Red curtains hang at the back of the space, framing a large screen that hovers over everything. Right now, it is blank. A circular table sits underneath the screen. Three performers are seated there; two in wheelchairs and one in an office chair on castors. A fourth performer sits off to the side. A fifth lies, as if discarded. They are all asleep and dreaming.
A camera on
a tripod, sitting front and centre starts projecting what we can see with our
own eyes. A man, in this case composer and sound designer Marco Cher, crosses to the tripod and pushes it toward the table. We get close-ups of these
performers and we start to hear their thoughts, their shared dream of the
arrival of a man in a slouch hat, appearing from somewhere out of the ether.
Slowly the
performers start to wake up and ask each other questions, inspired by their
dream or their lives. Do they believe in aliens or parallel worlds? Where have
they been and where are they going?
Weave
Movement Theatre, under the direction of choreographer Rebecca Jensen, spins an
emotional experience of disruption and miscommunication through movement, dance
and fragmentary story-telling.
Video of Weave
Artistic Director Janice Florence at home with her husband centres the story of
travelling to America to learn dance and soon, in the theatre, she is spinning
around the stage in her powered wheelchair, while Rebecca Jensen takes over the
camera tripod, spinning around as if dancing in time or in reaction to Janice.
The performers
gather to perform in a shouting contest, where the sounds that come out of
their mouths are animal, bird, inhuman or Elphaba from Wicked. It’s
playful but soon we’re connecting with ideas of communication and how we can be
impatient if someone is inarticulate or their patterns of speech are difficult
to understand.
Later,
performer Anthony Riddell tells the story of how he became disabled, though he
proudly refers to it as “being maimed” because he hates euphemism and trying to
soften the truth with comforting words. His speech is halting and his monologue
is helpfully subtitled, but about halfway through, I stopped reading and just
watched Riddell speak. He was easy to understand, if only we take a moment to
get our ear in.
Weave is a
collective of disabled performers whose work is challenging in its content and
in style. Marco Cher’s sound design evolved through the show from a subtle bed
underneath the work to a more roiling, stormy affect as layers of reality
started to splinter. Harrie Hogan’s lighting was equally mercurial, from
creating shafts of light that held performers faces in otherwise inky blackness
to backlighting performer Emma Norton to create a bold entrance like that of a
wrestler entering the arena.
Flesh Mirror creeps up on you. Early on, the red curtains suggest being backstage with the performers, but as we see their dreams and visions take shape, it took on a more surreal backdrop that echoed the work of filmmaker David Lynch. He often explored how imprecise verbal communication can be and how close other realities are to our own.
Weave Movement Theatre's new show captures a similar kind of off-kilter, inexplicable
uncanny feeling of moving through a world that’s suddenly shifted without us
knowing. It's slyly humorous, unsettling and assured in its vision of bending realities and changing perceptions.
- Keith Gow, Theatre First
Flesh
Mirror is playing
at Arts House in North Melbourne as part of Melbourne Fringe until October 12
Image: Gregory
Lorenzutti
Image description: A man with a weathered face and brown skin, greying hairs at his temples and a worried look on his face stares into a mirror that is shattered. His face is distorted because of the fractures in the glass.
Comments