Writers: Phil Soltanoff and Steve Wendt
Director: Phil Soltanoff
It’s hard to know exactly what to expect from Phil Soltanoff and Steven Wendt’s production at the Barbican, pitched somewhere between theatre, dance, mime and music. The name of their hour-long piece almost seems like the obtuse answer to someone asking them what they’re going to do: “This & That”. The performance is as playful as its title, jumping between disciplines and atmospheres, but anchored by live generative abstract animation and spell-binding shadow puppetry.
From the opening darkness of the theatre, there emerges a pinpoint of green light. It could almost be the torch beam of an usher showing a late straggler to their seat but it climbs up and up like a radioactive firefly to a projection screen where it sets in motion a host of coloured patterns against a soundtrack of classical music and free jazz.
We’re told before the performance that all the visuals are generated live, that nothing used in the show has been pre-recorded. You can see why they’re keen for this to be known, as it’s not completely apparent what’s going on. We’re literally in the dark, as are the performers, where one might have expected them to be more visible participants. The visuals are impressive though, the shapes and patterns produced constantly morphing, often branching out like vast trees or lungs, fractal and organic.
This kind of abstract generative animation has the potential to be little more advanced than the Windows screensavers of the nineties, so it’s heartening to see such a nuanced and varied example of what can be done with this kind of technology in a live context. Though it’s not always clear what the performers are adding, when you see that little green firefly dancing in loops and leaving tracks it has a movement that is entirely human in its imperfection that gives life to the abstraction of the visuals. Indeed much of the movement has a shaky analogue feel that a machine would struggle to replicate.
Where the human element is more subtle in the first section it is unmistakable in the second, which centres around the virtuosic shadow puppetry skills of Wendt. Against a simple spotlight, we are treated to an array of characters all created using just his hands. A cowboy lip-syncing to a country song turns into a horse then a bird and back again. There’s something about it that’s so simple compared to the futuristic generative technology of the light show that came before. But rather than the “this” and “that” of humans and computers being portrayed in opposition, it feels more friendly and open-ended, like here’s a bit of this and now a bit of that. We’re getting on, no shade necessary.
The narrative powers in those two hands are truly extraordinary though. At one point a mother tenderly strokes her baby then hands them over to someone else and it’s somehow incredibly moving. There’s also a great deal of humour and fun. As the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever starts playing, the hands form into energetic disco dancers strutting their stuff on the dance floor, clearly in the mood for love. The portion has the scope of a montage spanning time and place, a summation of human life, the emotion, the achievement, the play.
It feels a little like a show of two disparate halves that could have been more integrated, but the unevenness is a minor quibble for what is a display of true expertise by two performers clearly outstanding in their fields.
Runs until 17 February 2024
The Reviews Hub Score
Spell-binding, multidisciplinary spectacle
