AΦE is a dance company founded by Aoi Nakamura and Esteban Fourmi, and based in Ashford, Kent. Whist, its first major work, unites dance and virtual reality in a work that offers an intriguing new framework for performance. Wearing headsets, spectators proceed through a series of VR scenarios peopled by five performers. We are transported to a dilapidated suite of rooms where various Freudian psychodramas are being played out, often graphically. A masked man writhes and bellows as he wrestles with his sexual desire for his mother; we see him quivering, knife in hand, before a reproduction of Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting L’Origine du monde (which depicts a woman’s genitals). We pass through disturbing dreamscapes, and succeeding tableaux of jealousy, rivalry and desire.
Whist was created by Nakamura and Fourmi following conversations with psychoanalysts working at the Freud Museum and the result is the Oedipus complex writ large. The VR experience is awesome. It’s as if you’re suspended in space, watching events unfold around you in three dimensions. It reminds me of childhood dreams of invisibility, which always had a weird, voyeuristic edge. Our journeys through the narrative depend on the visual choices we make while immersed in individual scenarios. As we weave through the performance space, moving from location to location, the organisers watch our progress with smiling, Olympian detachment. Whist is an engaging and intelligent application of VR and the early-days feel of the technology is very appealing. Watch this multidimensional space.
