Wilson Pico has been devising and performing dances in Ecuador since the 1970s, but the life story he narrates during his one-man show is hardly typical of his profession. He was born into a family so large and so poor that the daily meal didn't always feed every mouth, and his fantasy of making good was originally to become a boxer. He only ended up in a dance class because he was hoping to meet a girl.
Biographies don't necessarily matter for artists, but Pico's work is so profoundly rooted in the circumstances of his life that the background he gives us (via a translator ) is very illuminating, especially in the case of his first (and best) solo, Matador. Ecuadorian bull-fighters are apparently very different from their glamorous Spanish counterparts, lacking the latter's gorgeous trimmings and public profile. They operate out of the dust and poverty of their local neighbourhoods. So at the beginning of this solo we understand that Pico, crouching warily in shadows with an old cloth wrapped around him like a blanket, is both a slum tenant and a matador plotting his moves.
As the solo progresses Pico assembles a collage of internal and external snapshots. He shows his matador assembling his professional persona, whipping the cloth through its bull-baiting routines and sharpening an ugly pair of knives. We also see him lost in fantasies of fame, his back arching into a bullfighter's swagger, his hands caressing the imaginary braid on his costume, his head turned proudly to greet the crowd.
Pico is a fascinatingly contained performer, not so much projecting a personality as assembling his characters out of fastidiously constructed images. His small, stocky body and finely angled face are mesmerising but, disappointingly, his other two solos fail to cast the same narrative spell as Matador.
Angry Mouth is strongly reminiscent of Martha Graham's classic solo Lamentation, with Pico wrapped in a jersey tube that leaves only his face and hands free. It is a piece about hunger, and some of its images are fierce, especially the final one in which Pico beats a tin plate against his side in a clamorous crescendo of need, his mouth gaping open furiously. But, as in the concluding solo, The Boxer, the material doesn't always communicate. In this last piece, the boxer's elemental contradictions - aspiration and scruffiness, bravado and pain - are vividly displayed, but some of the details through which they are elaborated are too elusive to read. Pico is a superb performer who could be far more eloquent than this material allows.
