All in one place : Reviews and previews at The Corn Exchange, Cambridge (@CambridgeCornEx)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

6 January (under construction)


In, as they say, reverse chronological order (= most recent first) :


* Artist Gilly Marklew's impressions of Ockham’s Razor’s show Not Until We Are Lost at The Corn Exchange, Cambridge * :

Watercolourist Gilly Marklew at the dress rehearsal for Ockham’s Razor’s (@AlexOckhams’s) show at Cambridge’s Corn Exchange, Not Until We Are Lost


* Ockham's Razor at Cambridge's Corn Exchange : Not Until We Are Lost * :

A new show at Cambridge’s Corn Exchange by aerial theatre group Ockham's Razor


* I am to Mozart (and Haydn) as Schubert and Brahms are to me * :

This reviews Noriko Ogawa’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3


More to come...



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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Artist Gilly Marklew's impressions of Ockham’s Razor’s show Not Until We Are Lost at The Corn Exchange, Cambridge

Artist Gilly Marklew's impressions of Ockham’s Razor’s Not Until We Are Lost

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

18 December

Watercolourist Gilly Marklew at the dress rehearsal for Ockham’s Razor’s (@AlexOckhams’s) show at Cambridge’s Corn Exchange, Not Until We Are Lost

Moonlight Sonata (© Copyright Gilly Marklew 2009)

It is a pleasure, which is ever present, to retire in contemplation of this watercolour, and to be wakeful with it after sleep :

The best art, whatever its apparent simplicity may be, one can live and grow with, because it has this quality to it that it never ceases to give as the eye explores, and re-explores, the felicities of construction and execution.

Partly, that is a question of the richness that keeps coming to the eye, but that richness is not simply in the work, but came from somewhere : Gilly Marklew has been known as a dear and gifted friend for more than half-a-dozen years, and, much as she might play down her intellectual side, her essential gifts of copying in image, word and sound, and her love of inventiveness and fun, are central to what makes her work special and alive – coupled, of course, with a strong sense of line, form, colour, and the dynamic power within a composition*.


It was a special pleasure, by invitation from the marketing team at The Corn Exchange, to bring Gilly along to the wonderland of expression that was last night’s dress rehearsal by aerial-theatre group Ockham’s Razor. In the event, she did not find herself with enough light to make use of her supply of sketching material, and the action anyway proved a little too swift for the medium, but she relished the clarity with which the subjects in the performance had been lit, and she took in image after image through her camera-lens, some of which have been shared in the original response to the evening.

Image by, courtesy of, and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014

A pose and a face such as this, that of the group’s Telma Pinto in the solo opening of the show, is classic material for Gilly Marklew : the timelessness of the expression, look and gesture


Since last night, the show has been seen again, and a short discussion with cast and crew took place, and Gilly has been making sketches after the fact, using what attracted her when she saw through her lens. On this first one, she comments :

I wanted to play up the interconnected movement and love story as I saw it, [without the climbing] poles, to emphasize the aetherial.

An original sketch, by, courtesy of and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014,

based on images taken at the dress rehearsal

The other sketch available so far is an ensemble piece, about which Gilly says This is a bit rougher, but there was more energetic movement in this scene, so it merited a more vigorous approach.

An original sketch, by, courtesy of and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014,

based on images taken at the dress rehearsal

In some key-words, after the matinee, this Tweet sought to use language to describe how this part of the performance looked and felt :

Some words about Not Until We Are Lost from @AlexOckhams at @CambridgeCornEx : artistry / grace / energy / atmosphere / vibrancy / fragility
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 18, 2014

With her painterly perspective, here describing her artistic approach and process, Gilly uses these lovely phrases ‘vigorous approach’ and ‘interconnected / energetic movement’ : for us, those descriptions may be in the same relation as are our internal attempts to encompass, through our senses, the performers’ work in Ockham’s Razor, and to find ourselves touched and emboldened in our responses :

In the live show (as against with a smaller audience at the dress rehearsal), we had this sense of atmosphere from sharing what we felt about the different scena as they unfolded – all at once and in the moment : for they do unfold, not as origami figures might, but with the delicacy and precision that we might, say, associate with the construction and appeal of a Fabergé egg.


After the show, in response to questions about working with Graham Fitkin on his score (as beautifully performed by harpist Ruth Wall), Alex Harvey said a little about what had gone on, after they had met him, between Alex’s fellow directors Tina Koch, Charlotte (‘Lottie’) Mooney and Graham, seeking to communicate through the language of moods a conversation about the score, and helping it to take shape. Now that we have it, though unfortunately at this venue Ruth cannot be present to play live, the music feels integral to the piece...


The life of the work is in its performance, and its performance is inseparable from the immersive participation of us being there, reacting to sound and visuals (from, all the time, the actors, from Ruth, and from each other), and to the sheer drama of limbs and bodies that are flying and interacting through space and time – the actors knowing their parts and abilities so well that they are in, and simultaneously are, the vigour and interconnectedness of which Gilly speaks :

In her pastel interpretations of moments from Ockham’s Razor's Not Until We Are Lost, in finding her own relatedness to the energy and imagery, Gilly shares with us wonder and amazement that even the performers themselves seem to feel just about being alive in, and having such power of motion within, our physical world.


Artist, and Bauhaus lecturer, Paul Klee is famous, in art circles, for opening his Pedagogical Sketchbook** with this proposition (from which the work, and its teaching, develop) :

An active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal.
A walk for a walk’s sake. [emphasis added]


In the second scena on the large apparatus (whose first reaction to seeing which Telma Pinto delightedly described to us as like a playground), when it becomes hinged as like a gate, we have yet another moment of discovery – it is as if another Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy (from the Narnia novels) were playing as Lucy does with Aslan (after The Stone Table), all four enjoying a game of chicken with it :

Running, as one does on a beach, towards the roarers of the ocean, and then squealingly away again, even more quickly (if possible), at a sudden appreciation of the sea’s might. All its nimbleness and experimentation – as if for the first time – caught in the hope of Graham’s score, and in the magic depicted by Ruth’s playing.


Whether evoking metallicized percussion, the picked notes of guitar, or of plucked instruments (as of a lute or thumb-piano), the boundless sound-world of Ruth and Graham's music, just as with the variety and variation of Gilly's palette, are all emblematic of the richness in Not Until We Are Lost, that we

begin to find ourselves [...], to learn the points of compass again as often as [we] awake, whether from sleep or any abstraction

[Henry Thoreau, Walden, chapter 8, 'The village']

End-notes

* As Gilly shared just on the night of the dress rehearsal, Moonlight Sonata relates to an image by Henri Cartier-Bresson that she once found and pasted into her source-book : she had seen, in his photographic image, the classicity of The Three Graces, and had – with some of her favourite sitters (not least the one placed centrally) – created her own version, looking back, beyond him, to what she thought had inspired him.

** So published in the UK by Faber & Faber Limited, London, 1953, in translation of Klee’s Bauhaus text from 1925, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Ockham's Razor at Cambridge's Corn Exchange : Not Until We Are Lost

A new show at Cambridge’s Corn Exchange by aerial theatre group Ockham's Razor

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

17 December (closing Tweet added, 28 December)

Glimpses of the dress rehearsal of a new show at Cambridge’s Corn Exchange (@CambridgeCornEx), by aerial theatre group Ockham’s Razor (@AlexOckhams) : Not Until We Are Lost

Nice meeting @AlexOckhams Harvey, Charlotte Mooney, Tina Koch at @CambridgeCornEx, the directors of the aerial theatre - now in occupation !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 17, 2014

Although sounding like it could quote the works of Samuel Beckettt, the title derives from Henry Thoreau’s Walden*, but no knowledge of Emerson’s or his transcendentalist thought (or of Beckettt) is necessary to an appreciation of what is to be seen and heard…

In around half-a-dozen scena, which seem to defy transparent and scaffolding materials by the forces that are exerted on them (though this is no lesson in dynamics or Newtonian principle), aerial theatre group Ockham’s Razor (@AlexOckhams) tell a series of stories – the exact meaning, though, is for us to interpret, even as it would be if we had words, rather than actions and interactions, to construe…


Afterwards, co-director Alex Harvey said that what appears before the audience is open to interpretation, and fellow directors Charlotte Mooney and Tina Koch even felt that saying that there is a choir as part of the musical accompaniment is not a give-away, so here goes :

Image by, courtesy of and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014

Some of the scena (involving all four performers (Alex plus Hamish Tjoeng, Grania Picard and Telma Pinto) on a giant scaffolding climbing-frame, which later becomes a swing) seem euphoric, even utopian, with a triumph of collective behaviour and what modern jargon calls ‘working together’, but not all of them.

One seems to revolve, more unfortunately, around the conjoined roles of Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel, another that of a young woman pestered by the attentions of two similar men, who appear to be hunting her as if in a pack and to win her confidence : it all ends with seemingly innocent fun and enjoyment, but what has she been cajoled into, and for what reason ?

Image (of Telma Pinto) by, courtesy of and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014

Paper rips and tears, and the performers bodies fly between or across the face of, blunt scaffolding-poles, with no room for error, no avoiding the consequence of a mistake, and, as already alluded to, the transparent material is tested, seemingly to its limits :

Things are starting to take shape for @AlexOckhams 'Not Until We Are Lost' run at @CambridgeCornEx opening on Thurs! pic.twitter.com/7bmSCk3cig
— Turtle Key Arts (@TurtleKeyArts) December 16, 2014

It is in that medium of a clear tower, which sometimes seems more than merely a box in cross-section, that we have scope both for what seems survival of the fittest pushed to its extremes, and for the greatest elation. In the latter case, maybe a release from a – maybe Narcissistically-created – invisible prison that could be what we conveniently call 'depression', and where love, and responding when another reaches out, are part of the healing.

Image (of Alex Harvey and Telma Pinto) by, courtesy of and © Copyright Gilly Marklew 2014

Never pulling its punches, in the fitness of the guitar- or harp-like melodies, dissonances, arpeggios, the physicality and riskiness of the performances, and the theatrical content of the scena, Ockham’s Razor (@AlexOckhams) give more than an entertainment :

All at once, something that, by turns, can be seen as encouraging, cynical, or appalling, but always thought provoking, and never compromising with the belief in realiz[ing] where we are and the infinite extent of our relations (Thoreau*).


A follow-up piece, featuring Gilly's sketchings from her images after the event, is linked here ...


The show runs at Cambridge's Corn Exchange from 18 to 21 December.

@LindumGreene:Ockham's Razor Troupéwith Cambridge Choir Lost! I can't believe it's all over...http://t.co/gtmvKIaIQH pic.twitter.com/4aaj586SaB
— LindumGreene (@LindumGreene) December 22, 2014

End-notes

* Specifically, chapter 8 (‘The village’), where Thoreau starts by talking about being physically disoriented, and having to put one of several visitors on the right track in the dark, being guided rather by his feet than his eyes.

Following the observation It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time, Thoreau develops the thought ,with the effect of snow, and of night added to it, ending the section where the words occur, first in a different form, then as quoted (but he is clearly no longer to be read as writing just about the visual world and mistaking one’s way, any more than Canto I of Inferno) :

In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round — for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost — do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.



If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here


Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)