Domestic abuse is not a comfortable subject for a dance piece, but choreographer Rhiannon Faith likes to take her work into such hard-to-navigate realms. Scary Shit (2016), her best-known piece, directed an unblinking gaze at two women’s phobias, sexual insecurities and loneliness, while Smack That (a conversation) introduces us to six real-life survivors of sustained psychological and physical violence. The work is presented in the round. We are at a party of sorts. There are balloons and presents. There’s dancing and pass the parcel. But every tableau, once unwrapped, leads us back to the same dark place, to the lethally aimed fist and the calculated shattering of personality.
The six performers are all called Bev, in wry homage to the Mike Leigh play Abigail’s Party. They all wear platinum wigs and sparkly mid-thigh dresses. They verbalise their brutalisation at the hands of their male partners (“You’re a piece of crushed scum... dead waste”) and they embody it. To a melancholy score directed by Molly O’Brien, we see the six Bevs propelled across the floor in flailing leaps, doubling up from blows to the face and belly (women are most likely to be the victims of domestic abuse when pregnant), hyperventilating, shuddering and collapsing. They run around wild-eyed, clutching their crotches. “Smack that bitch up,” one screams, perhaps referring to the similarly titled 1997 dance track by the Prodigy.
The audience are Bevs, too, and as we enter, we’re given stickers (I’m Stripy Bev, after my shirt). The dancing Bevs introduce themselves. “I like chocolate, picking my nose, and gangsta rap,” one says. When Faith held auditions for Smack That, she specified that she was looking for women who had experienced abuse by partners. The experiences that the six Bevs voice and re-enact are drawn from those that they described in the development period. This is direct testimony and what’s striking is the stories’ ghastly unanimity. The men’s over-intense wooing (“I think I’m falling in love with you”), the shock of the first violent episodes (“I saw blood on the piano”), the false contrition (“We can get through this”), the women’s silent hope that things will improve, the men’s threats of self-harm or suicide if the women leave.
Is this theatre? There are moments, when we are being bombarded with the appalling statistics concerning domestic abuse in the UK, when I’m not sure. It’s shocking, but it’s not more than the sum of its parts. Faith’s work is most telling when it moves from fact to metaphor, either through dance, which here is unaffectedly raw, and full of the sense of the women’s physical mass and subjection to gravity or through sequences, such as the one where one Bev politely offers another a cake, only to have her face forcefully and repeatedly slammed down into the vanilla sponge. The half-dozen reiterations of this scene, with the anxious-to-please victim humiliated in an identical fashion every time, never learning from her experience, speak more eloquently of the illogic of abuse than any statistics.
Smack That doesn’t examine the question of why the men in question treated the six Bevs as they did or why domestic violence is as prevalent as it is. Faith keeps her spotlight firmly on the victims. All the Bevs escaped their abusers and the final note is one of hope.
