Festival success led by Japanese actor

ORGANISERS are declaring this year’s Physical Fest 4 as the most successful to date, thanks to the participation of some huge names.

The festival, on until Thursday, features experimental workshops and evening events.

Japanese actor, director and teacher Yoshi Oida is involved in both strands of the festival.

Trained from early childhood in the traditional kyogen acting style of the Japanese “No-theatre”, he created his own style after years of performance with Peter Brook.

As part of Brook’s International Theatre Group, he performed all over the world.

Oida is currently giving one workshop taking place over four days, to give those attending a chance to connect properly.

“I try to share what I have studied in Japan and Europe, and from Peter Brook, with the younger generation,” he said.

“We are sharing movement together, or exchanging openness to transmit what I’ve studied in my past.”

All the Physical Fest workshops are sold out, but t some evening events are open to the public.

These include a showing on Wednesday of Have You Seen the Moon? a documentary featuring Oida, who will afterwards give a question and answer session, and the closing party at 3345 Parr Street on Thursday.

Oida continued: “I hadn’t done workshops for two yea rs, and my main aim is not a theatre degree, but happiness. It has helped me as a human being, in how to approach life.

“Before, I felt that life is difficult, but as soon as I started group theatre, I could learn how to live life. So I want them to find a happy life and learn how to live not in frustration and anger, but a calmer life.”

Yorgos Karamalegos, who with Elinor Randal is one of the directors of Momentum theatre, , which is behind the event, said: “This year has been the most successful festival we have done.

“People from all around Europe are coming to workshops, and practitioners are taking part from all over the world . . . It is for everyone who is interested in movement, acting and performance art, and I’m really happy it is taking place in Liverpool as it is a city that is thirsty for that.”

Liverpool festival celebrates physical theatre

PHYSICAL Fest 4 may sound like a festival of physical exercises, but is rather more interesting than that.

Presented by Liverpool’s outstanding physical theatre/dance company, Momentum, it is a festival designed to show just how far physical theatre has come these days.

The nine days of the festival in Liverpool, between June 4-12, provide workshops in physical theatre run by some of the world’s best practitioners.

But, this year, there will also be five free events open to the general public and all with free admission.

Among those running workshops will be Greek performer Selina Papoutseli, international actor/ director Ira Seidenstein, Liverpool dance/theatre artist Maria Malone and Japanese actor Yoshi Oida.

Momentum – performers Yorgos Karamalegos and Elinor Randle – will also be conducting workshops.

The festival is co- presented by the theatre school Hope Street who will host most of the public events at 7.30pm at its headquarters behind the Everyman Theatre.

This will include the festival launch on June 4 which includes the British premiere of Desert Story 2, first created for a Berlin festival and performed by its creator Selina Papoutseli.

A film night on June 5 will also be open to the public and show films from the international physical theatre world.

On June 8, participants in the festival will present a work in progress Une Filet d’Amour from Ira Seidenstein and Jam, an hour-long improvisation.

June 11, at 7pm, will offer a question and answer session with Yoshi Oida, a performer who trained in traditional Japanese theatre but found his own style working with the theatre icon Peter Brook for many years.

The closing party of the festival on June 12, at Bar 3345, at 5.30pm, will be open to the public where they can meet the Physical Fest team and enjoy "drinks and nibbles".

ANIMA, the new show at the Unity, is a voyage beyond the imagination. At least, most people’s imagination.

Who could dream up a man wearing a large fish head, a running race that seems never ending, a dance that becomes a vicious fight, or a girl turning into a sort of bird?

All this happens in Anima, the latest from the Liverpool-based, two-person dance and movement company, Momentum.

Commissioned by the Liverpool Culture Company, this third piece in a trilogy is their most ambitious piece yet, conceived by Momentum’s performers Yorgos Karamalegos and Elinor Randle, in collaboration with Tanya Khabarova and Malou Aurado.

It also uses a lot more technical gadgetry with projections on a large screen, smoke and bubble machines, and an ever-changing music score from Vergil Sharkya.

Its theme is the familiar one of dreams and reality, but with the dreams taken to the extremes.

It opens spookily enough with two caped and hooded figures emerging slowly. One, carrying a night light, wears a large fish head beneath the hood.

The figures sleep to be woken by a series of half-heard radio broadcasts whereupon they start running, running on the spot, but so hard and so furious and so long that with the moving background projections it becomes quite mesmerising.

The scenes become curiouser and curiouser, at one stage Karamalegos slowly pulling a huge skin up his body into which Randle climbs to emerge as a tiny, hungry little bird-like creature.

Karamalegos waves a cape over her and suddenly she is back in her original dress clutching a magic wand between her teeth.

There is a lot of humour in the piece, but also some frightening brutality. No more so than in a dance scene where a sedate dance develops into a rolling-on-the-floor fight between the two; in another scene, Randle becomes an aggressive sexual predator who takes bites out of Karamalegos.

As with their previous work, the two performers do not spare themselves. The result, however, is a piece of theatre that can leave audiences as breathless as the performers.