In pieces

Contemporary dance performance In pieces, written by UK writer Tim Etchells, created by him together with Janpanese dancer Fumiyo Ikeda in Sadler’s wells, is obviously an outcome of two struggling forces. Audience could easily recognize the manufactured isolation by noticing a slice of silent movements is definitely followed by vocal language with great diversity of gestures and facial expression. This mechanic repetition enchants audience at the first moments, however fails to help them escaping from the feeling of boredom and exhaustion later. Furthermore, the balance between audience and performer is somehow replaced by the vocal intrusion into spectator’s personal sensory territory when Ikeda vocally explains her childhood’s misfortune repetitively with the only difference of magnifying the physical language each time. As a result, audience is undeniable challenged by the feeling of tension and discomfort.

In personal perspective, I would like to label it as non-attractive performance. In fact, it doesn’t provide many opportunities for our audience to interactively communicate in between and with the dancer since it’s a solo piece. Unfortunately, it is a risk to do solo as whether you like a solo piece or not is largely determined by whether you like the dancer or not. More unfortunately, Ikeda is far from what I appreciate. However, I am much interested in the critical issues what in pieces raised, that how to deliver a certain emotion to the audience and target on invoking their resonance by maximizing the function of a performer’s body, especially in terms of physical language and language.

To emphasize those two elements, the minimization of alternative elements is absolutely a necessity and efficiency as well. Therefore Richard Lowdon simplifies the stage as a wall and a single chair; Ann Weckx makes barely any clothes more than daily apparel, which is neither a dramatic costume nor close-fitting dancer-wear; the lighting, designed by Nigel Edwards, is natural and concise; and the most importantly, the dancer is not Marilyn Monroe. We could interpret these attempts as an approach towards representation of concession of narratives of language and symbolism of body and an immersion of ambiguous area between the formal two.

Tim and Fumiyo tried but they do not attain the goal. The main reason of this failure, in my point of view, should impute to their aggressions on the successful transformation of extremely complicated sensory in such a tiny piece. Take Fumiyo as an example. As a none-native speaker, she manipulates her conventional oriental body, mocks at “the French” in a British way, kisses in a French way while her face expresses naive even at the age of almost 50. More dreadfully, she is the exclusive communicative tool on stage that audience couldn’t distinguish the illusion of innocent, humorous, conservative and adventurous oriental lady and herself.

On the other hand, it reminds me to put extreme care on the appropriate usage of language in my final show as it is the natural law that as a performative sign, language is a far more introductive and conversely, aggressive than physical language.