HERE it comes, snaking through the tunnels and exploding out of the basements; it's the 2008 Arches Live! festival, an 11-day bonanza of 20 shows, installations and events designed to blast an autumn wind of change through the grassroots of Scottish
theatre.
The programme began, on Thursday night, with a series of pieces by artists already well known to Arches audiences and what emerged, by chance or design, was a cry of protest against the stubborn survival of certain old-fashioned kinds of patriarchy, and the religious cultures that sustain it.
Maryam Hamidi's Chronicles Of Irania is a blazingly vivid 45-minute encounter – complete with carpets, cushions and tea – with a woman of "Irania", a mythical version of Iran, who is first seen, dressed in a black burqa, writhing in agony on the floor after her husband has thrown acid in her face.
Then, like a sturdy butterfly from a chrysalis, she bursts forth in shining traditional costume and begins to tell us stories: beautiful but sinister creation myths about the necessary subjection of women; a long tale with finger puppets about the failed rebellion of a courtier's wife, and – in a sudden dark shift of tone – tales of contemporary oppression, and of a gay son put to death.
What emerges is a brave, deliberately self-fragmenting narrative about the traumatic transition from an oppressive traditional culture into some kind of modernity; and like a difficult birth, it's a tearing, agonising experience, both exhilarating and frightening.
Cria, from writer Megan Barker and director Neil Doherty, is inspired by the 1976 Carlos Saura film Cria Cuervos. Here, the patriarchal setting is Spain in the dying days of Franco, and the household of a leading military man whose youngest daughter has observed both his emotional cruelty and his sexual hypocrisy.
It's hard to see exactly what Barker's slow-moving 75-minute reflection on this story adds to one of the greatest of all European films; but the show is beautifully performed by Doherty's four-strong cast, in a deep arch transformed by designer Kirsty Mackay into a powerful evocation of a domestic setting shaped by wider political realities.
Adrian Howells's Foot Washing For The Sole is partly inspired by his recognition of how far all three of the great patriarchal religions – Christianity, Islam, Judaism – tend to betray their own highest spiritual values; and by his desire to affirm one of the most simple of spiritual gestures, the washing of feet.
The one-to-one experience of having one's feet washed, massaged, anointed and kissed by Adrian is not only beautiful and comforting, but infinitely thought-provoking. It is as if our thoughtless abuse of our own feet, our main point of contact with the Earth, were a metaphor for our maladjusted relationship with the universe, put right here by the mystical power of touch, and of love.
The full article contains 498 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
