Even individually, each of the three pieces in the first of this week’s Flare festival triple bills might best be described as “defies categorisation”. Taken en masse, that sense of taxonomical panic only intensifies. Hannah Sullivan’s With Force and Noise sees the artist creep carefully down a narrow corridor of light to the front of the stage to deliver a quiet monologue about simmering rage, while wearing a kind of harness covered in bells, which clank and tinkle at the slightest twitch.
In contrast Dance Peas, by live-art favourites Figs in Wigs, sees the five-strong collective take it in turns to spend three minutes trying to eat as many peas as possible out of a Tupperware container using a cocktail stick, while their colleagues perform an absurd dance routine. It’s tempting to claim it’s a daring adaptation of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck and leave them to deal with the fallout, but in among all the likable postmodern silliness, the tools to explore more serious themes have been hidden.
The final piece of the evening, For Thine, by Netherlands theatre group Johnny’s Horse and directed by Sanne van Rijn, is based on TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men. The cast of eight delivers the entire poem, taking one word each in turn, while standing under stark white lights dressed in charcoal monochrome, before stripping down to their underwear and racing around the stage in a kind of joyous dance, thrashing the boards with a dead tree branch (I promise I’m not making all this up), and gradually getting covered in stage blood. Described so plainly it doesn’t sound like much, but the combination of the music, energy and spirit achieve a theatrical alchemy that transforms this uncomplicated spectacle into an ancient Bacchic rite, a ritual about desire and violence – a visual poem for the modern world.
- The Flare international festival of new theatre, Manchester, continues until 18 July.
