page4

Showpiece monthly event launches
It has to be said that the curtains (held delicately in place with shiny new safety pins) were more entertaining then the tired masturbation joke of the compere, but that was the low point of a show of mostly highs. The format was fast paced but satisfying with a high quality of professional, energetic and engaging performers, all of whom delivered what they promised. Vignettes of entertaining dramatic and comedic perfomances.
Produced by Alice James, Cardiff Bites is an offshoot of the highly successful London Bites and is supported closely by its big brother. The aim is to provide a very high quality showpiece for inventive and innovative actors/writers in Wales. Cardiff Bites is itself one part in a range of events under the auspices of www.standupdrama.com in London and Wales. This will include "Sit Down Drama" and "Corporate Bites".
Perhaps the most intriguing was "The Wonderful world of disassocia" by Anthony Neilson and performed by Mare Swain and Hannah McPake. Indeed despite the quality of all the prepared pieces this was the only one I would have happily seen expanded to a longer and deeper play.
In terms of humour the highlight for me was the two part story 'Other Hands' by Laura Wade and performed by Hannah O'Leary and Adam Timms which hit the right note of English (and nerdish) sexual frustration with a light comic touch. The one criticism? A happy ending was too much for my dark cynical heart.
Despite the nightmares invoked by Colonel Kurtz's scarier big brother the main impression was of a strongly focussed event; hitting the ground running for an audience eager to do something a little more interesting on a Sunday night. I got the feeling that the success of the first night has energised the organisers and i can only see Cardiff Bites going from strength to strength.
All in all i see myself as a regular and happy punter for this experiment in dramatic entertainment. Hopefully the people of Cardiff will continue to support it. Highly recommended.
Jeff Baxter
September 2007

DirtyProtest project takes off
Take one yurt, one slightly intimidating venue to those of us who may be described as badly dressed and ugly as sin and you have a combination that required some cutting edge theatre experimentation. In fact we demanded it. Unfortunately when you add being 2 minutes late and the only goddamn punctual artists in the whole of Wales all you get is a weak metaphor for the exclusive nature of art in all its forms, brought directly to the people or not. Nevertheless we eavesdropped like good investigative journalists. Tents are handy for that.
£4.10 for a bottle of not particularly good cider and gods knows what for a martini that tasted like socks may have been the cause of the initial ennui at good old Milgi but the sound of the cutting edge drama was the real killer blow. Is that the dulcet tones of a valleys working class kitchen sink drama? I think you'll find it was. Lots of swearing natch. Most cutting edge in this most English of Welsh places. We briefly pondered the scenario of lifting the rotund tent and all its contents and plopping it down gracefully on the Gurnos estate just to witness the looks on the faces of the patrons as they faced the non-dramatised version of that reality. Logistics, the only barrier.
Still on the face of it the intention was well founded. Fed up with seeing the same old grey hairs of the stalwart theatre going classes, up and coming young playwright Tim Price has taken action at least in some form. Determined to resist the clarion call of the establishment Mr Price has tried to innovate in the delivery of new works to a new, younger audience in untraditional venues and for this he should of course be applauded. Up to a point. Surely a more fundamental question is what can dramatic theatre deliver in this day and age and in this place. What do Welsh playwrights represent? What exactly is the purpose of theatre anymore in formulating or exploding the assumptions of the age, when will a play provoke a riot or even a shift in peoples understanding of the world?
Of course this impressionistic account is totally unfair and reflects personal bitterness at not being in the tent pissing out as opposed to being outside attempting to piss in. Please make your own mind up:Western Mail article
Jeff Baxter
August 2007

Interactive art: an experience and a half
The heavy plastic sheets may not have boded well for a warm welcome but the tea and swedish biscuits soon made up for that. In fact when it came to putting a couple of ordinary decent punters in the artistic mood then you couldn get better then the bosch buildings in Llandaff. Unreconstructed industrial building springs to mind although terrifyingly it was apparently a Victorian laundry! None of your asinine antiseptic stuff. Burnt statues of Icarus in the boiler room thats what we wanted and thats what we got. The confusion of what exactly we were supposed to be doing was overcome by the friendly sight of an apple iMac and silly pictures. The end result involved a flaming sword and a ghost with a hand on its head, err, throwing a number of dildos. (is there a name for group of dildos - a calvacade of dildos?) Moving swiftly on we felt the call of karaoke. In a cardboard box. Recorded onto a DVD, magical moving pictures and all. It had a purpose. An artistic purpose and one day i will figure that purpose out. I only hope to discover that the DVD has been destroyed in a freak localised DVD sized fire.Moving swiftly upwards via an intelligent and incisive deconstruction of a piece of work which turned out to be in fact an empty cupboard, the terrifying transmogrification from normal human beings into mask wearing, empty eyed sociopaths led directly to a challenge. Here is some cardboard, make something to express your inner character and then act out a scene on a cardboard background which then would be recorded on a cardboard camera (Please note that the camera was not made out of cardboard.) Swords, boxing gloves, violence both real and staged, blood, sweat and tears. Combined with the masks this made for a worrying insight into the aforementioned ordinary decent punters. Decent no more. We had become artists ourselves.Fortunately time constraints prevented further psychological degeneration and only time will tell (and the exhibition in Milgis from Sept 1st) if the damage to ourselves and the artists reputations is permanent. Fear not dear reader this exhibition provides further opportunity for interaction and messing with the creative mind and balance. Try it, its fun. Mincing and welshing all combined into one.
www.welshing.info/
Jeff Baxter
August 2007