Review: Take Me Somewhere digital festival offers mild, meditative musings

Take Me Somewhere, Glasgow’s contemporary international performance festival, is available in both online and in the Scottish city this year. After The Limping Chicken was invited to review the programming, deaf writer and theatre critic Liam O’Dell decided to take a look the shows and their accessibility…

It’s quite a relief to know that some theatre companies are still very much clinging on to digital arts’ potential, even when venues are opening up again, because for me at least, they tend to be far more deaf-friendly.

Described as a festival which “acts as a connector between people, work and ideas”, Take Me Somewhere got in touch with The Limping Chicken about their programme, and how they provide livestreamed content with captions and British Sign Language (BSL) interpretation. It makes sense, really, considering access – and thus, engagement – is a significant aspect of connection.

Even before I dive into the creative projects on offer, there is a fair amount of back-and-forth required to get to where you need to be. Just visiting the main page of the website shows you what’s on offer, but when you click through, each one says the same thing: to buy a festival pass. Once that’s done, you have to go to the ‘Festival Hub’ and find the livestream you want to watch. As I saw from a few other attendees ahead of one performance, the video at the top of the Festival Hub, the ‘Foyer’, can easily be mistaken for the performance stream itself – it is not.

First, I watch Sarah Hopfinger’s Pain & I, which comes with a curious contradiction. The 30-minute audio piece, with delicate woodwind sounds and atmospheric strings, is meditative and reflective in nature – an intriguing tone given that the performance explores the subject of chronic pain, a condition which affords those living with it little to no relaxation.

In her introduction, Hopfinger encouraged listeners to position themselves “in ways that are most comfortable” for them – be it sitting, standing, making noise or closing their eyes. It’s an important flexibility given the relaxed approach of the production. Such a personalised and accessible experience is necessary for an introspective narrative – as Hopfinger says herself, the space “needs you to be you for it to be itself”. In my case, I chose to close my eyes.

When you interpret Pain & I as being an almost satirical take on meditation tracks, then one may expect to be the individual centred in this short production. Yet instead, we are observers as Hopfinger speaks directly to her pain, about how fear, embarrassment and boredom around it. Granted, the script read by Hopfinger is descriptive in that each scene lays out what she is doing in terms of physical movements, but it feels as though it has missed a trick. Rather than referring to the pain as ‘you’, one wonders if the pain could be translated into the bodies of those listening. For example, meditation tracks often talk about the chest rising and falling, and our arms and legs relaxing as we listen. I couldn’t help but wonder why Hopfinger didn’t take this process and apply the perspective of chronic pain to that, using our bodies as the canvas for the areas in which she feels pain, and then talking about her feelings towards that as she progresses. It would certainly go a long way to offering an insight into chronic pain, when the condition is particularly hard to describe to an outsider.

Speaking of which, if we are to be a bystander in a meditative piece, then I do wonder why the medium of an audio recording was chosen, as opposed to an illustrated film.

It’s also worth noting that despite the performance being purely audio-based, a transcript is provided for deaf and hard of hearing people, which is appreciated. The issue here, however, is that while the music is explained in vivid detail, moments of repetition lack the required descriptions to indicate that different words in a sentence are being emphasised over time. There’s “I am scared of this body” and “I am scared of this body”, for example, but there’s no italics in the copy to illustrate this.

As such, Pain & I does lack in performer-audience rapport when it comes to the experience. Transcripts lack some detail, meaning different audience members engage with the show differently, and the role of the listener feels lost in this production. It sounds illustrative, and yet the audio performance only scratches the surface as to Hopfinger’s experience.

The second show, experienced the same day, was A Giant Dog Bed / Reclining Duet by Lucy Suggate and her greyhound, Molly.

Another half-hour performance, the film saw Lucy and Molly attempt to sleep and rest on a giant bed. As one ‘performer’ wakes (if we can count Molly as an actress in this), another lies still and tries to relax. When Lucy rests, Molly goes to lick her face. It soon becomes apparent that neither rests for long – not even the camera, which wobbles from time to time.

“During the pandemic, the reclining has taken on deeper significance, especially in relation to the act and role of rest and why it is so difficult to achieve,” the piece’s description reads, and it’s perhaps the idea I took away from watching a woman and her dog try to get some rest for half an hour. Perhaps the piece wanted me to sit still, with myself, for a short while, but I likely proved their point about restlessness in that it wasn’t long before I was checking my phone during the performance or tending to other things while watching. Calm during this coronavirus crisis feels lost now, as even when we’re in moments of silence, our mind can still be incredibly loud with whatever we’re worried about during a deadly pandemic. Will that return with the ‘new normal’? We shall have to wait and see.

Taking place almost completely in silence, captions aren’t provided for this performance, though it still needed them. Towards the end, Lucy goes to a vinyl record player and turns it on, leaving it playing some music as Molly continues to rest. This isn’t captioned, so there’s no indication as to what kind of music this is.

Provide access – absolutely – but never do that while casting aside particular considerations because they might not be necessary/needed. It shouldn’t be about the bare minimum; it’s about the most you can do with the resources available, and if something may have a benefit (describing the music in a piece definitely would), then you should include it.

Both of Pain & I and A Giant Dog Bed / Reclining Duet leave the interpretations and meanings to the audience, and while there is nothing wrong with that, of course, it’s like there isn’t enough guidance in terms of the pre-show information as to what the audience should be thinking about when watching. Equally, such guidance would have had to be non-prescriptive, so as to not stifle creative interpretation, but there’s a fine line between letting an audience’s mind run wild with ideas, and leaving things so abstract and speculative that the purpose and narrative is lost completely.

Even if these two pieces come without a definitive interpretation, Pain & I and A Giant Dog Bed / Reclining Duet are calming meditations at a time when we need them most.

Take Me Somewhere Festival is now running until 5 June. A Giant Dog Bed / Reclining Duet runs until 28 May at 3pm (BST), while Pain & I is available on demand.

The full programme and ticketing information can be found on the festival’s official website.

Photo: Take Me Somewhere.

By Liam O’Dell. Liam is a mildly deaf freelance journalist and campaigner from Bedfordshire. He wears bilateral hearing aids and can be found talking about disability, theatre, politics and more on Twitter and on his website.