Spy Monkey explores death through clowning and pantomime

Opening the series of performances for the Formosa International Arts Festival is the English group Spy Monkey with the rollicking Stiff?Undertaking, Undertaking, which has already had audiences in stitches in the highly competitive environment of the Edinburgh Fringe.

The troupe, founded by Toby Park, Petra Massey and Aitor Basauri come from a mixture of performance backgrounds. They met while working in a Swiss company that specialized in large spectacle theater, and according to Park, they found that the comedy that was taking place in the dressing room that the three of them shared was funnier than the show they were supposed to be putting on. They went on to become the founding members of the action theater group Spy Monkey, a kind of "chamber group" of physical theater artists, distilling the visceral energy of large-scale shows into a more intimate kind of show.

Part of the reason for the creation of Spy Monkey was the desire of the three founding members to have artistic control over their work, something not always possible within the theatrical establishment where theaters, directors, writers and others impose a framework in which actors perform. "Instead, we work out what we want to do and then hire a director and other personnel," Park said. "In a sense it is basically about control."

Another area in which Spy Monkey, and an increasingly large number of groups around the world, is in a strong shift towards physical theater at the expense of conventional text-based theater. From the point of view of Serina Chen (陳琪), physical theater is the direction of the 21st century. "It is very difficult to export text-based theater," she said. "The appeal of physical theater is much more direct, it is international in a way that text-based theater can never be."

Spy Monkey in some respects sets out to undermine convention insofar as Stiff is a parody of a play, a performance by a stuffy Royal Academy actor (played by Parks) to create a tragic and moving show to mourn the loss of his wife. Unfortunately, the other characters are not particularly cooperative and what follows is a series of comic set pieces that draw on the tradition of slapstick and vaudeville. The conventional categories are constantly being crossed, and as one critic put it, the show is a mixture of "Marx Brothers, Monty Python and Samuel Beckett."

Although the show deals with death, Parks says that it is really about "finding what is really funny about ourselves." The traditions of death have provided a rich source of comic material and although Spy Monkey has never performed in Asia before, they don't expect people to take exception to the macabre nature of the show. "Even people who have recently suffered bereavement have found the work an absolute tonic," said Massey.

The Taipei Arts International Association (TAIA) has brought a number of physical theater acts to Taiwan in recent years. According to Chen, the Association's director, this reflects international trends as well as personal preferences. Apart from the exportability of physical theater, with its direct appeal that transcends language, Chen pointed to Taiwan's poor record in the area of script writing. "Why shouldn't we concentrate on the areas that we are actually good at?" she asked. "After all, much of the Chinese theater tradition is fundamentally physical theater. Just look at Beijing opera." To this end, Spy Monkey will be conducting a seminar and a theater workshop during their time in Taiwan, elements that TAIA has made an integral part of their annual arts festival, which is increasingly acquiring an aspect targeted specifically at local theater professionals.