Now Not Now theatre preview: Asking questions about time, focus and perspective
As the pressures of contemporary life place increasing demands on our attention, physical performance team Cade & MacAskill set out to explore the meaning of time in a new multi-disciplinary piece
Time is a strange beast. It flies, drags, heals. Sometimes it seems to stop completely, as was the case during the pandemic. In the midst of this disorienting period, physical theatre creator Ivor MacAskill began thinking about his own relationship to time. ‘Like many people, I worked out I was AuDHD (autistic and ADHD) during the pandemic, when everything stopped, and I discovered I loved not doing so much,’ MacAskill says. ‘Since then, I've been learning how differently my brain relates to time. I find it hard to filter out what's around me, so at any moment I might be taking in far more information than the person next to me. Something in the room or in my head grabs me, for example, and time passes in a completely different way.’
MacAskill had been working with fellow neurodivergent performer Rosana Cade for the best part of two decades, and they had recently expanded from a duo into a quartet, with sound artist Yas Clarke and designer Tim Spooner joining up. In 2018 the team had begun creating the piece The Making Of Pinocchio. But due to lockdown it was four years before it could premiere live. No wonder that when the moment came to create new work, time itself was on their minds.
‘One of the sensations of time that we’re exploring is the feeling of it running out,’ says Cade. ‘And relating this to the prevalent condition of daily time scarcity, the reality of living a finite life and also the experience of living within a climate crisis.’ MacAskill agrees: ‘We feel time running out across many areas but, with our attention pulled in a hundred directions, it's hard to know what to do with the time we have.’
It’s a brain-tangling situation. Luckily Cade & MacAskill have form in the use of absurdity to tackle complex, serious themes. The Making Of Pinocchio was widely praised for its examination of trans identity through fairytale, puppetry and furniture humping. In Now Not Now they’re deploying similar surreal techniques (such as mashing-up video playback with live action) to ask questions about focus and perspective. Ultimately however, it is live theatre’s grasp on our shared experience of time that is at the heart of the piece. ‘Live performance is so in the “now” that we're literally in the act of making the “present,”’ says MacAskill. ‘You can’t scroll past it. For 90 minutes, we’re in a room with other people, off phones and together.’
Now Not Now, Tramway, Glasgow, Friday 30 & Saturday 31 October; Southbank Centre, London, Thursday 5 & Friday 6 November; picture: Mihaela Bodlovic.