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The Sian Clarke Experience

Black Sheep * The Sian Clarke Experience

Visual Theatre, Performance Art and Poetry

Assembly Rooms, Aug 16-27

by Gareth K Vile

Visual Theatre can be a nebulous term that includes multiple different styles: from choreography to shadow puppetry, it is an expansive category that subsumes genres. Many puppetry companies see themselves as ‘visual theatre’, and even words based in spoken word or poetry extend into clearly visual territory.

Black Sheep is not, strictly speaking, visual theatre, but an episodic presentation of poetry, song and cabaret routines: Kojo Alour is a sword-swallower, singer, roller-skating whizz and poet and Black Sheep is an urgent expression of queer black experience. Between a fan dance and the transformation of a coat into a ghostly mother figure – not to ignore a roller-skating protest with banners and electric wheels – Alour explores her own experiences of prejudice, privilege and self-love and acceptance.

The emphasis on lived experience ensures that Alour’s physical presence is central: while she identifies acts of casual and conscious of misogyny and sexism, the celebration of her unique skills and confidence is embodied in her posture and movement. The familiar burlesque trope of the fan-dance becomes a swirling display of power, and popular songs are retooled to deepen her important message.

The body is also central to The Sian Clarke Experience, a live art flavoured extravaganza that is unapologetically angry and feminist. Beginning with Clarke’s experience of being told she could be sexy, or that she is a good girl, it explodes across the stage in a shower of fruit and tinned food, climaxing with an inflatable penis costume and a litany of familiar abuses. The simmering, justified rage is balanced by Clarke’s stand-up talent: a sock-puppet appears briefly, only to be destroyed through her scorched earth dramaturgy. Like Alour, Clarke’s visual sensibility is a mixture of different genres, never settling on one approach but roaming around different experiences to support an explicit protest against prejudice and misbehaviour.

Both of these shows speak to the further weakening of the boundaries between genres, and use the physical presence of the performer to enhance their engagement with the audience. While Sian Clarke uses the visual traditions of performance art, Kojo Alour intersperses her poetry with visual interludes.