Edinburgh 2002

Fringe

Bodies In Crisis
C

James Grieve

The glut of September 11th inspired productions at this year’s Fringe dominated the pre-festival headlines but has failed to produce a work to match the hype. Perhaps it is just too soon. Perhaps it is impossible.

Bodies In Crisis is an honest and intelligent attempt at making sense of the incomprehensible. In a brutal hour of physical dance inspired by Ankoku Butoh, the Japanese ‘Dance of Darkness’, this exposition uses 9/11 as a springboard for a wider critique of reactions to tragedy.

A series of seven dance poems interpret the events of that iconographical date, from the age of innocence as dawn breaks in New York, to the apocalyptic desolation of Ground Zero.

The dynamic performers stretch to the heavens, robust and unflinching as the proud towers, then disintegrate. Their malleable bodies twist and convulse, horror etched in faces contorted around silent screams. It is a visceral, disturbing, often uncomfortable hour that hits a note and holds it, shunning conventional linear development.

It takes time to escape the literal – which threatens to become banal - and access the endless potential of metaphor. I saw Auschwitz, Hiroshima and, yes, Kabul. On one level human suffering, on another societal disintegration.

Ragesties, a company formed at The University of California at Santa Cruz, devised this piece over nine months of intensive research and rehearsal. They offer no simplistic conclusion but, in bringing down the curtain, bear down on the audience as a cohesive unit with a fixed stare. It seems to say, 'This is what we give you. Go away and make your own minds up.'

In the gauntlet of interpretation they throw down, Ragesties force a search for hope in the bleak and terrifying alternate reality conjured on the stage. Refreshingly, the audience is invited to speak to the company and offer opinions on what is a perennial work in progress. I did so, and my experience was enriched immeasurably.

Director Shakina Nayfack says he set out create an unconventional piece that offered a space and opportunity for acceptance, healing and catharsis in the face of September 11th having been co-opted by agendas of nationalism and war. For those closest to the tragedy, perhaps Bodies In Crisis performs this function. For the simply bewildered, it throws up more questions.

In the face of demonstrable conservatism at this year’s Fringe, with all too many rehashed former glories and tired clichés masquerading as new writing, this thought-provoking offering is as admirable as it is inventive.

Some will cherish the experience. Some will deplore it. That’s good theatre.

Federico Fernandez Armesto

Bodies in Crisis (produced by students from the University of California at Santa Cruz) has had appalling reviews so, to prevent myself from leaving, I sat very visibly in the middle of the front row.

To be fair, the dancers seemed so concentrated on their performances throughout that I probably could have stolen the entire auditorium and still walked out unnoticed. Fortunately, such action wasn't needed.

Bodies in Crisis is a representation of the events of 9/11 told through a series of 'dance poems' in Japanese Butoh-dance. Butoh, 'The Dance of Darkness', seems to be a style that revels in deformity, calling on its followers to contort themselves into grotesque positions and horrifying facial expressions. Either it's a rigidly controlled system of physical expression or just an excuse for a group of Americans to run around wildly onstage in the name of art. The experience is something akin to watching a mutant baby drown in jelly and is the kind of thing that might be created if Nick Park did a big screen version of the Chapman brothers' Hell. The product isn't pretty, but it somehow manages to hold the viewer in an awkward state between fascination and disinterest. It is gripping, but it's hard to say why.

The storyline (if that is the right word for it) is apparently a step-by-step portrayal of 9/11, from the morning to the white noise of the television coverage. Along the way I thought I recognised the point when the plane's passengers adopted the brace position, but realised that, in the context of the entire show, I was probably wrong and gave up trying to follow it altogether. The movement has a hypnotic quality to it, like watching protons and electrons ricocheting around an atom, but from the programme note that tells us 'every performance creates new stage pictures', I deduced that the ordered chaos was, in fact, just chaos: students covered in flour with their eyes rolled back, bashing into each other as eagerly as prep-school boys in a pillow-fight.

Bodies in Crisis' greatest merit is that, out of all the 9/11-inspired shows I have seen at the fringe (and there are far too many to mention), it was the only one not to present an odiously nationalist point of view. Anne Nelson, who wrote The Guys, one of the festival's big shows, seemed to think that New Yorkers don't want anyone else muscling in on their disaster. Bodies in Crisis on the other hand employs a style of dance that was created 'as a resistance to Westernisation' and thus offers a more balanced impression. Whether it succeeds or not is a different matter.

Its refusal to be accessible explains why the venue bosses have shoved it into the early hours of the morning. Still, it's certainly an interesting experience: the Butoh is the kind of thing that has to be seen and one must respect the performers' persistence. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this show, but if you're strolling around at midnight, it's definitely a more attractive option than the Edinburgh streets.