Knowledge & Melancholy, March 14, 1997

By Margaret Cameron & Louise Elizabeth Smith

At La Mama until March 23, 1997

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around March 14, 1997

Sometimes if we could simply un-know something, un-experience it, we might not be so sad.

Knowledge & Melancholy: one seems to lead to the other. They are blood sisters. They are also the title of a theatrical experiment by Margaret Cameron and Louise Elizabeth Smith who are as connected on stage as blood sisters.

Their connection is intense but indirect and impulse-based. They work parallel in the same space but have rehearsed solo on two separate pieces. The performance is structured around the collision of their two discrete works, the counterpoint of their divergent texts and separate realities. It consciously nurtures a split focus.

Cameron's fraught yet whimsical text is a poetic treatise on pain. It draws together text and physicality, poetics and theatricality, angst and humour, love and grief. She reaches out to her audience and calls us into her psyche to totter about in her sea of glorious imagery. Her opening line speaks volumes. "I began in a simpler place."

 Her style is abstract, edgy and profoundly touching in its intensity. " I'm not a very comfortable actress," she quips. The piece acknowledges itself as theatre. "Are you finished?" asks Smith. The two have a structure and text but are still improvising with form and sometimes with content. It all depends on impulse and on the audience. Its very randomness and non-linear quality is part of its essential beauty. "Soon we'll be able to live without narrative."

Smith begins the piece shadow boxing with bandaged hands and boxing gloves nearby. She quote from De Niro in Raging Bull and Brando's On the Waterfront. "I could have been a contender, "resonates against Cameron's, "We're taking the punishment" and incidentally two paths cross and images merge.

There is no point trying to decipher why these two tracks are running together. We are meaning-makers so any two images or thoughts will form some pattern or logic for us. It is a very challenging and satisfying theatre experience.

KATE HERBERT 330 wdsı