From the title of Sleepwalk Collective’s new show, you might expect yet another look at one of the 21st century’s most broadcasted clans. But Kourtney Kardashian is little more than a cipher – a never-mentioned but ever-present symbol of contemporary wealth and fame. Instead, the show that shares her name is about a multitude of other things that shimmer in and out of focus: opera, memory, technology, crisis, theatre, climate change.
Kourtney Kardashian is a dissection of opera – or perhaps it’s more like an echo. The features of the form are there in outline, framing and structuring the show, but the performers never sing so much as a note. Instead, we hear the recorded voices of Sleepwalk artistic director Sammy Metcalfe’s parents singing The Marriage of Figaro back in 1992, as he and performers iara Solano Arana and Nhung Dang try to recreate the memory of that secondhand opera. But memories are faulty, and nostalgia for the past is soon infected with anxiety for the future, as the show dances hypnotically across a huge range of ideas.
Visually and aurally, it’s mesmerising. Wrapped in rustling gold emergency blankets, Arana and Dang stand under coloured lights, slowly speaking into mics while Metcalfe’s dreamlike soundscape pulses beneath their words. The mood is strange, entrancing and, indeed, somehow operatic. Like the company’s earlier show Karaoke, Kourtney Kardashian takes a familiar form and uses it as a vessel for uncanny images and unsettling meditations.
And, like Karaoke, Kourtney Kardashian presents the audience with a woozy, slow-motion vision of the end of the world, peeking out from behind the pasted-on glamour of performance. Arana looks out at us, dead-eyed, and tells us that we are at the opera while the world outside burns. It’s both a metaphor and a very real indictment of how we escape into fantasy in the face of catastrophe, whether by attending the opera or by watching celebrities on TV.
There are moments when the show’s insistent deconstruction of itself threatens to crumble the whole thing into dust. But few theatre-makers capture the vertiginous thrill and terror of contemporary existence as captivatingly as Sleepwalk Collective.
At Home, Manchester, until 9 March
