Friday 2 March 2018

Ugly Chief

UGLY CHIEF
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TONIGHT: 
Heads Up Festival
 gets underway at Hull Minster
Heads Up Festival starts TONIGHT with Ugly Chief at Hull Minster. This will be the first arts event held in the Minster since it was handed over following the multi-million pound redevelopment and restoration project that has opened the historic place of worship up to the entire community.

Hull Minster is proving itself to be a catalyst for the economic regeneration of the Old Town by attracting visitors to its heritage collections, cafe, and to concerts, performances, banquets, exhibitions, and all kinds of exciting events.

Tonight, the tenth Heads Up festival gets underway with Victoria Melody’s most ambitious show to date in fitting and glorious surroundings.

Ugly Chief is a comedy based on true-life events. In 2013, Victoria's father and TV antique dealer Mike Melody was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease and given five years to live. Victoria was put in charge of planning the funeral (complete with eulogies, a New Orleans jazz procession and a congregation dressed in Blackpool FC tangerine). But a year later the doctors realised they had misdiagnosed Mike.

Victoria and Mike decided to go ahead with the funeral anyway and Victoria went to Port Talbot to train as a funeral director. Ugly Chief plays out two funerals – the one Victoria planned and the one her dad really wanted. And Mike is guest of honour at both. As the show unfolds, it unpicks the complicated relationship with a parent whose opinion you don’t always agree with.

Mike will also be running his own version of the Antiques Roadshow during the show and audience members are invited to bring along their family heirlooms and antiques for a free valuation!

Victoria Melody is an award-winning British artist with a background in fine art. She has made one-woman theatrical shows, performance interventions and films mainly about Britain’s pastimes, passions and tribes. Fascinated by anthropology, she immerses herself into communities and becomes an active participant in their rituals as research for her work. In the past she has become a pigeon racer, a Northern Soul dancer, a championship dog handler and a beauty queen.

Musicians James Gow, Steve Pretty (Hackney Colliery Band), Kieran Rafferty and Gemma Storr provide the appropriate live accompaniment for the funeral – including Soul classics and more. They will be joined on stage by a band of brass players from the Hull area.

Ugly Chief’s creative team is director John Gordillo, known for his work with Eddie Izzard and as host and co-creator of the BBC’s The RDA (Recommended Daily Allowance); set and costume designer Lucy Bradridge; musical director Tom Parkinson; and lighting designer Sean Philips.

Ugly Chief will be performed at Heads Up Festival on March 2 and 3 at 7.30pm at Hull Minster. Tickets are priced at £15/£10.

Arriving a Hull Minster was a little challenging
Parking is rare more so on a night
Although thankfully my friend dropped me off and I went in Hull Minster formly Hull Trinity which is hard to not to call it after so many years.
It was my first visit and it's first event since the development.
Walking through the huge main door you enter to a glass porch/entrance leading you into the minster.
Lots of people chatting, waiting and signing in and then to the seats.
Beautifully lit, staggered seating and a great set stage.

I knew little about the play or what would happen but had an open mind.
Slowly and quietly music began to play live
People were chatting and a lady one of the leads came out and began to talk.

The bones of the play were Mike Meldoy's funeral planning and their journey throughout their lives
Some definite up's down's and to's and fro's
What seemed a mix of reality and comedy moments which was highly received.

I began to feel a confusion between the two and uncertain, although I have to admit the emotional pulls meant I could and would focus back on the emphasis on the relationship between father and daughter.

Mine personally was fraught, full of shit and frankly, I wish my own father was dead.
(That's the way it is and that's how it is) 
I give no f**ks what he thinks the mans a bitter, twisted and god-awful human.
No apologies here someone that evil is here and good ones are taken!

Then the play became relatable emotionally and psychologically.
For me, this was a first time this had happened and it unexpected. Making think about my past and future.
There was two key points after that.
One that I had never seen a play that I could relate to like that. 
Secondly that I hadn't thought about my father in a long time.I have had no need to, I cut him off when I was sixteen, although he tried to remain in my life in many ways, his anger fades and I don't think about him again.

I liked the playing, soft gestures and frankly humbling jokes. Eye rolling and reverting back to practice for the show before playing it out on stage live.

A play of two halves, both the same subject one said to be organized the other said to be chaos.
I felt both seemed plain sailing, both equally entertaining and both holding the same questions from myself.

The journey of father and daughter is well depicted in a love-hate, growing up, to full-blown adulthood relations.
Again something I can relate to, I am talking about just me but I feel anyone can relate to rebeliance
or even a time of growing and feeling at odds with a parent.

I can also relate to someone just being at odd's with themselves and shit parenting being hand in hand.
The stand out part for me is Victoria standing up for herself at Art college and doing an installation  called
Pissed off Pumpkin
Telling people to
FUCK OFF
Victoria studied her postgraduate in fine art at Chelsea College of Art. She hated it. The competitiveness and sometimes the downright deviousness of people upset her. She decided she needed to tell them all to fuck off. She set up a video camera and dressed in an inflatable pumpkin costume. Holding a shiny megaphone wandering around the room telling the audience/viewer to fuck off. By wearing a costume and mask she becomes another more able to tell us how she really feels.
Bastard Bee is the most exasperated of Melody’s alter ego’s. The costume is a childlike representation of a bee and wields a chainsaw, interacting with the audience. The bee revs up the chainsaw and tackles the wooden chair with a large amount of pent up energy. He thrusts it wildly facing the camera, a nervous moment for the viewer who is confronted with essentially hysterical ball of fur holding an offensive weapon.
Bastard Bee has also performed at the ‘Seen’ Live Art Festival in 2004. He occupied a cubicle in ‘The Blue X’ a lap dance club in the centre of Leicester where he gave free one to one lap dances with a difference. The dark and murky film shows Bastard Bee dancing to Marilyn Manson’s version of ‘Tainted Love’, manically waving a plastic cricket bat and a pair of fake boobs glued to the front of his outfit. By these sometimes outrageous performances Victoria Melody suggests that similar to the drone (the male bee who is both fully dependant and does everything he can for his queen), our lives and views can be prostituted in order to thrive in society.
I find this totally relatable and before my son died I wasn't able to navigate myself to tell people to 
FUCK OFF 
I was fearful of people's thoughts and feelings towards me and about me.
Which a wasted emotion and strain.
This brought me back into the play and made me feel a connection, yet another wave of feelings within the play.
Now I am much more proactive and give not one fuck over anyone's thoughts, they are nothing to do with me and none of my business that's why.

The play is a rollercoaster, it's entertaining and in the end a harmonious reminder of love, relationships, and family bound by blood.

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