Features Published 13 November 2014

Evolutionary Leaps

Gecko’s Amit Lahav on the company's creative process, how they created their current show, Institute, and the need to take care of people.
Donald Hutera

Amit Lahav, the founding artistic director of the Ipswich-based theatre company Gecko, would probably qualify as a caring individual. For him one of the most surprising things about being an artist who also heads an organisation is looking after the people he’s working with. ‘It’s about trying to do good by them,’ he explains, speaking by phone from Bristol. ‘Sometimes I get emotionally and mentally exhausted trying to be good at that.’

Caring is one of the big themes underlying Institute, a full-length production which can next be seen in mid-January as part of the London International Mime Festival. Lahav has strong feelings about the opposite of caring. ‘We all know it, feel it and see it,’ he says, citing a number of current stories circulated through the media about human indifference, conflict and pain. ‘How are we able to be so lacking in care?’ he asks rhetorically. ‘Any one of us could very quickly get depressed if we thought about it. But I also find that there’s a tension between displaying a propensity, or even a lust, for caring and just being awful at it.’

Lahav’s brand of theatre thrives on these sorts of tensions, vividly realised via an organic yet long and carefully honed blend of physicality, imagery and metaphor. He has a nose for this coupling of creative instinct with the hard graft of a sometimes highly painstaking craft. It’s what helped to make Gecko’s theatrical calling card, Taylor’s Dummies, such a sit-up-and-take-notice treat in the early noughties. A passionate engagement with finding the most arresting ways of realising ideas has been carried through in later Gecko shows like The Arab and the Jew (a two-hander that drew upon the cultural backgrounds of Lahav and erstwhile  co-director Al Nadjeri), The Race (a Total Theatre Award winner about the anxieties of impending parenthood), The Overcoat (a company-devised adaptation of Gogol) and the ongoing international hit Missing (which, it’s just been announced, will enjoy a nearly three-week London run in March at BAC).

In his pre-Gecko past Lahav worked with the likes of Lindsay Kemp, Steven Berkoff, Ken Campbell and David Glass. No surprise, then, that as a director he’s especially keen to foster a feeling of physical openness in the performers who’ve hopped on his artistic bandwagon. It is, he says, a form of unlearning that’s ‘often to do with remembering – or reminding – their bodies rather than training them in something new. Finding that child-like state can be very difficult for some people. I’m completely turned off by dance shapes. I’ll spend hours, or days, calming down that element in them. Instead I’ll go into very basic explorations where performers try to locate states of being – anger, joy, complete abandon.’ Lahav knows what he’s talking about. ‘I have small children (three sons, currently aged 11, 9 and 2). If they get very excited, for whatever reason, their whole bodies are riddled with those emotional states.’

Tapping into an uncensored and total physical response to a situation is, he says, vital onstage. ‘It means you can be genuinely, humanly available to interact with one another in a vulnerable way – without barriers or social conditioning.’

Lahav is aware of the desire some performers perhaps unconsciously harbour to give him what they think he might want to see. Dub it a ‘Please Daddy’ syndrome. ‘People want to put you in a place of authority,’ he says, ‘whether you want that or not. I’m surprised how important it is, and how much people are aware of it. Sometimes I’m the least aware. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it. But I have become more conscious of it, and so I can ignore it or make the best of it.’

What drives Lahav himself is pretty straightforward. ‘I’m learning all the time about what it means to be an artist and run a company at same time. In doing that, I’m trying to create as much space, energy and money as I possibly can to give us a chance to make something really magnificent. How do we make something where people are able to experience it and feel, “This is about me working through my own life”?’

Consider, in that regard, Missing: the complications of memory and identity are thematic threads common to many dance and theatre productions, but rarely are they woven together with such riveting fluidity and emotional acuity. I was swept up in the unfolding story, as well as the dazzling performance style, even before I’d quite grasped what was going on. Missing swirls round a central character (Lily, superbly embodied by Georgina Roberts) who spends the entire show trying to make herself psychically whole. Lily has superficial friendships, possibly with colleagues, and a disjointed relationship of sorts. Time is an amorphous concept in the production. There are recurring glimpses from Lily’s past, notably of a flamenco dancing mother who might’ve abandoned her as a child, and a mysterious yet benign figure who functions for the adult Lily like a cross between doctor and priest. There are only three other cast members, but together this small ensemble generates a tingling energy. The piece courses along swiftly, light on spoken language but densely cinematic especially in the transitions between scenes. The staging is ingenious. Images from Lily’s childhood and details of her parents’ relationship occur just behind variously sized frames; lit glowingly round the edges, they’re like windows into the past. Treadmills, discreetly used, also help keep the action percolating. The whole enterprise transcends its own slickness, rendering Missing a must-see of high emotional impact even if the exact source is hard to locate.

As Lahav explains, ‘I’m not one to have a simple, literal narrative line.’ This non-dictatorial approach may account for the show’s appeal and, as they say in the business, legs.  ‘Missing seems to have a huge effect on people in a very personal way, and it’s rich enough that it means something completely different from one person to the next. I’m really happy that there’s so much demand for it. Companies rarely get the opportunity to take around something that’s been cooked to such a nice level. We’ve been asked, “Aren’t you getting tired of it?” I say, “No, it’s just getting good.”

‘Our business model is very simple but precise. Usually we have just one show, the only thing we’re working on, for three to four years. It has to work.’ Institute, however, has come along and helped expand and test the company’s capabilities. How so? For starters, Lahav and several other male cast members are in both shows, which must by necessity call for a more careful and considered company calendar. This newest Gecko creation is a four-hander set in an office-like work environment in which we observe two men being put through a series of tasks. But things are not as simple as they may, on the surface, appear to be”¦

I’ve yet to see Institute for myself, but I’m intrigued and I know I can trust Lahav and his Gecko collaborators to concoct something with which I’ll be able to connect. ‘We try to take some of the personal details of people’s lives and,’ he says, ‘twist it in a way. That’s the universal bit. As long as it’s multi-interpretational.’ The final ingredient is the public. ‘You start with something, and at some point it can’t go any further without the audience. You know that you, and the work, are going to be rocked and changed by that final character, or author. You sense it. It’s their imaginations flying wild that enable you to reach the next level.’

Like Glass and others, Lahav is someone who never loses patience with what he calls the ‘amazing evolutionary leaps’ a production makes even as it tours. Prior to the opening night in Bristol he and his fellow actors in Institute spent an entire day fine-tuning three sections of the piece at an extreme level. ‘I completely stand by and trust every version of the show, and honestly can’t imagine anything richer and more detailed. But what was beautiful before can, with time, become even more meaningful and multi-faceted at a deeper level.’ It is, Lahav says, a never-ending quest for the piece’s own potential for theatrical poetry. ‘We can handle waiting for that.’

With Ipswich as home base, and close support from the New Wolsey Theatre, Gecko is in a good place. ‘The company is run extremely well,’ Lahav avows. ‘It’s on a real rise.’ For him this is a source of pride and relief. ‘I can be creative with the budget and look at grant applications, but if I had to manage the company to the level of detail I’ve been doing it’s not going to last. I think I’d die. I pretty much collapsed about four months ago. It was like childbirth. The pain! Obviously I love it. But any internal appointment we can make is about what’s going to provide me with more head space.’

So what is it that keeps him going? ‘I never have to ask that question,’ Lahav claims with a confidence born out of certainty. ‘There’s not a single particle of doubt in me about what I am and what I do. I never have any other quest than this. Not,’ he adds, ‘that I don’t have doubts about what I’m actually doing”¦’

Lahav likes working with students. Indeed, Gecko seems to thrive on education and outreach. ‘We’re always teaching. Working with students is a valuable kind of sketchpad for me, but also for them because they’re treated very professionally. We constantly receive emails and letters from people wanting to connect or get some advice. They’re gagging for it.’ On the rebound from economic downturns, funding cuts and similar dire financial forecasts for the arts, Lahav and company cooked up an ambitious scheme to conduct 52 free workshops in the UK, one per week throughout 2015. Although the Kickstarer campaign the company initiated failed to reach its £10, 000 target, the positive outcome was yet more conversations and contact with people wanting to hook into what Gecko has to offer. ‘It’s not been detrimental in any way,’ asserts Lahav. ‘Something will come of it.’

Asked to name some of the biggest stumbling blocks for budding theatre-makers, Lahav cites fears about making a living. ‘Talking to students, I know that they’re shit-scared about affording flats and things. But you’re not gonna make it if you’re already thinking about money.’ His advice to anyone in the arts: ‘Be utterly, ridiculously courageous and use that as fuel to do what you want to do. You have to keep yourself as worry-free as possible for as long a time as possible. If you worry too much about money, I find it hard to imagine how people are going to make sensational work. If you’re very creative you’ll find a way to make your life very cheap to do what you’ll have to do.’

Sustaining healthy relationships is, according to Lahav, as essential in the arts as it is in life. ‘That’s how I know how to relate to the world. It just happens that I’ve found a medium for my relationships – making shows.’ Since it was founded in 2001 Gecko has developed solid links with BAC, Lyric Hammersmith, The Place and LIMF, as well as the New Wolsey and other organisations in and around Ipswich. ‘These relationships have given us a lot of strength and stability internationally, but also in how Gecko is perceived.’

How, I wonder, does Lahav think the company is perceived? ‘We occupy a certain place which isn’t Complicite or DV8 – huge-level physical theatre. We’re in a thicker band of smaller companies somewhere in between, like Frantic Assembly and Kneehigh. Judging by the volume of requests we get from performers and designers, there’s a lot of expectation about the quality of our work from within the industry.  There’s an integrity here. It’s less a case of “What’s the show?” and more, “Oh, it’s a Gecko show!” With us you can make work that’s beautiful, funny and dark, and you’ll be looked after.’

Gecko’s Institute will be at Linbury Studio as part of the London International Mime Festival in January 2015. Tickets for Missing at the Battersea Arts Centre will go on sale on 17th November 2014.

 20th January 2015

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Donald Hutera

Donald Hutera has been writing dance, theatre, live performance and the arts both in the US and the UK since 1977. Publications and website include The Times of London, Animated, Dance Europe, londondance.com and many others. He also curates both GOlive Dance and Performance and Chelsea Arts Collective aka CAC.

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