New School

25 April 2012 | 12:02 pm | Liza Dezfouli

It’s not often you get to see or experience something utterly new and unpredictable but theatre company Fish & Game is challenging that with Alma Mater, a performance/installation/filmic experience so original it almost defies description

It's not often you get to see or experience something utterly new and unpredictable but theatre company Fish & Game is challenging that with Alma Mater, a performance/installation/filmic experience so original it almost defies description. “A filmic journey for one” is one way of understanding this work which astonished audiences at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, resulting in a raft of lavish reviews.

“We're exploring how to experience theatre in different ways,” says Eilidh MacAskill, who, with Robert Walton (now teaching theatre at VCA), comprises Fish & Game, an 'interdisciplinary duo' based in both Glasgow and Melbourne, who give themselves the brief of coming up with not only new works but new forms in which to present them. “We explore form as well as new content with each new work,” MacAskill explains. “We try to compose a theatre experience in different ways, looking at all the potential of a live event and how to share that with audiences.”

Alma Mater happens like this – you go into a specially constructed space (basically two boxes) with an iPad and headphones and thereupon find yourself alone in the bedroom of a little girl. “It's almost a blank space,” continues MacAskill. “A white room with a little bed and a little seat. You move slowly through it. It's a filmic piece; you watch a film on the iPad and listen to music, an original score by John De Simone, through headphones. It's a beautiful score,” she adds. There are no words; according to MacAskill, what you see and hear guides you around the space. “The room starts to change; these characters come into it and look at you right in the eye; it's an uncanny experience.”

But how can watching something on an iPad not be a distancing kind of experience? “We are used to seeing screens,” MacAskill replies. “We read two-dimensional screens as a 3D experience. It's all filmed in digital HD. The screen is just mirrored in the space around you so you just kind of read it as one-on-one. Your brain puts the two things together: film and space.”

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MacAskill and Walton have been working together for ten years since graduating from their own Alma Mater, the Dartington School Of Arts. “We were doing this kind of experimental theatre course,” recalls MacAskill. “Looking at the history of live experimental live work. The School Of Arts is in the Devon countryside, a beautiful part of England, so we were out in the woods a lot of the time.”

Alma Mater is collaboration between Fish & Game and cinematographer Anna Chaney and composer John de Simone. Before Alma Mater, Fish & Game presented a similar work at the famed Glasgow School Of Arts, the building designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. “It's a particularly beautiful building in an out of the way part of Glasgow,” says MacAskill. “We invited audience to experience the building in a new way. We wanted the building to breathe.”

Alma Mater will also open shortly in London, at the Battersea Arts Centre then in Cologne in May at the Theaterszene Europa Festival. For Fish & Game the experimentation and exploration is never finished. “We're trying out a model for touring, a different way of working; to see how to expand it,” MacAskill adds.