Feather Mammy
Father’s mother’s sister’s brother’s daughter’s son
Hip-bone connected to
Heart beating outside my ribs
Blood thickens
Mind stops
Birds crack like ice
Words form as frost on my skin
My body fills with gas and I float away
Horns roar; I dance
My shoes don’t fit too well
Chicken skin fits like shit
Covered in feathers, quills full of ink
Shake my legs off
Arms but no body
Nothing to eat for days
Looking towards the sea for something to change
Feet out of control
I wave and wave
My back of chain links and iron scales
Feather mammy; out of reason.
Dancers:-
Florencia García Chafuén
Brian Hartley
Judith Milligan
Alex Rigg
Musicians
Joel Sanderson
Anders Rigg
Xanders
Rudi Zygadlo
Design & Direction
Alex Rigg
Margaret Kirk - The Skinny 22nd August 2009
Four figures appear at the entrance to Dance Base. Strangely attired, they twitch and stumble, gradually making their way into the Grassmarket. They scatter green sand; they frighten a passing official; collect an audience as they round the streets; trip over cobbles and make their way towards the castle. Attracted by ragged music from a wayward xylophone, they climb the stairs. Welcome to Feather Mammy, Alex Rigg's typically eloquent live art puzzle.
Rigg's work seems to exist in a cultural vacuum. Despite the references to grafitti and butoh, it feels timeless. The costumes are amalgams of safety gear, camping equipment: the four Mammies could be travellers from another planet, or colourful migrants on an unknown journey. By the time they reach Dance Base's back garden - now convulsing to a vicious dub step - they might have found home, or extinction.
Feather Mammy is not vague, as every gesture, every lurch, builds the characters. It is, however, ambivalent, forcing the audience to look closely, think hard. It is a blank slate, a screen for the viewer to project a personal interpretation.
Because of this, it can be read through multiple filters. There is a connection to burlesque, with the emphasis on character and costume. It could be butoh, thanks to face paint and idiosyncratic patterns of movement. It could be contemporary dance, street theatre, busking. It relates to the endurance performances of live art. Nothing is fixed, only the inexorable progress of the four bodies and their mysterious attraction.
Perhaps alone in the Fringe, Feather Mammy draws in the punters even half way through the performance. Passers-by, fascinated by this perverse pilgrim's progress, follow the players back into the studio, paying at the door for a show that they have caught in the street. The finale, uncertain as everything else, sees Feather Mammy scratch at the doors of the dance studio, desperate to enter: a highly iconic image of the piece's own relationship to dance. It is outside the tradition, but scraping desperately to enter. That the characters fail, and fall at the door, does not echo an artistic failure. Rigg is slowly coming in from the wilderness, bringing back his secrets.
Mary Brennan - Glasgow Herald
Actually the downpour added something unexpectedly poignant to Oceanallover's Feather Mammy (****). As the four barefoot, raggle-taggle figures edged and juddered into the Grassmarket, their slow - and heavily burdened - progress up the steps towards the Dance Base roof garden took on a sodden, chilling aura of endurance and determination. Hair became plastered to skull, the ritual pigments, part of elaborately emblematic costuming, drizzled down bodies and clothes trickled water down bare limbs. But, as if lured by chiming musical sounds, they kept going. Only laying down their baggage of bedrolls in the safe (albeit squelching) grassy haven of the venue's top level. As an image of survival, migration and eternal journeying, it was genuinely affecting, and while Alex Rigg and his companions slogged on, passers-by were certainly stopped in their tracks.
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Shambelli House - September 2009 Feather Mammy Snail, says it all, the spiraling out and down, the expanding, the annual depositions, the defense, the separation, demarcation, the house. Sliding forwards carrying a curved and polished record of all previous journeys. What are clothes but small houses, compartments in which to place ourselves, labels to identify, skins to slough for growth. What are clothes if not bizar, like a cow in trousers or a spider with a wooly hat. Here are mine, my signifier, my stylistic abode, my laurels to rest on, my station and standing, my label. I am wrapped and concealed, preserved from vision and the clarity of knowledge, a home for speculation whose form and content have been surveyed by a select few, whose intrinsic value is placed at the head, whose colours can be changed more than once in each day, whose sell-by-date is approximate only, whose nutritional value is rarely tested, whose returns label was lost, whose catalogue code is too long to remember, whose method of delivery varies dependent upon belief.
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