By Vanessa Rowell, Kate Ellis
at La Mama until Sunday February 20, 2000
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
The audience's physical position can dictate the form and
content as well as the resulting impact of a performance. The audience at Skin
Flick sit with their eyes at floor level.
Chairs are set under the false stage floor and viewers heads
poke through slots in the stage to watch the actors' feet go by.
Skin Flick is a collaboration between two performers,
(Vanessa Rowell, Kate Ellis) a designer/director, (Anna Tregloan) lighting
designer (Jen Hector) and sound artist. (David Franzke's) It is a novel idea
which works only partially.
Franzke's soundscape
is a highlight. It combines music, sound
effects and voice to create an evocative sound environment.
Anna Tregloan's set design intentionally restricts the
audience's view, making them a part of the design. It is cleverly lit with
light spilling from below floor level, from vertical ultra-violet fluorescent
tubes and tiny floor lights.
The two performers, in a series of vignettes, take advantage
of the audience's limited perspective. They walk on their hands or on stilts,
crawl along the floor, whisper in ears, black out parts of their bodies with
lighting or costume.
Each vignette begins with a good idea but none fulfils its
promise. They are short but repetitive and so they wear thing quickly. Much of
Skin Flick looks like a drama class exercise.
Strangely, the greatest theatrical impact came from the
surprise appearance of tiny, quirky objects. Wind-up toy fish suddenly toddle
across the floor at eye level, bumping into audience.
A hailstorm of coloured ping-pong balls rains from the roof
only to bounce into silence. A bevy of tiny plastic steering wheels are
catapulted in the space through a curtain of telephone book pages.
This is a collaborative piece of performance that has no narrative.
It is an exploration of body, space and perspective and the relationship
between the audience and actor.
Skin Flick fits into a contemporary performance style that
abandons the word, story and other actorly pretensions. It relies on the
collision of images and resonances arising from actor so very close to
audience.
It needs work to give it more substance but the design , as
long as you are not claustrophobic, is inspired.
by Kate Herbert
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