As part of the latest edition of the London International Mime Festival, Olivier Award-winning dance theater innovators Peeping Tom return to the Barbican for the UK premiere of their new show, Triptych.
Triptych is a fabulous, energetic and mysterious work, made up of three linked pieces, The Missing Door, The Lost Room and The Hidden Floor, all set on different parts of an ocean liner. Together they once again demonstrate Peeping Tom's extraordinary imaginative range and sheer physicality. One dancer will maneuver another as if that partner were made of rubber, twisted into extraordinary shapes, or left frozen, bent backwards onstage. Other associations involve a body, rigid as a mannequin, held high without even a shudder of movement. For brief moments, the bodies contort so strangely that they look like inhuman figures from some hellish painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Most compelling are the ensemble pieces that are impressive in their complexity and vitality.
Stars: Maite Perroni, Angel Zermen, Ofelia Medina
Raphaëlle Latini's sound design is powerfully chilling. We often hear the deep, ominous rumble of the ocean liner's engines, but there are strange electrical sounds, luscious musical passages, and furious crashes of thunder.
The Missing Door is largely inventive. We are in an elegant salon of the liner. A body, apparently dead, is carried unceremoniously off the stage by a waiter who proceeds to clean the blood from the floor while another man sits apparently lifeless in a chair. He feels like we're watching a cozy murder mystery. The scenes become more and more surreal: the doors don't just open, they fold. A large mirror becomes a window in which, in a dazzling scene, we see seated train passengers being pushed backwards. Human instability is exaggerated. The men turn to jelly, unable to control their movements. A woman finds herself unable to walk on her high heels, her ankles bend and collapse. At another point, she is all in control. Perched on a chair, one leg splayed elegantly over her head, she moves to the ominous opening and closing of a creaky door.
Towards the end of the piece - it is not easy to detect when she has finished one piece and another begins - the scene seems to return to the original. What exactly has been happening remains a mystery, but the ride has been tremendous.
The second piece, The Lost Room, is perhaps the most interesting of the three. A maid makes the bed in an elegant cabin. Flowers are brought. We are still waiting for guests to arrive. But when they do, it's comically. A clothes closet is reopened to expose a full pile of human bodies falling to the floor. The bed becomes a sinister mound that breathes, straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. A lover appears, only to merge with another. The squawks come from a strange bird-like head, whose body belongs to someone else. Suddenly we find ourselves in the depths of a mysterious underworld.
The ensemble moments are often brilliant. There is a repeated commotion as, with a thunderous roar, an outer door is flung open, and everyone in the room is thrown violently backwards, tumbling and spinning endlessly. Equally brilliant is a scene between two lovers, whose acrobatic coupling is at first beautiful. But when the maid, clad in her underwear from the explosion, finds herself trapped outside the balcony window, we realize we're voyeurs. To intensify this feeling that we are all voyeurs, there are repeated references to the fact that it is a cinematographic work. Huge lights are put in place and the set itself is clearly an artificial construction.
In the third piece, The Hidden Floor, the mood is much more somber. The ocean liner has sunk. We hear great gulps of watery sound, and the interiors take on the dilapidated look of a shipwreck. The floor is flooded, dancers splash across it, sometimes joyfully, but more often desperately. Increasingly, obscured scenes take on the appearance of paintings. An intense ensemble work shows nearly nude bodies stretched out, clinging to life like the figures in Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa.
Triptych is intense, often fascinating work. But there are frustrating moments when what seem like plot lines refuse to be resolved. The repeated device of making one scene surrealistically merge into another can have a distancing effect. It can be hard to see a general shape, as was evident when the audience was asked to applaud each piece, as we just didn't know when to speak.
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