Performance

I am excited about this. (The link has been in my sidebar for some time, but has changed recently. Sooner or later it will change again, and this entry will make no sense, but fuck it, life is a moving target.) Shunt's last production, Dance Bear Dance, was really one of the most remarkable theatrical pieces I've seen, hilarious and startling and very, very strange. Even now it's over, knowing it will never be seen again and there is no danger of spoilage, I'm slightly dubious about revealing the startling coup de théatre at its centre -- but of course I will.

Performed in a dank arch underneath a railway bridge in Bethnal Green, the show co-opted its audience as delegates to a conference of terrorists, known only by the names of nations ("The Yemen!"), preparing to blow up a train passing overhead, carrying some mysterious enemy.

The bombing, of course, does not go as planned. There are... complications. As the moment approaches, the promenade audience are dragged away from the conference table and made to stand between a pair of metal blast doors in the arch's brick sides. There are pyrotechnics and strange goings-on on the CCTV. As the train roars overhead, one of the doors is thrown open to reveal a mirrored surface, in which the audience briefly view themselves. That door is closed, and the other thrown open to reveal -- not a mirror, but a whole other audience, gazing back bewildered from their place in an identical, simultaneous performance one archway over.

After a period of panicky separation, in which the doors are slammed again and people shout into telephones, the two audiences are merged. The hideout is raided and everyone (the audience, that is) required to adopt alternative personæ, first as suave casino gamblers, then as the congregation of rather unusual church. There are aerial performances, and a traitor at work, and an explosion; and later on some executions, performed by the eponymous bear.

It was a seriously fucked-up evening's entertainment, but quite brilliant. (Ian, for reasons largely external to the performance itself, hated it.)

As I think I've mentioned before, I'm excited about this:

Les Ballets C de la B produce shows unlike anyone else, raw and often rather upsetting ensemble physical theatre full of madness and screaming, apocalyptic revelry among the marginal and disenfranchised. By the end of each show, the stage is often covered with blood and sweat and tears, the set in tatters, the performers battered and bruised. Foi, returning to the QEH in June for its final two performances after a lengthy world tour, is their best piece yet, terrible and magnificent, moving and memorable, and I'm pathetically happy to have the chance to see it again.

All art, all culture, everything that humans create is ephemeral. Some of it may survive 10,000 years, most manages only a fraction of that -- a whole warehouse of modern British art went up in smoke just this week -- but there's something particularly special about the transience of performance. It functions in the here and now, in the moment: now you see it, now you don't. There's no pause, no rewind, no special features. Later, you can recall it, and marvel at it, but you can't go back.

Well, sort of. Perhaps it's my control freakery that drives me to see these things more than once. Perhaps it's just that I'm prone to nostalgia. I find it difficult to let go of things I love. The fleeting nature of theatre is part of what gives it is power and immediacy, but it's also a taunt.

Of course I can't.
Posted by matt at May 27, 2004 11:55 PM