What happens when theatre meets film? It is a question artists keep returning to. The West Country japesters of Forkbeard Fantasy talk about “crossing the celluloid divide”. Chile’s Teatro Cinema puts live actors in noirish settings. And cult favourite 1927 mixes real performers and retro animations.
Now, with high-intensity colour, psychedelic landscapes and trippy imagination comes visual artist Ornagh and a show unlike any in Edinburgh. In The Ode Islands, she performs while sandwiched between two screens to give three-dimensional depth to her mixed-reality creations. A nightmarish vision of googly-eyed monsters, electric seas and an Alice in Wonderland sense of instability, it takes us on a fascinating digital journey, with Ornagh trapped in the midst of it all. Her stated interest is in freedom, even as she pulls us ever deeper into an imprisoning lair.
She begins in a gingham dress, a woman trying to conform to idealised images of 1950s American housewives and warped commercials from a materialist culture. From there, it is a Wizard of Oz head trip as her character takes flight, chased down oppressive passageways like the darker corners of her own subconscious. Suddenly, she is talking about a trip abroad for a breast augmentation operation, the neglect of a friend and subsequent regret. Then she is back on the run from her digital demons.
Addressing the audience at the end of the show, she explains the work brings together highlights from a series of previous art installations. That would account for the narrative uncertainty. Never less than fascinating, The Ode Islands hints at the artist’s preoccupations with identity, sexuality and body image, but keeps them opaque. To combine her hi-tech vision with a coherent story could yet create something powerfully dramatic as well as visually audacious.
• At the Pleasance at EICC, Edinburgh, until 16 August
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