It was the painter Vasili Kandinsky who pushed the visual arts away from being mere representations of reality and into the abstract, and it is clear from his programme notes that the American puppeteer Basil Twist, appearing at the ICA as part of the London international mime festival, aims to do the same for puppetry.
That's fine by me. But this 60-minute underwater fantasia, during which Twist and his colleagues manipulate pieces of cloth and feathers in a large tank of water to the accompaniment of Berlioz's 1830 Symphony, is about as interesting as spending the evening at home watching your lava lamp while listening to a CD. Pretty - but also pretty dull.
On Kandinsky's canvases, the splodges skid across the empty spaces, the colours do the jitterbug or the quickstep and erupt into tangos and tarantellas. Seeing, hearing and moving become one experience. But in Twist's hands the manipulation of inanimate objects becomes merely illustrative. When Berlioz's music is rousing, his feathers or silver balls are duly roused; when it is busy, they jiggle up and down excitedly; and when it is soft the fabrics drift about dreamily.
About halfway through I suddenly realised that the experience had much in common with toddlers' music time at my local church hall, when the under-fives are asked to physically mirror the mood of the music.
For one who is attempting to be abstract, Twist is remarkably literal in his approach. The performance takes place in a tank of water, so what does he give us? Fish. Feathered fish, wispy fish, eel-like fish. But nonetheless fish. Once you've seen him create one or two fish, you know he can certainly do fish. But the fish keep on coming. It is like being at an aquarium, not a theatre.
Actually, it is more like being at the cinema. The major problem with this live performance is that it is inert. It doesn't just lack drama or theatricality, it lacks all signs of life. If it were not for the odd thump and bang from behind the screen, the fact that, if you are sitting close up, you can see some of the strings, or that the puppeteers appear at the end to take their bow looking slightly water-logged, you could be forgiven for thinking that the whole thing was simply a piece of film.
To have achieved this is something of a technical triumph, but what puzzles me is why anyone would want to take this experiment out of the workshop and into the theatre.
After all, it is pretty hard to make out a case for the artistic merit of synchronised swimming, and this is just synchronised swimming for inanimate objects.
I never thought I'd find myself saying this, but this is 60 minutes that starts making you think of Pinocchio with considerably more affection.
Until Sunday. Box office: 020-7930 3647.
