Extra!_Extra!_Mime_Festival_Review_k_Harris_Dead_Wedding_Barbican

London International Mime Festival

Bite 08

Faulty Optic and Mira Calix

Dead Wedding

Photo by Dina Younis

Barbican Pit

22-26 January, 2008

In a desperately bleak, rubbish-filled underworld, Orpheus has pulled most of his body back together and Eurydice is trying to wash herself to nothingness. This production, conceived and designed by Faulty Optic and directed by Gavin Glover, picks up the myth of Orpheus after the dust has settled in Hades and takes the audience on a journey of love and loss in a hopeless landscape.

The look of Dead Wedding is one of junk-yard desolation, a world where everything has to be tentatively tied together again, including the protagonist, in order to function. The set pieces are constructed from a myriad of found objects, dead items that have been discarded into the underworld, like a vast and eternal ‘lost and found’. It is here that Orpheus has to find his Eurydice, stranded across the emptiness. The performers, Liz Walker, Gavin Glover and Leah Morgan, play with the puppets and the space beautifully to portray separation and togetherness in the gloom.

The exquisite puppetry and frenetic animation are accompanied by a live string and clarinet ensemble, Oliver Coates, Xandi van Dijk and Peter Sparks, as well as mixed-electronic soundtrack, composed and performed by Mira Calix. Together, they weave a haunting mist around the action and freely pull upon our heartstrings. The sounds are nails-on-a-chalkboard painful at times, which feels entirely appropriate as what we are witnessing is not intended to be comfortable viewing. Occasionally, the score rises to a pitch of anguished cacophony before dying down to let sorrowful strings take their toll on the audience’s emotional state. The parts where spoken words are played within the soundtrack are a little contrived, but this is always a hard device to get right, especially in such a conceptual arena where the wrong choice of words can throw a moment off balance.

The benefits of having a live ensemble are evident. The presence of ‘real’ music in the auditorium widens the spectrum of the play-world out to include us, the real time audience. When confronted with multiple layers of fictional portrayals (animation, puppetry, recorded sound and distant myth itself) it is easy to disconnect with the world of the play. Having actual, almost physical, sounds floating through the space gives us something to hold on to; something which can lead us further into the story and the emotion of the piece.

I found myself particularly moved by the portrayal of Eurydice as a skeletal ‘corpse-bride’ who, seemingly unconsciously, washes and wipes down her hands on a ragged skirt again and again. These recurring mannerisms hint at suffering beneath the surface of the storyline. The hellish nature of repeated tasks is a theme that builds with a sense of impeding doom to a delicately sorrowful climax.

The quirky animations that are projected onto he backing screen weave seamlessly into the rest of the action as well as broadening the audience’s perspective to include the rest of the underworld. These sequences add yet another sinister layer to the piece by portraying the God of the Underworld’s cruel, fateful hand in all that happens to the characters in front of us. There is also an especially well formed, animated, visual metaphor linking pennies (traditionally placed on the eyes of the dead to pay for passage on the river Styx) with slot-machine gambling.

All the animation and puppets have a rough hewn quality to them, giving a dimension of child-like charm to a very disturbing subject matter. This charm is needed in order to give this piece any lightness at all. Indeed, all moments of humour are tinged, if not saturated, with darkness. I found myself smiling for an instant and then feeling a wave of sorrow as I remembered the desperation of the whole thing. This is a beautiful piece, and even more beautiful for its bleakness.