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Showing posts with label mime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mime. Show all posts
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Thursday, January 22, 2015
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Dystopian cyberpunk mime theatre? Sign me the hell up. When I read about Light, described as "blending anime-style storytelling and a pulsating soundscape"" I couldn't get a ticket fast enough. I always enjoy science fiction theatre; it's difficult enough to realise a fantasy world in cinema, let alone on stage. So companies that take up the challenge tend to be of the ambitious, experimental and bold variety.
Those qualities apply in spades to Theatre Ad Infinitum's Light, but sadly they don't add up to a particularly enjoyable experience. Staged in the depths of The Pit - the Barbican's deepest theatre - we're utterly entombed in concrete. Down here nothing gets in, not the sounds of the traffic, not phone network signals and certainly not a ray of sunlight. As we begin we're plunged into pitch darkness and tossed forward in time to an Orwellian nightmare.
This is future of interconnectivity between humanity, where thoughts can be tossed between skulls as easily as sending a text message. These wonder implants might have once had the potential to unite us in empathy, but they're been appropriated by an authoritarian government to police the thoughts of the citizenry. It's now illegal not to be implanted; the memories, desires, dreams and ambitions of every person filtered through state surveillance.
Our hero is Agent Petrus, charged with hunting down those who've had their implants removed, torturing those he captures and working his way up the ladder to the terrorist's leader. It's a stressful job and adding to his woes is that he's the son of the Glorious Leader, who considers him a disappointment in failing to stamp out the resistance. But things are soon to change for Petrus as he discovers the true nature of his world, the past those in power would rather keep hidden and some dark family secrets.
In every respect this is dark stuff; from the crushing misery of the futuristic surveillance state to the literal darkness we're enveloped in. Told entirely through mime (with dialogue on surtitles above) the primary methods of communication are motion and light. This is extremely minimalist theatre; what's on stage pared right back to the bone. Characters wear identical black jumpsuits and move between pools of torchlight, the scenery created through a couple of strips of LEDs held in different configurations.
It's undeniably visually striking, the lack of detail allowing us to imagine a future far more detailed than anything a production designer could cook up. There's a film-noir aesthetic to the hunts and interrogations; the cast's faces uplit to create a sinister chiaroscuro effects. A dry ice haze that hangs over the stage makes for a literally dense atmosphere, allowing the performers to remain invisible so long as they're not directly in the light. This means they can sinisterly loom from anywhere, fostering appropriate levels of paranoia. Perhaps most cleverly, this technique also allows the company to 'edit' their play like you would a film. In dream sequences we can 'cut' from the dreamer to seeing what's inside his mind, giving the piece an expansive, spontaneous quality that's difficult to capture 'live'.
So with all that going for it, how can Light not be that great? Well, once you've gotten over being thrilled by the novel aesthetics there's not much else to fixate on. The show lasts about an hour, but you'll have seen practically every trick it has to offer after about fifteen minutes. It quickly transpires that no matter how imaginatively you use two strips of LEDs, a couple of torches and some red gels you're limiting yourself.
This leaves the story to hold our attention. On paper it's a pretty straightforward sci-fi tale, but the lack of spoken dialogue makes it next to impossible to empathise with the characters and often makes it pretty tricky to even follow what's going on. Not to mention that the structure is a little wonky, the hero disappearing from the plot in favour of a lengthy flashback sequence. There's a tension between the symbology of the piece (having the characters communicating only by electronic text is entirely appropriate) and the actual enjoyment of watching it.
If this were half an hour long I'd be singing its praises to the heavens. But, as pretty as it frequently is, fatigue rapidly sets in. Light is technically and politically excellent, containing some wonderful imagery and imagination, but just can't quite sustain its aesthetic high-wire act, so I was disappointed when I realised I'd ever-so-gradually become a bit bored.
Light is at the Barbican Centre until 24th January. Returns only.
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
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| SIRO-A |
It’s half past four on a lazy, overcast Sunday afternoon. Monday morning is just over the horizon and with it the ominous promise of work. Last’s night’s hangover is still gently squeezing your brain and right now a nice cup of tea would be just the ticket. The perfect time for a tripped-out electro-rave laser extravaganza!
SIRO-A are a six man performance group from Sendai, Japan who combine dance, mime, performance art and comedy with cutting edge technology, creating a series of optical illusions where the boundary between reality and video is distorted. Everything SIRO-A do is designed to push against this barrier, making us question whether what we’re seeing is a person or a projection of a person.
Aesthetically, the immediate point of reference for the audience are films like ‘Tron: Legacy’ streamlined, neon-bondage cyberpunk. More obscurely, I see straight visual and sonic quotes of the work of Tetsuya Mizuguchi, designer of the dance music/trip-out videogames ‘Rez’, ‘Lumines’ and ‘Child of Eden’. I absolutely adore this style, but rather than futuristic it feels slightly retro, with roots in the early 90s rave scene. As far as views of the ‘future’ go, it’s been superseded by boring old reality.
The music is similarly slightly retro, banging big beat electro tunes, the kind you’d expect to hear ringing out over the beaches of Ibiza in 1999. This atmosphere sends a little thrill of nostalgia down my spine, the kind of pleasure you get when you step into the Cyberdog shop in Camden Market, a reassurance that somewhere in the world is still plugged into the 1990s Matrixy-WilliamGibsony vision of the future.
This is very much up my street, and as pyramid headed robots stalk across the stage firing bright green lasers from their arms to thumping techno beats I had a huge grin on my face and was bobbing my head excitedly. Things calm down a bit after this intense introduction, switching to a more comedic tone, the performers get menaced by a plague of black dots in a sequence reminiscent of a Looney Tunes cartoon, or enter into a frankly surreal sequence about the life of one of the performers, Abe Toshinori.
This humour balances out the cooler-than-thou aesthetic, and also largely avoids the trap of laughing at Japan rather than with it. It also means that while the performers rarely speak we identify with them through laughter. Everyone on stage is effortlessly expressive, whether they’re playing a character or pretending to be a computer-generated robot man. Even more impressively, they make the illusion that they’re interacting with the videos absolutely seamless.
This interaction is something that looks perfectly natural but must be immensely difficult to get right. To take a simple example, there is a white screen with a black dot projected in the centre of it. One of the performers walks on stage, looks at the projection then ‘picks it up’ and throws it like a ball. These are the basics, the rest of the pieces rely on the performer being in the exact right pose in the exact right spot at the exact right time to get something projected on them in a certain way. They get it right over and over again. I found myself wondering what they can even see from their perspective on stage (probably not much) and it became even more impressive.
The PR makes much of the fact that you won’t be able to tell the difference between the performers and the projected images. This isn’t quite true, at all times its obvious which is which. What confused me at times was whether the performers were following the projection, or the projection was following the performer. In an outstandingly beautiful sequence someone dances across a stage as time-delayed rainbow images of himself move around him, creating a morphing kaleidoscope moving sinuously around the dancer. At this moment it’s impossible to tell who is following who, you’d think it’d be impossible to cartwheel the exact same way at every single performance, but if anyone has the strict discipline needed to get it right, SIRO-A do.
The only downside to all this is, unfortunately, the venue. The Leicester Square Theatre is a small place with a low ceiling and a relatively small stage. It’s perfect for stand-up, but a full-on audio-visual experience like this feels a little restricted. I’d cheated before going to this, looking up a video of the band on YouTube. They were playing with a huge projection screen, and the rainbow images above took up a huge amount of space. Not here. The image looks like it’s been chopped off at the top. The smaller screen also prevents us from becoming properly immersed in the music and lights. The music makes me want to get up and dance but I’m stapled to my seat!
Ideally I’d have liked to have seen this late on stage in the Brixton Academy, somewhere where there’s actually room to dance a bit, where the projections can really tower over you, overpowering your senses. The show is on twice a day, at 16:30 and 19:00, both of which seem like way too early for this kind of thing. It’d be fantastic to see this in the ‘right’ state of mind to fully appreciate a room full of laser beams, dry ice, flashing colours and pounding pounding techno music.
Still, I’ll take what I can get. SIRO-A is like nothing else on in London at the moment, a perfect fusion of cybernetic fashion, laser cool and visual oveload. I had a big silly grin on my face the whole way through and can’t think of many more enjoyable ways for a person to spend an hour of their time.
SIRO-A are performing at the Leicester Square Theatre from the 1st February – 22nd April 2013.
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