The London international mime festival (43 years old and stronger than ever) specialises in indefinable performance, and this show by Australian multimedia artist Fleur Elise Noble is certainly in a genre of its own. Projection, puppetry, animation, song, dance and soundscape feed into an unsettling hour of film-as-performance, with scenes projected across multiple paper screens and moving parts (a rolling screen for a bus that rides across the stage, for example).
Noble, the central character, moves through empty monochrome days peopled by blank-faced puppets, only to be jolted into vivid life by a dream of a strangely alluring half-man half-kangaroo. Soon Noble is going to sleep in order to be woken by this macho marsupial dressed in a suit, with shirt unbuttoned halfway down his furry kangaroo chest. They dance, they have a paint fight, they snuggle by a roaring campfire. It’s love.
Thanks to the loneliness at the heart of the story and its fairly static, graphic novel-esque style, even these ecstatic episodes feel distant. But while the mood in Noble’s piece is in many ways flat, the visuals are full of different textures: hand-drawn backgrounds with defined pencil marks, realistic film, silhouettes, puppets and extravagantly costumed dancers. It’s like all the layers of a person’s experience – sleeping, waking, conscious, subconscious – coexisting.
In search of escape, Noble’s character chases her fantasy into ever darkening territory. For her the obsession may be an anthropomorphised kangaroo, but it’s the same urge that sees others unhealthily consumed by video games, serial Tinder dates or mind-altering substances; there’s a universality to this oddball tale. Its dreamlike detachment makes it difficult to love, but this highly original show is strikingly distinctive.
