REVIEW:Ketzal (Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin)
Russian company Derevo kicked the Fringe Festival off on Saturday night in (literally) George's Dock, their shivering, naked bodies performing a short but thoroughly enigmatic spectacle in the chilly and rather murky waters.
For their main Fringe show Derevo have moved to the slightly more hospitable quarters of the Samuel Beckett theatre, but seem determined, all the same, to put their bodies through as much punishment of possible, and to maintain a distinct inscrutability.
As with the water show, the company of five (two women and three men) remain mute for most of Katzel (the title translates as "birds") as they act out a series of bizarre Neanderthal rites. Or perhaps play a series of carnival games with ornate props. Or perhaps, they are just larking about in their athletically lithe and acrobatic manner.
Derevo's theatrical style is one that remains sceptical about literary values, preferring instead to work with complex theatrical images and whatever complexities can be expressed via bare skin, tendons, bones and muscles. There's touch of Grotowski to the look of it all, but perhaps even more of Matthew Barney's protean humanoids dragging themselves at length over the set.
The company, shaven-headed and naked, bar a loin cloth, lead us into an unfamiliar, and often uncomfortable world in which unearthly creatures dance, cavort, fornicate, feed and generally get on down to an ever-present soundtrack which blends techno with Edith Piaf, whistling and some fairly random loud noises. Images of procreation appear regularly, along with flamboyant births and copulations. Men and women struggle, swirl like dervishes in billowing skirts, feeds from each other's breasts, spit mouthfuls of multicoloured feathers and pirouette in the half-light for the pure fun of it all.
It is the sort of thing that is supposed, you imagine, to get in under the audiences defences as they meditate (often at slightly greater length than they might wish) on Katzel's extended series of wordless theatrical images. Some of these images are extraordinarily appealing visually, and, like the exquisite finale, lush and clever, a triumph of simple means. But here for some reason, dilution perhaps, the sequence adds up to a curious, rather than stirring experience.
For their main Fringe show Derevo have moved to the slightly more hospitable quarters of the Samuel Beckett theatre, but seem determined, all the same, to put their bodies through as much punishment of possible, and to maintain a distinct inscrutability.
As with the water show, the company of five (two women and three men) remain mute for most of Katzel (the title translates as "birds") as they act out a series of bizarre Neanderthal rites. Or perhaps play a series of carnival games with ornate props. Or perhaps, they are just larking about in their athletically lithe and acrobatic manner.
Derevo's theatrical style is one that remains sceptical about literary values, preferring instead to work with complex theatrical images and whatever complexities can be expressed via bare skin, tendons, bones and muscles. There's touch of Grotowski to the look of it all, but perhaps even more of Matthew Barney's protean humanoids dragging themselves at length over the set.
The company, shaven-headed and naked, bar a loin cloth, lead us into an unfamiliar, and often uncomfortable world in which unearthly creatures dance, cavort, fornicate, feed and generally get on down to an ever-present soundtrack which blends techno with Edith Piaf, whistling and some fairly random loud noises. Images of procreation appear regularly, along with flamboyant births and copulations. Men and women struggle, swirl like dervishes in billowing skirts, feeds from each other's breasts, spit mouthfuls of multicoloured feathers and pirouette in the half-light for the pure fun of it all.
It is the sort of thing that is supposed, you imagine, to get in under the audiences defences as they meditate (often at slightly greater length than they might wish) on Katzel's extended series of wordless theatrical images. Some of these images are extraordinarily appealing visually, and, like the exquisite finale, lush and clever, a triumph of simple means. But here for some reason, dilution perhaps, the sequence adds up to a curious, rather than stirring experience.
posted by luke clancy at 3:07 PM
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