Uncovering Glasgow’s Behaviour festival

AS MOULD-breaking live performance festival Behaviour returns to Glasgow, Chitra Ramaswamy scans the programme and discovers there’s something for everyone.

If you want to hear pensioners talking about sex...

Mammalian Diving Reflex

All the Sex I’ve ever had

The last time this Canadian company with a conscience attended Behaviour, it was with the revelatory site-specific piece Haircuts by Children, a show, or rather social intervention, that did what it said on the tin. A group of ten-year-old children from Oak Grove Primary school in Maryhill spent two weeks learning how to cut hair without, for example, cutting off ears. Then they took up residence in a salon and cut people’s hair for free while curious passers-by watched through the shop window. It was a piece that – via a wash, cut, and blowdry – explored trust, power, vanity and the invisibility of children.

Now Mammalian Diving Reflex return with a work that does for seniors what Haircuts by Children did for juniors. All The Sex I’ve Ever Had invites a group of over 65s – a sector of the population whose very existence, let alone sexuality, is routinely ignored – to tell the story of their lives through their sexual experiences. The company practise what they refer to as social acupuncture: “Work that induces encounters between strangers and blurs the line between art and life.”

In this case, the acupuncturists will be running workshops at the Arches in the weeks leading up to the performances with senior citizens from Glasgow. The result will be a scripted piece of documentary theatre about social change and gender as much as sex and desire. Audience members will sign a contract promising to keep these stories to themselves and the company is still looking for volunteers representing a range of backgrounds, classes, races and sexualities.

So if you’re over 65, living in Glasgow, and want to talk about sex contact Lucy on 0141-565 1011 for more information.

• The Arches, 9-11 May

If you want to join Andy Warhol’s factory...

Gob Squad

Kitchen – You’ve Never Had It So Good

Nothing much happens in Andy Warhol’s 1965 film Kitchen. A static camera spies on a small white kitchen. The banal drone of a refrigerator forms the soundtrack. Rene Ricard washes dishes. Edie Sedgwick, who was instructed to sneeze whenever she forgot her lines, sneezes. A lot. Like all Warhol’s work, it conceals as much as it reveals, revels in the allure of surfaces, and, above all, celebrates celebrity. Normal Mailer, who loved it, described Kitchen as “a horror to watch”.

So what of Gob Squad’s reworking? The acclaimed Anglo-German outfit ventures into the vast Tramway 1 – the first time Behaviour has used the space – and takes participatory theatre to a whole new level. Slowly the actors – none of whom had actually seen Kitchen before making this thought-provoking work – are replaced on stage by audience members who follow their instructions through headphones.

Here is Warhol’s notion that we are all playing versions of ourselves, that life itself is a performance taken to its logical conclusion. By the end of the show the actors are in the audience and the audience are on the stage.

Don’t expect a reverential copy of Kitchen. Expect something even more experimental, knowing, and perhaps even more Warholian.

• Tramway, 3 May

If You Want To See Men Dancing Like Kate Bush...

Peter Mcmaster

Wuthering Heights

Matthew Bourne did it with Swan Lake and now Peter McMaster – one of the winners of the Arches’ prestigious Platform 18 Award – does it with Wuthering Heights. This all-male production, the result of a mentoring project with acclaimed Scottish director and designer Stewart Laing, was shown in an earlier incarnation at last year’s Arches Live, where it won five-star reviews for its exuberant and tender portrayal of straight male love. Yes, as in bromance. Emily Brontë’s classic 1847 novel about untethered masculinity and bare-chested pain on the Yorkshire moors is reimagined here by performance artist McMaster whose preoccupations are with the shifting role of men, wildness, and nature. There is an extra show for a male audience only and McMaster ran a series of men’s groups in preparation for the piece. And, yes, there will be a blistering all-male dance routine to a certain Kate Bush song.

• The Arches, 23-27 April

If you want to see a legendary performance artist talk about surviving a stroke...

Peggy shaw

Ruff

In January, 2011, Peggy Shaw had a stroke. The 68-year-old co-founder of renowned New York touring company Split Britches has always made transgressive, autobiographical work, “open heart surgery of the artistic kind” as it has been called. Last time she was at the Arches, it was with a piece exploring her changing, female, lesbian body (Must), and so it’s no surprise that this time her stroke becomes the subject. Written with long-time collaborator Lois Weaver, who also directs, it’s an unflinching and charismatic monologue about the dark spots left behind – she can no longer memorise scripts, for example – the characters she has lost, and the (slightly warped) perspective she has gained. Expect laughs, a Brando-esque delivery, confessions, video projections (to aid her memory), a spot of stand-up, and a song or two.

• The Arches, 10 April

If you want to see stand-up without the stand-up...

Gary Mcnair

Donald Robertson Is Not A Stand-Up Comedian

People are always telling Gary McNair how hilarious he is on stage. This is whether he is pondering the value of money (Crunch) or satirising the democratic voting system (Count Me In). A fiercely political theatre maker who is focusing more and more on one-man shows, he scored a hit at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe with Born To Run, a show in which Scottish actor Shauna Macdonald ran on a treadmill for over an hour. And so, finally, he has decided to give comedy a go. Sort of. In this interrogation of the world of stand-up (with added gags, fear not) McNair deconstructs an industry that has become too commercialised, too aggressive and too homogenous. As part of his research McNair travelled the world (okay, London, Glasgow, and New York), watched 103 stand-ups performing, and met a boy called Donald on a bus. This piece is a result of the Auteurs project, an ambitious collaboration between the Arches and the National Theatre of Scotland, in which five Scottish theatre makers were involved in a specially tailored two-year development programme. McNair, one of these rising stars, will also be curating and hosting a free pop up comedy club during the festival. • The Arches, 3-6 April

• For the full Behaviour programme visit www.thearches.co.uk or call the box office on 0141 565 1000