Pin-drop silence, two creatives, intent staring, contortions, occasional laughter (from the audience) and occasional heavy breathing and lugging (by the performers). That’s as close as I can get to summing up the labyrinth called Megastructure, because its complexity makes it quite difficult to articulate the substance of such an impulsive production.
Sarah Baltzinger and Isaiah Wilson enter the stage to absolute quietness and a watchful audience. They twist and turn practically every limb, every joint in their feline bodies with an arresting, animal gaze. The programme informs us that this is a dance duet whose pieces are constantly being dismantled. What I witnessed instead was the solving of a jigsaw puzzle, in which, the actor-dancers’ body parts became the puzzle pieces. Actor-dancers they were, for I experienced their performance as a mimetic dance that mischievously teased the audience and tested the limits of human bodies whilst attempting to find out what is necessary to create a performance.
Is it resistance in flexibility or flexibility in resistance, that is necessary to create performance? Both emerged and disappeared in the piece. Whilst the production considered music as obstructive (‘music and other distractions…’, reads the programme description) I couldn’t stop wondering: what is unobstructive, then? Is it the fluidity of the movement through the acrobatic flexibility that the performers demonstrated? Or is it the ephemerality of the moments that prompted humour when the two actors’ lips (in)advertently touched, leading to a peck-kiss?
Staring? Teasing? Provoking? Entertaining? I am not 100% certain what I experienced more in this inexplicable 25ish-minute production. But whatever it was, it did bring me one step closer to clocking the terpsichorean-screw.
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