Hush
By Russell Eaton and Michael Fontaine (My Haunt Life)
Mike: Every year at Fringe, there’s a show that you go into not knowing what to expect. You then see the show, and like it, but with the days following, you can’t stop thinking about it and the admiration and love you have for it just grows and grows. “Hush” is that show for me.
Russell: A new company called Madcap Creative is behind HUSH, and they have created something special. From the opening moments of the show featuring someone playing with items that everyone associates with young girls – dolls – this group is determined to make you think. Throughout the show, there are moments that make you question the connections we make through our lives as to what we expect women to be, how we expect women to behave or what we expect femininity to look like.
Mike: They showcase an artistry behind what most people consider taboo subjects. They bring it to the forefront and it’s beautiful to watch. One scene in particular still has me amazed. The skill of how quickly it was set up (and safe). The profile of the woman in the middle of a spin. The peace she seemed to have felt. It was beauty personified.
Russell: Mike, I feel the same way, I loved the beauty of that whole scene. Ever since seeing this show, I have been pondering certain images, recalling how certain moments made me feel. There is beauty here. At times erotic and captivating, at times oddly distant and cold, the women in this dream-like series of scenes are challenging us as well as entertaining us.
I would also like to say I enjoyed the excellent score for the show. It seamlessly moves from eerie underscore to pulsating dance rhythms.
Mike: This is Madcap Creative’s first show and if this is an indication of where they’re going and what they’re doing, then I am in for any and everything they do.
By Russell Eaton and Michael Fontaine (My Haunt Life)
Mike: Every year at Fringe, there’s a show that you go into not knowing what to expect. You then see the show, and like it, but with the days following, you can’t stop thinking about it and the admiration and love you have for it just grows and grows. “Hush” is that show for me.
Russell: A new company called Madcap Creative is behind HUSH, and they have created something special. From the opening moments of the show featuring someone playing with items that everyone associates with young girls – dolls – this group is determined to make you think. Throughout the show, there are moments that make you question the connections we make through our lives as to what we expect women to be, how we expect women to behave or what we expect femininity to look like.
Mike: They showcase an artistry behind what most people consider taboo subjects. They bring it to the forefront and it’s beautiful to watch. One scene in particular still has me amazed. The skill of how quickly it was set up (and safe). The profile of the woman in the middle of a spin. The peace she seemed to have felt. It was beauty personified.
Russell: Mike, I feel the same way, I loved the beauty of that whole scene. Ever since seeing this show, I have been pondering certain images, recalling how certain moments made me feel. There is beauty here. At times erotic and captivating, at times oddly distant and cold, the women in this dream-like series of scenes are challenging us as well as entertaining us.
I would also like to say I enjoyed the excellent score for the show. It seamlessly moves from eerie underscore to pulsating dance rhythms.
Mike: This is Madcap Creative’s first show and if this is an indication of where they’re going and what they’re doing, then I am in for any and everything they do.
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"Hush" - The Freedom Found in Fantasy...
By Earnest Kearney (The TVolution)
Like little boys with their toy soldiers, so, too, are little girls with their dolls: They weave webs of fantasies. But nothing, as psychologists have finally realized over the recent decades, is quite as important as the pretend world of a child.
Bruno Bettelheim, in his classic study, The Uses of Enchantment, holds that the human child transcends infancy via a bridge of fantasy. That fantasy liberates the child from the “limited and provisional hopes of what the future has in store for them.”
In Hush, the performers of Madcap Creative, take you into the doll play of a little girl left alone in her room. As the girl (Sarah Mann who co-directed) engages with her dolls, they engage her with imagination entering her fantasies as dancers reflecting her own flights of fancy.
The troupe creates images suggestive of attitudes and hopes, and of the realms all little girls in our society must test and explore as they discover and defy the boundaries set for them.
The Ballerina who brazens forth into the seductress (Alyssa Marquez), the bound and hanging doll (Corrin Evans) who in her rope restraints finds a freedom verging on flight, and finally a carnage of bursting balloons in a celebration of sexuality by Lila Sage (co-director of the piece), Zoe Kirkpatrick, Lyssa Morgan and Rachele Donofrio.
You can assign whatever significance you choose to the exploding balloons stomped on and pricked: illusions, pregnancy, the obsession with “boobs,” but in the middle of the destruction these take on the sense of liberation of a child when sitting amongst and playing with her dolls.
In the final analysis, dolls and toys are the tools the child uses to embody aspects of its personality too complex or intimidating for him or her to fathom.
The dancers of the Madcap Creative troupe skillfully expressed how — through the projection of fantasy play — the child masters its own inner processes and is awarded with the potential that comes with growth; and for that a GOLD MEDAL.
By Earnest Kearney (The TVolution)
Like little boys with their toy soldiers, so, too, are little girls with their dolls: They weave webs of fantasies. But nothing, as psychologists have finally realized over the recent decades, is quite as important as the pretend world of a child.
Bruno Bettelheim, in his classic study, The Uses of Enchantment, holds that the human child transcends infancy via a bridge of fantasy. That fantasy liberates the child from the “limited and provisional hopes of what the future has in store for them.”
In Hush, the performers of Madcap Creative, take you into the doll play of a little girl left alone in her room. As the girl (Sarah Mann who co-directed) engages with her dolls, they engage her with imagination entering her fantasies as dancers reflecting her own flights of fancy.
The troupe creates images suggestive of attitudes and hopes, and of the realms all little girls in our society must test and explore as they discover and defy the boundaries set for them.
The Ballerina who brazens forth into the seductress (Alyssa Marquez), the bound and hanging doll (Corrin Evans) who in her rope restraints finds a freedom verging on flight, and finally a carnage of bursting balloons in a celebration of sexuality by Lila Sage (co-director of the piece), Zoe Kirkpatrick, Lyssa Morgan and Rachele Donofrio.
You can assign whatever significance you choose to the exploding balloons stomped on and pricked: illusions, pregnancy, the obsession with “boobs,” but in the middle of the destruction these take on the sense of liberation of a child when sitting amongst and playing with her dolls.
In the final analysis, dolls and toys are the tools the child uses to embody aspects of its personality too complex or intimidating for him or her to fathom.
The dancers of the Madcap Creative troupe skillfully expressed how — through the projection of fantasy play — the child masters its own inner processes and is awarded with the potential that comes with growth; and for that a GOLD MEDAL.
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