Here we are coming to the end of 2008.

T’has been a busy year – Lots of Living Paintings, of course, – some ‘Faun’ing at medieval recreation festivals – a certain amount of ‘Angel’ing – several one off performances at exhibition openings - and some nice teaching work including a long week in Croatia at the Breza Project in Osijek, on the Serbian border. Osijek, which is like a tiny Prague, is still very much war-scarred and somewhat forgotten by the central government in terms of redevelopment and rebuilding. The remarkable pedagogue Suzana Vargovic heads a project which brings specialists of many artistic fields such as architecture, sculpture and percussion from all over the world (and from the rest of Croatia) to her city during August to work with the young people born during and after the war.

I’ve been making some new shows too:

‘I Remember Me’ / ‘MiRicordandoMi’

Performer: Patrizia Marcato - Direction/choreography/design: Chris Channing

This is a one person acrobatic dance show for Padua artist Patriza Marcato based on the work of variety star Victoria MaBel (1904- 1976). It includes a ‘recreation’ of her signature piece, the number ‘Song to the Moon’ which was (is again) an adagio dance piece performed to the famous operatic aria from Dvorak’s ‘Rusalka’ in which the heroine calls on the moon to bring her lover back to her. It is danced entirely in an upright metal circle 2m in diameter. This is the number that took MaBel from being just another acrobatic dancer in a team of girls to being a featured artist and sometimes a star in her own right. She performed this number for years on and off well into her old age, first of all on tour in the States and then, after coming to Europe in 1936 in most of the principle clubs and variety theatres in London, Berlin and Paris. Our Show, ‘MiRicordandooMi’ or ‘I Remember Me’ is a 40 minute piece made for the ‘dance theatre’, ‘new-circus’ and ‘variety’ festivals. The premise is that she is an old lady at home in Paris with her home-made footlights, her acrobatic apparatus, wearing her early costumes and flitting through her old numbers and memories between cigarettes and gulps of whisky from her thermos.

Music includes, ‘Blues in the Night’, ‘Song to the Moon’, ‘Forever Young’ (Bob Dylan) and ‘Guinevere’ (Crosby, Stills and Nash).

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Video coming soon

Horizontal Heroines

I worked on the repertory and arrangements of ‘Horizontal Heroines. Sleep, Death and Madness in Opera, Poetry, Music and Popular Song’, a Recital for voice, accordion and piano with Denise Leigh and Stefan Andrusyshyn. (made initially for the 2008 Dada Fest at Liverpool City of Culture). Rep includes work by Verdi, Handel, Aznavour, Mama Cass, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Yoko Ono. Apart from the choosing and organisation of content, which is always fun, one really enjoyable element of this show was doing English translations of ‘Sempre Libera’ from la Traviata, ‘Verdrai Vedrai’ by Luigi Tenco and ‘Bugiardo Incoscente’ (which become ‘Unthinking Liar’), originally sung by Italian singing actress Mina, the stream of consciousness and hatred sung by a woman into the ear of her sleeping lover.

Monna Lisa in Delirium Totu

After years of presenting the Mona Lisa as a comedy act I decided to make the act into a theatre show by formalising the hours of gags and improvisation I usually go through when performing as Mona. The surprising thing was that I very quickly found that I didn’t want to use any of the usual material and was starting from scratch. Away went the handbag and off came the hair-rollers. The idea of creating an interactive variety show of interchangeable and unrelated numbers went out of the window and it all became a connected series of written and choreographed scenes and images based on my silly and surreal interpretation of Mona Lisa as figurehead artistic phenomenon. …

And so we now have:

‘Monna Lisa in Delirium Totus … The Creation, The Fame, The Descent and The Re-Birth of a Monster’(2008) Comedy theatre using masks and puppets, with 7 chapters including ‘Home Sweet Home’, ‘Stardom’. ‘The Nightmare’ and ‘The Can-Can of Death’ with references including Frankenstein, del Toro, Kubrick, Michelangelo, Munch, Warhol and Disney.

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Video coming soon

Music / Recording project

This winter I’ll be in the studio with Denise Leigh to record the 14 tracks which make up our long prepared music project. The rep choices are ours and include pieces by, Benjamin Britten, Henry Purcell, John Dankworth, Michele Legrand, Janice Ian and Leonard Bernstein. I’ve been doing what might be called the artistic direction: the instrumentation and structure of the soundscape and plotting the musical journey from song to song and across the expanse of the whole collection. Michele Serafini has spent a year working on the sound and style and has created the orchestrations and reinventions. He will play the flute and has collaborated closely with Stefano Cassatrucci who will play acoustic and bowed electric guitar. Maestro Gianfranco Grisi will join us on crystal harmonium and English concertina. Michele Roscica will lend his heartfelt blues harmonica.

This project came from wanting to bring together Denise and Michele having talked so often to each of them about the other. I had also tried on occasions to bring together Michele’s flute with Grisi on crystal harmonium but never managed. Studio collaborations being a little easier to bring about than live work, this project is the perfect opportunity.