Recently a multidisciplinary performance with the curious name of 'Room Temperature Romance' was presented at the Barbican Pit Theatre. It was performed by two young dancer-coreographers and I considered it could be interesting for me mainly from a technical point of view.
What struck me as an audience member was the fact that everyone around me was eating and drinking prior to the show and when the performance started the noise of munching and slurping was transformed into giggles and laughter. Well it's great to be around happy people, but it almost felt like a little ritual to cover 'funny moments' rather than a natural reaction.
The performance was very stage centred, and there was the typical 'theatre' presence which drew the audiences' attention fully, for a whole seventy minutes, no interval. Eleni Edipidi and Bethanie Harrison showed off for spectators, keeping an eccentric behaviour on stage. Two girls lived in their fancy world of fashion and dreams on stage, thus making the barrier between performer and audience an important aspect of the piece, despite the performers' original statement, found on the leaflets outside the theatre, that said 'We encourage an intimate exchange between audience and performer'.
There were surely lots of ideas there , but they were scattered in a pattern that did not put them together to make a good whole, and even if the aim was to present a dispersive world of various aesthetic realities, it was not done with a consistency that justified its length. The final video projection was a documentation of the work in progress, which showed the performers trying on their fancy dresses and giggling for another five minutes, with subtitles and names, which seemed more of an excuse to have a video work on the wall rather than part of the piece.
Whoever may have the opportunity of seeing this award winning piece I wouldn't want to ruin them the ending, although this notion probably comes from watching cinema and not theatre. So I might as well go on by saying that the storming in on stage of dozens of soft toy pigs, with their own mechanism of moving legs and wagging curly tails was most probably the most interesting part of the whole piece and could have been a starting point for a new performance. As the audience got up to leave and was naturally drawn to go and see the litte pigs from closer, they were immediately stopped by staff as if they were attacking the dancers...intimate exchange?
Fancy dresses, talking about boys, swinging on ropes, digital projections that somehow resembled MTV music videos and little IKEA lights that were randomly turned on and off were all part of a set design in motion that probably wanted to say too much and so couldn't keep a story running throughout. The Frida Kahlo-like painted eyebrows of the two performers immediately granted them more character, but after a while they didn't seem to have any meaning except underlining the constant presence of the performers on stage. The performance was based on appearances, and it was very narcissistic altogether, which is probably why I did not find it particularly original.
There were surely lots of ideas there , but they were scattered in a pattern that did not put them together to make a good whole, and even if the aim was to present a dispersive world of various aesthetic realities, it was not done with a consistency that justified its length. The final video projection was a documentation of the work in progress, which showed the performers trying on their fancy dresses and giggling for another five minutes, with subtitles and names, which seemed more of an excuse to have a video work on the wall rather than part of the piece.
Whoever may have the opportunity of seeing this award winning piece I wouldn't want to ruin them the ending, although this notion probably comes from watching cinema and not theatre. So I might as well go on by saying that the storming in on stage of dozens of soft toy pigs, with their own mechanism of moving legs and wagging curly tails was most probably the most interesting part of the whole piece and could have been a starting point for a new performance. As the audience got up to leave and was naturally drawn to go and see the litte pigs from closer, they were immediately stopped by staff as if they were attacking the dancers...intimate exchange?
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