Choreographer: Dimitris Papaioannou
Renowned Greek choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou takes to the stage in a very wet piece of performance art. As the clothed Papaioannou nurses and nudges a stream of water that gradually fills the stage, he must deal with a nude intruder, dancer Šuka Horn. It’s an intensely atmospheric world dripping with symbolism, visually arresting but somehow ultimately unsatisfying.
With a noirish stage design that makes it feel like the world has been turned black and white, the on-stage setting has the atmosphere of a limbo dimension. The characters are forced to get to grips with ruptures in their realities with the introduction of an “other”. At first, this interaction comes in the form of antagonism, the clothed man wanting to rid his world of the nude man. But a relationship develops as the nude man goes from captive to companion, with electric moments of contact between them.
There’s a sense of primaeval play to the way the performers interact, like the monkeys in 2001: A Space Odyssey throwing bones at each other or Adam and Steve in the queer Garden of Eden. This narrative of archetypes and symbols seems to be what Papaioannou is going for, with the clothed man representing a higher form of humanity and the nude man representing the animal, the sexual, the brutal. Papaioannou links these through the analogy of ink, which when seen both as the fluid in a pen and the sperm of an octopus is the crude building block that begets a higher form of beauty.
The action is often slow, betraying the ennui of the clothed man. Props like a goldfish bowl and a disco ball are brought into the stream of water as if these bizarre actions are merely the day’s chores, perfectly normal.
The thematic lens comes into focus with the knowledge that this is a pandemic piece, conceived when Papaioannou and Horn were in lockdown together, unable to continue with rehearsals for another piece. It has all the hallmarks of that time: claustrophobia, boredom, experimentation, paranoia, madness. Playing around listlessly with a stream of water seems like exactly the kind of thing you may have resorted to after months locked away from others, as is making a performance art piece out of it.
It’s a show with many striking moments with an intriguing narrative thread that’s tantalisingly open to interpretation, and often carrying symbolic resonances akin to Greek mythology as well as science fiction. Papaioannou reaches for deep truths nestled between nods to the everyday and frivolous, with the bare truth of our sexual bodies powerfully on show throughout. Unfortunately, the water play isn’t an interesting enough spectacle to make up for what can be at times a slightly uninspiring performance.
Runs until 2 March 2024
