Exploding
Rice is not an easy production to put into words. In fact, the
production itself used few words at all, relying instead on music, movement
and imagery to present a slowly unravelling dreamscape of alternate
realities and strange possibilities. Characters silently appear and
disappear from behind hanging swathes of grey cloth and do not seem
directly related to one another and yet the pieces work together to
create a powerful representation of the nature of dreams - full of motifs,
metaphors and symbols but where meaning is always just that one step
ahead so you can never quite reach it. In fact, it was only when I relaxed
and released the urge to try to interpret the meaning behind each symbol
that I truly appreciated the beauty of the production.
I sensed that there probably was meaning in the madness but why did
we always have to try to find it and pin it down? In fact, I believe
the intention of this abstract piece of theatre was precisely to challenge
me to resist doing that. Looking for meaning in dreams is after all
like trying to holding water in your hands. Moreover, I felt it almost
rude to try and impose my consciousness on someone else's personal theatrical
journey into his or her own memory and subconscious. This was due to
the feeling of intimacy that arose from the starkness and simplicity
of the imagery. The images were presented on what was pretty much a
bare stage and the characters always worked individually or at most
in twos or threes, with their movements very controlled and precise
and only ever leading to a single purpose. The actors also never had
anything other than the expression of a corpse on their faces which
made them seem not so much distant as vulnerable and naked.
The sense that I made of the production, then, was (quite literally)
that of the five senses, or, at least, two of them. For 50 minutes,
Riverbed Theatre massaged my eyes and ears with images and sounds so
carefully paced that they would have lulled me to sleep if not for the
fact that they were so enthralling. I simply sat back and absorbed the
series of bizarre and surreal images presented before me: a semi-nude
woman with an engorged prosthetic upper torso roamed the stage; a man
stood still as a statue and had red paint sprayed on his right hand
and left ear; another man with a cartoon head sat at a writing table
and wrote - and all the while, hypnotic music played in circles around
me.
What was particularly effective was the way images would unfold so
very slowly like the second hand of a clock and then turn, without any
melodrama or fanfare, into something unexpected and sometimes truly
shocking. One example is a woman in slow motion impaling herself on
a knife and another is a woman who enters with a box and opens it to
reveal a woman's severed head - which then starts to sing. Dreamlike,
these images would in turn segue smoothly into something ordinary and
mundane. This constant settling and unsettling of emotional motion was
oddly disturbing and calming at the same time and captured perfectly
the complexity and randomness of dreams - and, perhaps, of life, where
peace and horror can be only a second apart and are both part of a single
tapestry... Damn. Have I just tried to construe meaning from the play
again?
I came out of the Esplanade Studio Theatre that evening as if waking
from a half-remembered dream, my head full of jumbled images. And somehow
the real world I lived in, with its own jumbled images, seemed strangely
to be that much sharper in focus. |
"The constant settling and unsettling of emotional motion was oddly
disturbing and calming at the same time and captured perfectly the complexity
and randomness of dreams - and, perhaps, of life"
|
