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Cabba Hey - Experimentica/Chapter Arts Centre 17th October 2007 Mr and Mrs Clark’s ‘Cabba Hey’ is a crowd-pleasing closer to the day. Framed within the cabaret format, the audience expectation is that this is comedy, and this frame allows ‘the Clarks’ to be as experimental as they want without ever worrying about being labelled pretentious. They start with bags over their heads, and in a series of musical skits strip them off only to reveal or assume more and more masks. Disavowing the seriousness of what they do, they can actually be increasingly serious: upon closer study, their piss-take choreography is more choreography than piss-take. When they perform a ventriloquist act with live dummy, it is both absurdly hilarious and heartbreakingly earnest, a balance that has everything to do with their detailed attention to their performance. If cabaret (in the Dadaist tradition) is insurrectionary theatre, then this is insurrectionary cabaret, in that what makes it pleasurable is its more and more clever deferral of pleasure. And so, one of their closing numbers does literally what the Dadaists attempted metaphorically, flicking off its audience – and the audience loves it. Theron
Schmidt, a writer with Live Art UK’s Writing from Live Art initiative. A short, sharp, mind-battering dream draped in disorder. Mr
and Mrs Clark’s Adventures in a Sitting Room Mr and Mrs Clark are like Terry and June on crack. A surreal and disturbing pair that stand out so far from the couch culture they portray, they should carry a wide load sign. With eerie, contorted masks concealing their faces, the troubling twosome fuse movement, music and occasional speech to produce an esoteric observation of today’s TV nation. They describe the sitting room as a “timeless zone of ritual” reflected in their repetitive, robotic movements, at times resembling a dancing figure within a music box, ticking on, dominated by the cultural cogs that drive them. There is no obvious plot, instead the bemused audience observe a day in the life of the Clark family, in their dark, dingy sitting room, lit only by the halogen glow seeping from their cherished box. The couple use their sofa as an inert platform to launch their gnarled movements, climbing like meerkats across its banal structure. A lone chair and scattered musical instruments occupy the rest of the performance space utilised most competently by the talented and adept Mrs Clark. Suggestive sexual movements are thoughtfully choreographed to delicate music, interjecting an inexplicable distorted charm to this raven sphere. Then enter the children, and of course these are no typical offspring. Seemingly controlled by the rhythmical, almost narcotic beats gushing from their parents’ instruments the pair (whose detached, despondent expressions were portrayed admirably) enter dressed in identical red anoraks, zipped up to the neck, with their hoods preventing any common identification and long white socks pulled up to the knee. Affixed to each other by handcuffs, the pair move in unison, and common to the music box theme they perform a short dance before they disappear back into the ghostly darkness. It would have been too easy to discard this production as another piece of contemporary theatre, trying too hard to be different. The shock factor has been defused over time and we have become more accustomed to the varied extremes of visual theatre. However, it’s possible that familiarity has begun to breed contempt, as audiences become harder to enchant and as result have become more critical. Although not practical with conventional theatre this production had humour, imagination and enough intrigue to get my brain cells frantically trying to interpret the action before me. The unsystematic entrance of the ‘old lady from next door’ to draw the production to a finale with a haphazard karaoke chorus would be my only complaint. Unclear of her purpose and despite an entertaining portrayal this inclusion clouded any set boundaries previously established. However, in retrospect one has to wonder, in a performance such as this where do boundaries belong? As the audience disperse they are left wondering, and if they so wish questioning their interpretation, unclear of what they have just observed, and in my opinion this is the beauty of it. Reviewed by: Amy Stackhouse
An experience beyond description. Mr
and Mrs Clark’s Adventures in a Sitting Room Marega Palser, perfectly partnered by her complicit partner, is an extraordinary individualistic artist, always seeing life out of one corner of a twinkling eye. Two people sitting watching TV, eating popcorn is a pretty everyday event. That’s what Mr. and Mrs. Clark are doing as we enter their space. Mrs. C soon becomes restless and, sometimes very slowly and at other times very quickly, stretches to an alternative position. Marega Palser is known to be a remarkable dancer and mover. She extends her legs, with such control, into seemingly impossible positions. Her body co-operates and follows through, she becomes a paint brush, painting startling images before our eyes. There is a magic and Mr Clark, like a magician’s assistant echoes some of the movements with his own restricted physical comments. She decides they are going out, she tips the remaining popcorn down his Y- Fronts, undresses him, dresses him and puts on a black dancing dress, They dance. It is an experience beyond description, beyond explanation. There is a narrative, there is beauty and humour but with a somewhat overriding troublesomeness. We have been transported into the world inside Marega Palser’s head, well part of it. At times it seems quite right to question whether or not we are trespassing there. Or even should we be there at all? The
questions continue, what are they up to? She causally asks him if he
would like a boiled egg. Then with the most wonderful display of body
manipulation she lays one for him! Mr C goes over to a keyboard, plays
a few stirring chord and their two children in hooded, red plastic-
macs are introduced to us. The children don’t do very much but
of course in the personalities of Michelle Cahill and Belinda Neave
they do it superbly. A flustered Ri Richards rushes on to the stage
towards the end of the performance and now we are into a rush of words
that almost have some meaning but it is futile to search for any. Mr
and Mrs Clark eat biscuits and assault our emotional faculties. We might
go away questioning but we’ll also go away querulously delighted.
David’s Percy would have felt very much at home. Very nearly real theatre. Mr
and Mrs Clark's Adventures in the Sitting Room Irony is what our Mr and Mrs Clark are about and their performances take a laconic look at the domestic life of a married couple that are the very opposite of Hockney’s Notting Hill friends Ozzie and Celia – although these actually are also Mr and Mrs Clark, albeit better known as Gareth Clark and Marega Palser. As individuals, they have been stalwarts of the Cardiff alternative arts scene for some while, he as a musician and she as a dancer (though “dance” is hardly the word for Ms Palser’s inspired performances over the past couple of decades since she first grabbed attention with her work for Moving Being), but their marital union has given them a new lease of life as postmodernist parodists of life between the television and the settee. We get to share the popcorn in this, their biggest proper theatrical show since they launched their personae on an unsuspecting Chapter-going public five years ago, and the first minutes of Adventures in the Sitting Room consists of choreographed snacking as they sit and watch the white noise from the box in the corner. Mr and Mrs Clark, it should be said, are not merely characters: they are artworks, constructs, models. Their faces are, literally, masks, but those unnerving semi-transparent masks where you can never really tell what is someone’s real face and what is plastic. Their actions are choreography, usually jerky and manic. Their voices are abnormally pitched. What adventures do the Clarks enjoy ? They eat popcorn, lots of it, faster and faster. Mrs Clark gets randy. Mrs Clark dresses a Y-fronts clad slothful settee-bound Mr Clark. Mr Clark plays bottleneck blues guitar. Their children, identical red-mackintoshed girls, move in perfect synchronicity. And their neighbour calls by, as noisy as they are wordless, unmasked apart from make-up, with tales of injustice and a pack of biscuits to dunk and viciously decapitate – Ri Richards in marvellous form. An hour of absolute nonsense, then, a glorious sixty minutes of utterly unique eccentric zaniness. You can spot the references if you want, you can deconstruct the carnivalesque performance, but it is difficult to resist being drawn into their crazy world of hyperreality and just enjoy yourself. There
are some dead bits, some self-indulgence, some moments that border on
the too archly knowing, and it does seem to end somewhat abruptly, but
the show is an impressive development of the sketches and installations
that have for the past few years surprised audiences, like some crazed
darkly surrealistic comic guerrilla attacks… and is very nearly
real theatre. Well, sort of.
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