If the body is a landscape then the crotch is an intersecting space of desire and the primal urge. A muscular female dancer wearing skimpy negligee squats on a bench, her tense toes pointed toward the ground. Some distance to her left, a man lays splayed across the floor, his hips and groin constrained by a pair of ubiquitous Y fronts. Disconnecting the two dancers is a rolled out length of butcher's paper. Defying an expectation that this unfurled path should act as a link between the two dancers, the paper instead disappears into a scrim covered booth. The man engages in a seductive, backward crawl; his tumescent groin rubbing back and forth over the roll of paper as he and unfurled path recede toward the booth. He does not however enter the booth, for the allure of a frightened woman sitting on an isolated bench tempts the two performers into a masticating dance; during which there is much barely covered crotch readily exposed. Unrestrained sexual desire it would appear, is at once a pentultimate sin and a fertile release of wild fantasies played out in mental space yet to be experienced. A trapdoor into a dangerous world governed by one law: survival. As was the case in the Greek myth Orpheus, do not look back toward love already trodden, lest he or she with tempted gaze be forever condemned to burn in a bad love incapable of being extinguished. A fire that burns most fiercely in that intersection of lust, and that which might have been but never will, the genitalia of the soul.
And yet once this Pandora's Box is opened, it is never easily closed. Emanating forth from within the booth of fantastic shadows is a cavalcade of imaginative material. A second female dancer appears, wearing a red hooped dress; within which another women is concealed. A distorted shadow of bovine appearance is cast upon the scrim; one suggested by two flapping breasts that cannot be contained. A pair of red shoes - obligatory in any fairy tale - are then somehow suspended from the ceiling, before being slipped into by a dancer descending from the heavens. While all the time this imagery flushed from the back brain is casually observed by the same male dancer mentioned above, wearing a cardboard cut-out white tux, and carefully inclined upon the bench. What began as a tryst between two lovers becomes a competition for affection. The redolent imagery is at times so foregrounded by its contrivance that it becomes difficult to ascertain where the tryst ended, and its symbolic narrative begins. Perhaps though, Clickety Clack is a performance less comprised of a sequence of signs that contribute to a story, and more the presentation of images that bear no relation to events occurring in the actual world. Its motto appears to be be: this is a highly imaginative world within which the audience will make of it what they will... While the second show on this double bill, Aoroi, although more menacing in tone, is in effect not dissimilar.
Rats or cats, or perhaps, foxes hiding in the grass at night when terrified by the presence of spotlighting shooters, wade forward from beneath a curtain. Each animal's incandescent eyes are LCD lights propped on dancer's heads. Their mawkish movements exemplify exploration in the undergrowth; each searching for a golem who soon appears, dead keen on seducing all and every female into acts of profanity. Alongside his devilish demeanour, this manipulator of women outlines in tiny red candles a path leading nowhere else but toward and into his fiendish lair. Once again, the motif of the path is one of temptation. But unlike Clickety Clack, in which this path led toward a whimsical release of playful and gratuitous imagery, Aoroi's path is an express trip to the dark heart.
Considered together, Clickety Clack & Aoroi is a rumination upon the choice that confronts us when it becomes time to choose an appropriate partner. The show asks: who is right for me ? The devilish, carefree, reckless and often destructive spirit, or the safe bet that is the stay at home romantic who will see it through until the end. Of course, the same choice is rarely a simple one, as recent events in the Joseph Fritzl case confirm that the up standing, socially respectable individual can easily conceal a tortured and despicable secret. Important to note though is that Clickety Clack & Aoroi's manichean world is one underscored by a Christian dilemma. Adam and Eve, Good and Evil, The Garden of Eden and ultimately, a way of behaving that will result in judgement passed and an after-life in heaven or eternal damnation in hell. For the many people inclined to this manichean world view, catch Liquid Skin's double bill and you be the judge.
Direction & Choreography:
Rochelle Carmichael
Performers: Kathryn Newnham,
Caroline Meaden, Alice Dixon,
Michael Kopp
Illusionist: Ross Skiffington
Light: Thomas Lambert
Design: Andrew Thompson
Costume: Rochelle Carmichael,
Michael Kropp & Sarah Carmichael
May 21-31, Theatreworks, Melb.
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