Iona Firouzabadi
posted 23 August 2006

Imagine what would happen if your subconscious was given its own Edinburgh venue. And was allowed to throw cornflakes at people. Imagine this and you have some idea of Redreamt. Here humour and violence, chaos and order tumble over each other like scary clowns, each threatening to strangle the last.

Out of its vault venue, Redreamt conjures the dark cellar of the sleeping mind. Clad in costumes pilfered from dolls, urchins and Agent Provocateur the all-female cast embody the chop-logic of dreams. They are fragments of people, scraps of memories, fears and desires, condemned to a purgatory of repeated actions. Like patients in an asylum, each is locked within her own nightmare, but to those on the outside their absurdity is often very funny. Redreamt artfully plays with this sliding scale from the comic to the sinister, provoking both laughter and discomfort in its audience.

Structurally as disjointed as dreams are, Redreamt offers us a sequence of surreal scenes. From a breakfast that echoes the Mad Hatter's tea party in its literalism and absurdity to an unprepared musician caught in the spotlight. There is no happiness here, only manic comedy and dark joy, underlain with the constant threat of violence like the low buzz of white noise. Occasionally this violence breaks the surface to disturbing effect - when a woman in agony begs for help she is greeted by the silent laughter of others, her voice smothered by their hands.

The suffocation and suppression of the feminine is the strongest thread in the patchwork of Redreamt. 'We're all red blooded males here,' postures a chauvinist policeman, played ironically by one of the female ensemble. There is a lone point at which we step outside of the dream realm: a woman stands forward and speaks her memory of a recurring dream. In the dream a girl is tortured and neither the girl nor the woman has any power to stop it happening. Within dreams we can be crazed, violent and anarchic but we cannot be free. Free will is for the waking life.

Redreamt is a student production, not a polished Aurora Nova show. Its physical performances are raw and impassioned rather than honed. The choreography is brutal, broken and mechanistic, but it works. Amorphous figures wrestle to be born out of a piece of cloth; figures break out into the aisles; others appear like automata, trapped in the greater machine of a staccato dance.

Clipping images and ideas from a variety of sources, Redreamt stitches a visual patchwork, mimicking the fabric of dreamscapes. Notably, in an echo of Emeric Pressburger's film The Red Shoes, a woman begins to dance; the movement possessing her, she is made the puppet of its speed and repetition, no longer in control of her own body. Red shoes also form a visual motif surfacing throughout Redreamt symbolising Cinderella-shoes and surreal guns. The red stiletto becomes an emblem of a female sexuality that can hold women at gunpoint and cripple them. These layers of imagery and ideas of the feminine are what give Redreamt's land of subconscious misrule its depth and darkness.

Till 26 August 2006.