Mesh, Oxford’s first International Youth Festival, organised by the Pegasus Theatre, ended last weekend. It has been such a success that it will take place again next year. Young performers came to Oxford from France, Croatia, Russia,The Netherlands, Palestine and Germany. There is no threshold of standards for the groups, or definition of the level of training they should have had. The idea is that everyone brings something to share, and each evening’s show is discussed the next day by all the young performers.
Inevitably, standards vary. The German contribution came from the Bertolt Brecht Gesamtschule, a secondary school in Bonn. The piece is called Spaces Outside and Inside of Me, and has been created and choreographed by the pupils themselves, with help from their teachers.
“The dancers, using their bodies, will build the architecture and forms of a city”, says the programme note.
“The surroundings will feature less and less, until the dancers are alone, each one inside his [and her] very own personal space, bringing the audience into an atmosphere of heart and soul”.
That’s asking a lot of secondary school pupils with very little training, but what they did produce was a complex and intriguing performance composed of many episodes, including a girl in a shiny evening gown massaging herself with strings of pearls. Three girls spring in and out of their trousers, and, later, a boy lies dead on the stage; three girls laugh hysterically, while two others mourn over the corpse. They attempt to sweep the cadaver away with a broom, at which point he springs back to life.
It isn’t easy to relate such events to the sequence the six girls and four boys have set themselves, but they have clearly put a lot of thought into how to bring about their aim. Have they brought the audience “into an atmosphere of heart and soul”? It’s up to each individual audience member to decide that.
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