What will artists sacrifice to realise their ambitions? – The Irish Times

Most art is bad. So are most people. This is the provocative premise of Yfel, a new comedy from Pan Pan, the Irish theatre company run by Gavin Quinn and Emma Coen. Set at a performing arts school, the play (whose title uses the Anglo-Saxon spelling of Evil) explores the extremes its students will pursue in the name of their work.

As William Faulkner put it, if an artist he has to rob his mother “he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies”. At the Yfel School of Performing Arts, the aspiring actors are ready to make a deal with the devil: there is nothing they won’t sacrifice.

Four students who have survived from an original 16 remain trapped in a training loop. They rotate through exercises, texts and tests in pursuit of transcendence, their ambition exploited by the shadowy figure of the director, who controls their movements by feeding live directions into their earpieces.

The show’s structure is deliberately fluid and immersive: scenes can reorder, beginnings can become endings, and performers navigate both recorded and live instructions, creating a precarious, electrifying performance.

Yfel’s philosophical backbone is provided by Faust, Goethe’s play about a necromancer who sells his soul to the devil in return for knowledge and power. Because it’s notoriously challenging to stage, it seems ripe for Pan Pan’s playful, irreverent approach: large passages are worked in, characters swapped, scenes distilled and lines pulled apart to create a modern exploration of ambition, striving and the limits of knowledge.

Pan Pan, Dublin’s oldest experimental theatre company, is collaborating on the project with Mish Grigor and Marcus McKenzie of Aphids, a collective from Melbourne, in Australia, who are bringing their experimental approach to Dublin audiences for the first time.

At Dancehouse, in the middle of Dublin, the cast are in the middle of rehearsing a scene that features Faith Jones as a tyrannical dance instructor. The sequence, titled Stooping to My Level, has her coaching students through a very simple move that she approaches with militaristic brutality.

“A lot of it is deliberately silly,” Grigor explains. “Marcus and I both went to drama school, and when you look back at the strange exercises you do there – rolling on floors, screaming vowels, pretending to be a tree – they’re ridiculous and sometimes humiliating. But we also deeply believe in them, because those exercises eventually build the technical skills you need to be an artist.”

The school in Yfel, McKenzie explains, “sits in that space where residencies and conservatoires can start feeling a bit culty, intense and absurd”.

Both have experience of the kind of cultish intensity they’re poking fun at. “We’re from the last vestiges of that older era of training, the military, boot-camp style,” McKenzie says.

Grigor agrees. “There’s a whole school of theatre training built on breaking people down,” she says. “The idea is that constant criticism builds internal resilience, makes you ready for whatever the industry throws at you. I remember stepping on to the studio stage and someone immediately saying, ‘Oh, this is shit.’ I’d literally just walked in. You never know if it’s meant to be an exercise or just the director’s ego.

“Ego is central: the ego of the artist, the ego of the director and the attempt to destroy the ego completely. In a way the audience is watching us train, watching the ego get built up and dismantled again.”

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This theme has rich dramatic and comic potential.

Grigor describes how they have deconstructed the processes of training and rehearsing for Yfel. “It started months ago with hours of improvisation. Those recordings were edited and re-recorded, and then we perform them through headphones. It’s a cycle we step into, and the audience is part of that rhythm.”

Yfel is interested in the long overlap between theatre training and cult-like hierarchies. Alongside Faust, the play draws on theatrical and cultural figures whose towering egos and moral ambiguity symbolise the darker side of artistic aspiration.

Yfel asks its cast to oscillate constantly between sincerity and parody, vulnerability and bravado, discipline and chaos. It becomes impossible to tell where the training ends and the performance begins – an ambiguity the piece actively courts.

For Faith Jones, that playful sensibility feels almost like home. “I started working with Pan Pan when I was 16, in a youth-theatre project,” she says. “They just kept calling me back. I’ve been touring with them for years now. It feels like I grew up inside their work.”

That lineage gives her an ease with Pan Pan’s unusual processes: the looping recordings, the oblique provocations, the trusting fall into uncertainty. Her long familiarity with their approach becomes an anchor for the newer performers.

One of them is Mazzy Ronaldson, who is making her Pan Pan debut in Yfel – and happens to be Faith’s partner of five years. The pair have a theatre company, but they have never worked together like this.

“It’s our first time properly sharing a stage as equals,” Ronaldson says. “And it’s been really fun. Because we know each other so well, we can be more brutal, more trusting. We can push things physically and emotionally in ways you only can when there’s that history.”

The actor, who is new to the play’s dense textual world of theory, cults and performance history, laughs at the steep learning curve. “At the start we were probably the least educated about all the references: the cult stuff, the performance-art texts, the gurus. It was daunting but exciting. Pan Pan doesn’t want perfect recall; they want to see what sticks in your mind and how it transforms into something live.”

That sense of spontaneity is heightened by the show’s use of live direction, a technique Pan Pan has refined over years of experimentation. “We’re fed lines and instructions in our ears,” Jones explains. “Some recorded, some given live by the director, so every night shifts … It’s incredibly hard to split your brain like that, but it’s also really fun; it makes the whole piece come alive.”

As the conversation winds down, Grigor circles back to the bigger questions that sit beneath the silliness. “Theatre lets you sit inside the blur of ‘What, actually, is art?’ It’s a question no one really knows the answer to, not even the artists who are meant to be experts.

“What is art? What does it do? Why do we have it? Why do we need culture? Theatre is a way of living inside those questions rather than pretending they’re solved.

“Live performance gives you this concentrated experience of togetherness. And it takes skill to make that exciting, not just something that happens. When it works, even for an hour, it can be transformative. The problems in the world stem from a problem with imagination. We’re trapped inside systems we don’t know how to navigate, and art helps us practise thinking differently.”

I’m reminded of a line the writer and critic Mark Fisher used: it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

“Exactly,” Grigor says. “I’m not saying art has to save the world. It can be stupid, joyful, cathartic. A big laugh, a big cry, a weird hour away from your life, that’s reason enough. But I also believe art can help us navigate the systems we live in, and even help us escape them.

“If artists have the capacity and the wherewithal to think and to dream, then some of them will do things that genuinely change the world.”

A comedy about the absurdity of artistic striving with big ambitions of its own. Very Faustian.

Yfel, staged by Pan Pan, opens at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, on Saturday, December 6th, and runs until Saturday, December 13th