★★★★☆

Before this evening, I had never seen a live improvised comedy show in my life. I was excited but a little bit worried about the imminent threat of audience involvement, which the Imps were so insistent would be a part of this show. I entered the Simpkins Lee theatre and plucked up the courage to sit at the very front – this turned out to be a very good decision.

The whole concept behind Hyperdrive is to do something genuinely innovative – to take that flourishing medium of improv, with all of its infinitudes of possibilities, and to smash it unrelentingly into the glittering world of internet communication, social media, and the silicon valley age. This show got off to a phenomenal start, with a ‘loading screen’ from three enormous projectors exclaiming that the systems were doing a wide variety of preparatory tasks – ranging from “Inquiring about the ethical standards of Oxford tattoo artists”, “re-evaluating life choices”, “annexing Crimea”, “problematizing gender binaries”, “testing burning jet fuel on steel beams”, and most intriguingly for me, “seducing reviewers”.

One of the driving gimmicks of the show was the promise of setting up a tinder account, to be managed by a member of the audience over the course of the evening. The pictures and bio of the account were decided through a poll, which the audience voted for on their phones; the outcome of which was a picture of a sliced ham, and a description that pertained to Winston Churchill’s penchant for “dank ass kush”.  This tinder account was then entrusted to an unsuspecting audience member, with the promise of building improv around the conversations that ensued; the audience were able to submit opening lines on a rolling feed on the projector screen.

Sadly, despite the 60+ matches that the ham was able to get on tinder, there was a lack of any substance to the ensuing flirtations which could have led to sketches – as one of the imps was forced to concede “well it doesn’t look like that’s going anywhere”. This was the first in a series of technical mishaps, which prevented this show from fully realising its potential. The next bit involved the Imps improvising a serenade over facetime for the girlfriend of an audience member. Sadly, the girlfriend failed to pick up on facetime, so the Imps were left singing and being filmed on a phone – still very funny and impressive, but not quite realising the potential of the show.

The improv sketches got of to a very good start – a series of images sourced using audience contribution and google made the backbone of a ‘what we did on our honeymoon’ sketch – with the married imps completely unaware of what was going to come up next on the slideshow. Similarly, a sketch where one imp had to read alternate lines from a random text conversation, whilst the other desperately forged a narrative out of the ensuing nonsensicality was incredibly impressive to watch.

The bulk of the improv was built around an audience member’s facebook profile, which was projected onto the big screen – all of the joys of profile pictures from 5 years ago, group chat nicknames and context-less timeline posts forming the heart of a series of sketches which careened wildly from a communist Disneyland, to an art exhibition featuring the director of the Imps turning himself into a burrito. An extended bit about Mary Somerville not getting onto the five pound note was enjoyable, until I realised that this Imps line up was comprised of seven white men and one woman – something about glass houses and stones might have been appropriate here.

Overall, this is a very funny show – packed to the gunnels with energy and some very bright ideas. It took the audience a little while to get into the swing of it, but the comedy really shone when the randomness of social media shone the light on little hints of shared understandings and common truths. It’s a shame that the Imps were occasionally let down by the technology that this show is so reliant on, but I hope this company continues to innovate and come up with this sort of exciting and boundary pushing comedy. 

Rain dance by Steve Wright

What a thrill to be out and about in the rain

without socks or shoes or even a mac.

It’s probably unsafe but we can catch our

death of cold together. Look how the drops

dance on puddles like the skin of a drum,

like a pudding left too long in the air.

I went out in a storm when I was six

and lathered my hair with apple and pear.

You should have seen the neighbours stare,

and my mum behind the curtains in creases.

So slap the puddles with your feet,

give the rain something to dance for.

Note:

With the frequent February showers Oxford has been experiencing over the past week, Steve Wright finds joy in english weather through poetry. Also contained is a useful life hack for those struggling to make the time to wash in the lead up to fifth week.

A study in urban botany

17/1/16

On the bridge behind the Tescos

Sprouting out from the cracks of the pavement

There’s a small, delicate blue plaque

Pinned tastefully to the railings. It reads:

‘Geranium Robertianum flowered here

From June to October 2014’.

The railings have been lovingly repainted

And the pavement has been recently swept-

There isn’t a weed in sight.

In the doorway of a McDonalds

Two homeless men crouch on plastic bags

Discussing where best to spend the night.

Author’s note:

This experience with the plaque did genuinely happen to me whilst out running in Oxford one evening last week- it struck me as such an absurd moment that I had to write it down. After writing it I felt it needed something else – whilst walking to a tutorial the next day I saw the homeless on Cornmarket Street, and I realised how the poem had to end. I like the fact that the comparison gives the poem a whole new level of meaning- looking at what really proliferates on our streets, plants or people.

The Arctic Tern’s Prayer

tell the air to hold me in the rushing heart of it

and keep its paths straight

away from home let there be a land that

flows with fish and flies

and let it taste like it tasted at home

home take this salty scent of home from my head

cut away the memory of its last ultraviolet

flash beautiful beneath me

don’t turn me to a twist of salt to fall to

sea’s saltiness if I look back at my home

let me look back just once let me

look back

Note:

This poem is published in Flight, an anthology in response to the refugee crisis, which launched on the 1st of February. Artic terns spend summer in the UK and winter in the Antartic. Annual round trips extend up to an estimated 90,000 km.

It is not controversial to assert that Andy Warhol is the most instantly recognisable artist for the latter half of the 20th century. This makes the task of putting on an exhibition of his work rather problematic – presenting Warhol in a fresh light is challenging when the man has had so much exposure. An unimaginative exhibition of his work would no doubt still draw crowds, so it is particularly exciting when an exhibition attempts to put together something genuinely fresh, to carve a new-fangled lens through which to view him. Last year, the Barbican did so by displaying (a portion of) his private collection in their delightful exhibition Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector. This year the Ashmolean Museum presents, in public for the first time, over a hundred works from the collection of Andrew and Christine Hall. The collection is predominantly formed of various portraits – of celebrities, naturally, but also of politicians and other artists. It also includes other work, such as some of his Oxidation paintings and an attempt at replicating a Rorschach test, as well as a number of films loaned from the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Curated by veteran Sir Norman Rosenthal, the exhibition is brightly lit. Each piece has a number of lights from a variety of angles pointed at it, creating a criss-crossing overlap of shadows. Jonathan Jones suggests that there are shadows everywhere in Warhol’s work and Rosenthal’s careful curation reflects this notion in the exhibition space itself.

Contextual information is usefully, but not excessively, provided, in each of the rooms, and is sometimes even quirky. A highlight is the backstory of a series of portraits of Ethel Scull (1963), which explain how Warhol, armed with a hundred dollars’ worth of change, took her to a photo-booth and shot image after image after image, before picking the best 36 to use in the commissioned work. The result is a series of images of Scull in a variety of positions and a variety of colourways, which, when placed next to each other, produce a notable sense of movement – as if we are seeing her facial reactions throughout an average day.

A similar effect is enacted by the films included in the exhibition. Two Screen Tests, where people were asked by Warhol to sit and ‘do nothing’ in front of a rolling fi lm camera, are displayed on screens side by side. The focused gazes, combined with the participants’ minute twitches, make for a strangely transfixing (and utterly disarming) experience. A 50-minute excerpt from Empire State, Warhol’s eight hour film of the changing daylight on the eponymous New York skyscraper, is shown on a screen on the perpendicular wall. The juxtaposition leads one to draw parallels between the building and the faces, both standing still in front of the camera but also minutely changing.

Warhol seems fascinated with the motion created through repetition, with his portraits of Watson Powell (American Man) providing an early illustration of this. Later on, we get a small selection of the hundreds of society portraits produced by the Warhol Factory, displayed in a large grid on a colossal wall. The portraits are often repeated with minor changes in colourways. In the same room hangs Twenty Fuchsia Maos (1979), which takes the official image of the leader disseminated throughout China in The Little Red Book and repeats it again and again in a gaudy colourway. Rosenthal’s note to the piece likens the image to the widely disseminated Coca Cola logo, and highlights Warhol’s transformation of a necessarily static image – a logo, or official portrait – into something changing and mutable.

The final room of the exhibition is, in this respect, unexpected, and more than a little jarring. Devoted to his late work, it is filled with black and white pieces which often focus on religious subjects. Subtle changes and the resultant movement they create give way to a preoccupation with dichotomies: between black and white, or ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell.’ Repetition only occurs in the form of positive and negative versions of the same work, further emphasising a focus on the opposition of these extremes (or lack) of colour.

Postulating about the purpose or meaning behind Warhol’s work will always present a problem, particularly given the man himself continually refused to share his system of beliefs. Such an ambiguity can, perhaps, be seen as a reflection of Warhol’s diffidence in regards to his own image – he wore a wig from his 20s, narrowed his nose, and had repeated collagen injections in his later years. The self-portraits included in the exhibition are thus remarkable insights into a man of mystery, in that they articulate a desire for control over self-image. None are repeated like his other portraits, but rather each exists as a singular expression of himself. Yet that is not to say that these expressions are lucid or unaffected – rather, they are personas. As such, the resounding feeling upon leaving this exhibition is that we may never quite know what made the man under the wig tick.