THE Live at Project mini festival reached an impressively high note last night with performances from John Byrne and Wendy Houstoun, two very different practitioners who have each developed some sophisticated ideas about speaking with an audience.
John Byrne's entirely seductive style involves using semi improvised stand up to create a resonant personal and political history of the North, piling up a succession of nervous gags that may be hilarious, but might as easily be thinly disguised revelations of angry wounds and deep personal grievance. .,
A Man With Guts opened with the reedy Byrne standing upstage, probing his abdomen for something that has gone missing. He has, we discover, lost his faith. He asks around perhaps somebody saw him with it earlier? He inquires of the stalls, and then starts to ask the "gods", but corrects himself. Of course, there are no gods. But, as the gags spray out Jesus was a good host, Byrne says before projecting a picture of Leonardo's Last Supper, never had any trouble getting people round the table no preconditions a sense of wild panic, even despair, gathers.
Wendy Houstoun is a contemporary dance practitioner of considerable and on the strength of her Project performance deserved reputation. She might easily be the contemporary dancer for those with no sympathy for the genre. Her cleverly structured piece, Haunted, combined dance with spoken narrative, music and comedy to produce a compelling hybrid. Shaking free of the impersonality which can dog such work, Houstoun skillfully reunites gestures and ideas as she shapes her every bend, sway and drop into a brilliantly articulated outcry against the brutality, greed and self obsession of contemporary Britain.
