International Children’s Festival: Australian performance artist steals the show!!

 

A production of Insite Arts from Australia, written, conceived, created and performed by Fleur Nobel.

This show is in a category of its own. Much too sophisticated to be billed as a children’s show it is essentially an experiment in intermedial performance techniques where film, puppetry, sculpture, drawing, choreography, photography, lighting effects, sound experiments all collide to create an inbetween space where all these techniques and technologies aquire new meanings. The children obviously enjoyed  it because it creates images that they have certainly never seen before and as for the rest of us, we came out wondering what had hit us.

There is a narrative of sorts,  if you look twice at the title and try to understand the  way the main and only character is constructed on the stage.

In the first moments of this monochromatic event, a room seems to be in ruin, torn paper lying all around, the furniture is crooked, placed anywhere, in tears in the wall paper and mainly, it is not clear if we are looking at a set, or projected images of a set  since the  format of the film is transformed through the theatre space, the way the walls are torn apart and opened up, into a multidimensional area that creates a feeling of uncanniness. The  figure of a woman,- HER -  either a filmed image, a live actress or a cardboard doll, is standing upright  on one side of the stage, aureoled by a white background .. the reverse of its shadow  as if it were a negative. The figure seems to be breathing..or  moving ever so slightly but again, is it only an illusion. Again the ambiguity of the cross between the stage and the film catches our eye. Then the figure  slowly slides out of view, leaving the outline in white of what was  the profile of a human body, a flat form against the black background of the surrounding space and from that point on the tension between the moving bodies – human of otherwise,  the flat  screen of the camera and the three dimensions of the performance space play off against each other to  produce a  living installation, or a performance of intercepting media that is quite astounding.  Puppetlike figures move out of the shadows, like human figures although they all represent humans, subjected to the shot by shot approach of the film so that theya re all transformed into unreal dolls moving in a jerky process of film animation.  The human looking actress, whether she appears as a shadow or  a live  cleaning lady with her pail of water stomping around behind the walls of  the theatre, tearing holes in the walls and washing the drawings off the walls to “clean” up the portraits and sketches that cover the panels and torn surfaces that are sometimes screens sometimes walls of the house , or the open  space for new apparitions. .

The sculpted forms, of terra cotta figures finally  assemble on the one side of the stage, sitting on chairs, watching the performance from their side of the acting space while we watch from  our side of the space as  something violent takes place transforms the stage area as the hyperrealism of the lighting effects and  the sound , create an uneasy moment of a more than perfect illusion that brings us beyond reality, a reality that is too real to be real as it all returns to its original form. and the two dimensional girl has found her place again.

This is an extremely interesting conception that brings together the performance, space, the actor and film…how they intersect, how they change each other, how they impact on the stage event as a whole.

2 Dimensional Life of Her  must be seen. !! Best in the show! Without a doubt.