Viva Lewes Issue #160 January 2020

1927 Roots
Animated stage show based on an index
From the tale of a man who shares his house with
Poverty to a cat that consumes everything it sees,
the folk stories that make up 1927’s latest animated
stage show Roots offer a glimpse into a world both
familiar and strange.
The company behind touring hits including Golem
and The Animals and Children Took to the Streets has
delved into The British Library’s Aarne Index – a
collection of thousands of traditional stories from
all over the world – to create a show that depicts a
weird, warped parade of cannibalistic parents and
tyrannical ogres. As ever, the multimedia company
draws on an eclectic range of styles and influences
to bring the stories to life, from the Surrealist
paintings of Max Ernst to the films of 1960s
French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard.
The show also harks back to the company’s own
‘roots’, explains co-founder Paul Barritt, whose
distinctive style of animation runs through all their
work. “When we started out in 2005 our shows
were far more stripped-back, partly because they
were made with limited resources. They have got
bigger and bigger since and we wanted to take a
step back, to get back to our essence.” The 1927
aesthetic has frequently been compared to that of
“a weird fairytale”, he says, and the magical and
mythical has long informed work such as 2015
show Golem, inspired by a Jewish folk tale about a
man who fashions a creature out of clay to work
for him. “It made sense to make something that
was directly drawn from that context.” The stories
collected in the Aarne Index offered an interesting
starting point, in part due to their brevity: “The index
only gives a brief synopsis of each tale so Suze
[Andrade, co-founder, director and writer] just
used them as a springboard for her imagination.”
While the stories were collected at the turn of the
20th century there is a timeless quality to them,
Barritt goes on. “These sorts of tales have always
been a means of understanding the world and of
making sense of the challenges humans face. Some
of them are undoubtedly a product of their time
but there is a lot that still rings true today.”
While it’s a more pared-back show than their previous
appearances in Brighton, it still bears all the
1927 hallmarks, Barritt says, from the breathtaking
melding of animation, performance and film, to a
live musical score performed on instruments from
a berimbau – a Brazilian, single-string musical
bow made from a gourd – to a donkey’s jaw. Well,
actually, the donkey’s jaw has been dropped now,
Barritt explains. “It doesn’t really work in a touring
show. Places like Australia just won’t let you in with
something like that.” The pitfalls of navigating
customs with a few bones in your holdall; it’s not
a typical workplace problem, but perhaps not so
unusual in the rabbit-hole world of 1927.
Nione Meakin
Roots, The Old Market, Brighton, Jan 3rd-18th.
theoldmarket.com
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