Malika Booker explores in ‘Unplanned’ the relaxed and making it up as you go along of live art, the increasingly popular form of the lecture appears here as a sort of down-at-heal Christmas lecture, a discourse on jelly babies, a screaming chemistry test, an integration of the audience into the action that moves adeptly and un-warned, invitingly towards the jelly babies of the Marshall Islands.

From a Fortean take on twisted urban legends we slither towards the thing that cannot be shown to its own mother.

To its own maker.

The thing that will not be owned.

Zena Edwards is extraordinary mimetic talent, and in ‘Security’ she easily inhabits Mahmut, a middle-aged man who is probably the most generous person on the planet (and yet completely detailed and believable). The man is iconic, giving, giving, and taking only the hypnosis of the Thames, the mirage of a grape plantation in the lines of second books (“spines naked to the air”, the portraits of beautiful women.

There is already a poetic voice within the closely observed, naturalistic detail and a sureness of lithe imitation. If these talents continue to grow together, Edwards will be a powerful force on any stage, a beautiful force – her poem, Mahmut’s coat stripped away, purports to be of Ann the party giver, but it’s an architectural work – the house is made in iron and colour before us.

Charlie Dark presents the early days of a new project – ‘The King of Haiku’. Gripper discovers himself through his encounters with the audience, searching for a victim, hiding from education among books.

The King of Haiku is an unruly wooden machine that seems at times to be manipulating Dark, a machine not yet with a life of its own, but in a fight with his operator for one .

Aoife Mannix’s superbly voiced autobiography is an empathy bomb delivered with aplomb. Many autobiographical performers forget to enjoy the self they are performing into being, but not Mannix – there is a tough joy throughout her telling, a hard-edged 50s colour cinematography to that green pram in the Stockholm snow and the sickly sweetness of the New York shopping palace.

At any moment the words can curl in an image that wraps up a feeling, its tale flapping, waving, stinging. These words sing, so that Janie Armour’s music seems to disappear into Mannix’s voice, the notes become the heartbeat of her story. And what better image for performance writing than paper snow?

Download review as word document (28K)