Creators: Meg Stuart and Tim Etchells
“It’s like the sound of voices coming from another room’” begins Tim Etchells as he watches Meg Stuart contort her body on the bare stage of The Place. She moves more earnestly, and so Tim Etchells repeats his words, only changing the last few words of his sentence: “It’s like the sound of voices coming from the corridor”. Suddenly, we’re transported to a hotel, perhaps, where sinister people talk on carpeted floors, hurrying to their rooms. Stuart moves violently and repetitively. “It’s like the sound of a machine”.
In Shown and Told, playing as part of Forced Entertainment’s 40th anniversary, it’s never clear which performer is leading the narrative. Sometimes, it’s Stuart who, in her movement, prompts Etchells to talk about scratching, while at other times, the American dancer responds to Etchells’ suggestion that “it’s like a clock moving slowly.” She lies on the floor, her scissored legs jolting like a second hand.
She replicates her movements, and he reiterates his sentence, each leading or illustrating the mini-scenes that become ever darker, ever bleaker. He runs breathlessly around her as she jerks or smoothly stretches her arms in the air. “It’s like a star”, he says before she creates other shapes, decidedly not star-shaped. When he talks of busy shoppers on a crowded street, she doesn’t saunter, arms heaving with bags with items she’s bought on, perhaps, Oxford Street on Christmas Eve. It’s never as literal as that.
But if there is a dominant language here, it’s the words spoken by Etchells. These forge the images in our heads, even if Stuart’s movement doesn’t quite match the scenes that he imagines. There’s a thrilling disconnect between their semantics and a rush of joy when the two art forms are concordant, like when she raises one arm straight up in the air, and he sees a building, possibly a skyscraper in Manhattan.
The piece feels totally improvised, but it would be no surprise to see exactly the same show tomorrow. Or, then again, maybe it will be unequivocally different. But what won’t change is the sense of melancholy that the pair weave into their stories and dances. They both tell half-finished stories of disappointment, like the time Stuart remembers a time when she wanted to dance in the rain, but the downpour never came. Or like the time when Etchells arrived at the airport only to find that he’d forgotten his boarding passes. These are disappointments mined from quotidian lives.
The sadness is occasionally broken by the pair blowing raspberries. You can forgive them anything, but Shown and Told always works better when they make wry observations or act out flatliners on stage, a final disappointment for us all.
It’s like so quiet at times that you can hear the bells of St Pancras New Church toll the quarter hours. It’s like they come so quickly you wonder if the chimes are recorded, acting like an audio cue for the performers to finish on time. It’s like the hour has hardly begun. It’s like how you linger outside the theatre to hear the bells once more just to check that they are real. They sound so loud in the autumn air.
Runs until 2 November 2024
Forced Entertainment’s 40th anniversary season continues at Battersea Arts Centre withL’AdditionTim Etchells / Bert & Nasi from Tuesday 5 November – Saturday 16 November, and Forced Entertainment’sIf All Else Failsfrom Tuesday 19 November – Saturday 23 November.
The Reviews Hub Score
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