Co-Creators: Daniel Jones, Maddie Mellon and Emilia Nurmukhamet
Klazo in ancient Greek means ‘to scream’. Klazomania describes a compulsion towards repetitive shouting, grunting, and barking, a mental state with some similarities to the vocal tics often seen in Tourette’s Syndrome. Daniel Jones, Maddie Mellon, and Emilia Nurmukhamet’s 25-minute work about living with Tourette’s, KLAZO, is more of a petition for understanding than a scream. Nevertheless, the piece, part dance and part performance art, still carries some emotional heft.
Performers Jones and Mellon both have vocal and motor tics. The former has been diagnosed with Tourette’s and the latter with symptoms of the condition. Mellon is the more obviously adept dancer and takes the major solo role. Both impress in the elegance with which tics have been incorporated into the rhythm of movement and words.
Perhaps what comes across most powerfully in KLAZO is the infectious joy the pair feel expressing movements and words that in other circumstances they may struggle to suppress. There is anger too. Jagged black lines, etched in charcoal, track the nervous pathways in their bodies through which the urge to tic travel.
Much of the piece sees the duo perform with each other, at times embracing playfully and at times indignantly pushing apart. Other elements see the performers interact with plaster cast representations of body parts. The isolated torsos, faces, and limbs dangling from the ceiling presumably intend to communicate the complicated relationship individuals with Tourette’s have with the components of their body that tic. “Can they take it, so we can rest?” Mellon asks of a disembodied white arm.
Composer Kay Rowan’s top-notch musical accompaniment to KLAZO, heavy on new age strings and piano, sees a single main theme articulated in a variety of different ways. Tainted Saint’s lacily gothic white costumes are tremendous too, even though the performers switch them early on for sweatpants.
KLAZO has been through two iterations already and still feels like work in progress. Indeed, one wonders whether, at 25 minutes, there is enough here to justify a solo show. For those who know little about the lived experience of Tourette’s the 30-minute Q&A at the end of the show may well be the most intellectually enlightening component of the evening. But there is humour, pathos, and joyfulness here too.
Reviewed on 23 November 2023.
The Reviews Hub Score:
Tourette’s dance performance.
I went to see KLAZO unprepared, I had no idea what the play would be about. I was amazed at the actors’ performance – “how well they got into character!” – I thought.
And I thought so until the very end, and only when the actors finished their performance and started an open discussion with the audience, I learned that they actually have Tourette’s. I was astonished. I learned about this syndrome more than many learn from Wikipedia because the knowledge was based on the actors’ real lives. It was very interesting to listen to them, and then I spent a couple of days reflecting on the play, already knowing that they indeed have Tourette’s syndrome.