Find Your Eyes
O’Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College
★★★★☆
In the course of this unclassifiable performance piece, Benji Reid, a photographer and theatremaker from Manchester, highlights a quote from the fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto. “I think perfection is ugly,” the Japanese veteran wrote. “Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion.”
Well, maybe. But we are here watching a kind of perfection come into being. The piece is largely taken up with Reid creating still images from the real-time contortions of three athletic collaborators. The pictures are consistently beautiful. Our dancers are firmly honed and even of feature. The closing montage, displayed to music by Björk, could exist comfortably in the sort of coffee-table book that comes in a glossy box.
Yet “failure, disorder, distortion” are there in the deeper background. We are ultimately left in no doubt that trauma acts as fuel.
This is one of those experimental pieces that, early on, trigger the nervy question “Oh Lord, is it going to be like this all the way through?” Pretty much. To the audience’s left a man at a laptop cues audio that moves from ambient electronica through contemporary R&B and on to angular hip-hop. On the right another technician passes the images from Reid’s camera to screens mounted to either side of the photographer and his subjects. We see the performers tangle themselves up in one another, climb poles and, in a particularly odd diversion, pay tribute the late hip-hop artist MF Doom.
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One fascination springs from the demonstration of the photographer’s powers of transmogrification. For the most part this involves subtle shifts between what the eye shows us on stage and what Reid delivers to the screen. Late on he and his collaborators become conjurers as a dancer, raised on a hoist clearly visibly onstage, appears to float unsupported in the photograph.
Reid refers to his approach as choreo-photolist – a merging of theatre, choreography and photography. He has worked hard at firming that amalgam into an attractive, seductive aesthetic. The piece is less successful in conveying his thesis, illustrated largely through deep allegory, that the work is a form of combat photography. He compares his analysis of societal ills – racism, poverty, social exclusion – with what a journalist would do in a theatre of war. In practice this works best when he is dealing with the personal. His treatment of his mother’s experiences after having a stroke risks a too-heady reach for transcendence, but Reid triumphantly pulls off the meshing of sympathy with magic realism.
His own performance is so muted as to be largely invisible. Shuffling about in the dark, Reid could as easily be an electrician or a stagehand incongruously dumped centre stage. It comes as a shock when, as one performer ascends the pole for transformation into a windblown kite, he urges the hitherto silent audience into appreciative whoops. It is touching when, after the strains of Björk die away, he shuffles on stage to thank us in deeply humble fashion. A tricky piece that rewards surrender.
Continues, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Saturday, October 12th
