For the opening show of its annual theatre winter school, Pan Pan theatre company has joined forces with a Marburg-based touring company, German Stage Service, whose versatile performers are directed by the author of the work, Gavin Quinn.
For the First Time Ever
Project Cube, Dublin
Had the original script been in German we might surmise that something had been in lost in translation; English dialogue notwithstanding, that feeling persists.
For almost a decade Pan Pan has explored the limits of theatrical language, both verbal and non-verbal, highlighting states of mind, feelings, hidden aspects of consciousness, and playing with sensory perception. These preoccupations are apparent in Quinn's latest work too: here three characters, two women (Sigrid Giese and Claudia Weiss) and a man (Rolf Michenfelder) enact a series of scenarios using microphones and tape-recorders in what could be, at different moments, a therapy clinic, a military headquarters, a police station, a robot laboratory.
Their dialogue shifts between different kinds of discourse, parodying therapeutic, militaristic and technological jargon. Amid the battery of allusive non-sequiturs are occasional observations that are funny and pointed: Quinn has a satirical eye for the absurdities of institutions and power games.
Yet there's not enough humour to carry the piece, nor are the objects of the satire always identifiable. Surprisingly untheatrical, the work is at times like a private joke from which the audience is excluded. By the end of a long 60 minutes, it's clear that these are three characters in search of a drama. - Helen Meany
Runs until Saturday, January 11th
I Bought a Spade in Ikea to Dig My Own Grave
Project
The time cannot be very far distant when furtive punters will be ducking down back alleys to see films with implicit sex and implied violence. The explicitness that was once shocking is now par for the course. Realism has to compete with reality TV.
Surrealism is the lingua franca of the advertising industry. Almost anything you might ever dream of seeing will turn up at some stage on late-night telly.
So what's left for the avant garde? The visit to Dublin as part of Pan Pan's International Theatre Symposium of one of Europe's more extreme companies is a good opportunity to ask the question. The answer from the Madrid-based La Carnaceria Teatro (literally The Butchery of Theatre) is, perhaps inevitably, equivocal.
At an intellectual level, there is nothing in I Bought a Spade in Ikea to Dig My Own Grave that adds anything to the commonplaces of modernist culture in 20th-century Europe. Created by Rodrigo Garcia, the piece is essentially a continuation of the modernist assault on mass culture. Its depiction of the anomie, alienation and dislocation of urban consumer life is immediately recognisable to anyone who has ever read, say, Eliot's The Waste Land or Sartre's Nausea.
Mocking the bourgeoisie is such a venerable tradition that at this level the piece is not avant-garde at all. Nor is its use of obscene language and nudity likely to be shocking to anyone who watches telly after the watershed. Pushing the boundaries of good taste doesn't carry much voltage when those boundaries are as fuzzy and porous as they are now.
What does remain of the old avant-garde impulse, however, is something that is very easy to state and very hard to do: the refusal to be embarrassed. There is still a certain power in the willingness to take any idea, even a bad one, and push it to its limits. What makes I Bought a Spade so gripping is this unflinching quality. Nothing keeps you alert like danger, and these actors have that dangerous aura of people who will stop at nothing.
It is notable that the stupidest parts of the show are those which rely most on video and projected images.
Two longish video inserts are painfully adolescent. In one, hatred of the system is expressed by making a rude gesture at designer shops and state buildings. In another, contempt for ordinary people is expressed by getting people on the street to put on T-shirts with slogans that, when they are put together, contain an obscene message.
A long slide show, which consists of showing pictures of what are described as the "biggest motherf**kers in history" and is laced with racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic insults, is an equally crude attempt at irony.
Yet just as it pushes bad ideas to the limit, the show becomes potent when it takes a kind of generalised disdain for consumer society and literally embodies it. The three performers - Juan Loriente, Patricia Lamas, and 12-year-old Ruben Escamilla - accompanied at times by an operatic soprano (Anna Maria Hidalgo), have the nerve to use their bodies as the stages for a drama of disgust.
At their best, the images they create have either a raw simplicity or a bitter wit: Loriente's naked body decorated with designer logos, a fierce image of eating, puking and excreting, Christ crucified with hot dogs, a tale of four Christmases which culminates in the blowing up of a Christmas tree, Escamilla body-surfing with a raw chicken, a murder visualised with corn flakes and milk, a dumb show featuring Spiderman and an Ikea shop assistant.
Images such as these, and a stunningly disgusting final act, fulfil one of the basic requirements for a functioning avant garde: showing you things you would not otherwise have seen. Whether you would ever want to see them again is, in this kind of work, beside the point. - Fintan O'Toole
The Pan Pan International Theatre Symposium continues until Saturday, with performances nightly, and talks and public events and workshops at Project and Arthouse in Temple Bar, Dublin. Today: Loose Canon presents a public event (free) at Arthouse at 1 p.m. Booking 01 881 9613/4, information and workshop booking 01 2800544 www.panpantheatre.com
