzle, Music Director Matt Ray and producers Pomegranate Arts join together to celebrate the holidays in all of their dysfunction.
(Saturday 12th and Sunday 13th)
Sparking conversations at the intersection of sexual violence, justice, and our personal predicaments.
Built as an ongoing negotiation with understanding questions of consent, Allegedly seeks to spark conversations at the intersection of sexual violence, justice and our personal predicaments. A work forever in progress, it opens up the contradictions, confusions and irregularities of our own behaviours and solidarities.
As a consequence of its journey in the past several months of making, unmaking and remaking the piece finally into an online performance, Allegedly contains in itself a new journey of transformation of form and design, to make possible an online conversation between performers and audiences, to implicate their thoughts and decisions in the direction the play takes, trying to ‘make sense of it all’. Or at least the closest we can get to!
Monday 7th and Sunday 13th
“War is inevitable — but there are miracles. Every day millions of people die, yet we live as if death will never touch us.” –St. Vyasa, The Mahabharata
These words sit at the heart of one of the greatest epic poems— a meditation on war, death, and loss. Its core question is of a particular resonance: what should we fight for and why?
In an attempt to understand this exact question, Theater Mitu spent two years gathering interviews with a range of communities worldwide: current and past members of military forces; citizens who have been directly affected by war; people diagnosed with terminal illness and their families; nurses, spiritual leaders, scholars, and mental health professionals. As they touch upon, come to the edge of, and often confront death, each interview becomes a portrait of what is left behind — a remnant.
In a time of seismic loss, as it becomes increasingly difficult for communities to gather en masse, Theater Mitu has reimagined the original live theatrical production of REMNANT as an online experience. Part performance, part sound art, part video installation, this work offers an intimate reflection on how loss can scar us, shape us, and at times propel us towards change.
Thanks again for subscribing and taking the time to read through.
If you watch any of the shows or have any feedback drop me a message on twitter and please do share with people!
If you want to follow Ben on twitter you can find him here.
Hope you have a lovely week and talk soon!
Josh x