Tuesday 8 August 2017

Hotter

Two young, female performers set out to document how women relate to their bodies. The interviewed loads of women: from nine to ninety-seven and they made shows based on those recordings. It’s that verbatim thing that David Hare said had nothing useful to say.


But they do it with songs and dancing and sketchy bits and speechy bits and jiggling bits and  lipsyncing and jokes (good ones) and a proper relishing of the way their own place in the thing they are making complicates and informs their work.


You start off thinking it’s probably going to be straight verbatim – lipsyncing to a cast of voices – but as the piece progresses it gets variously sillier and more expressive. The lines blur between these women, until the uniqueness of one becomes the uniqueness of another, until the pleasures and disturbances of a disabled woman living in their body are counterpointed with those of a trans woman or a black woman or a woman with a different sort of body to those we normally hear – the hearing is important – in culture.


It’s a really striking and sort of miraculous thing – these disembodied voices, recorporealised by two young performers, are subjects in the most free and generous way possible. They describe their bodies because their bodies, for once, are not the object. Their bodies are absented and freed to speak in ways they never can in the open.


And the difficulties with describing their bodies and what their bodies do is at times funny, at times hollowing – there’s a beautiful bit where they dance an orgasm, describing it through any word that seems to fit (pink, lightning, yellow, rushing), and though you get the sense of what it is, there is always an exclusion as well as an inclusion at play. The private-language being made is between the performers and those with whom they spoke, being translated and reencoded without an attempt at transparent language, in order to convey how tricky the body is to talk about, particularly when it is gendered and constructed around a culture as misogynistic as ours.


Some of the movement sequences are remarkable. There’s a particular section where they very simply thank all the people to whom they spoke in turn, while offering words they wish they had said to them at the time, but for us now in the room. It’s quiet and serene and the bravery with which the two performers wear their selves  – not, in fact, their bodies (though they do take their clothes off and twerk defiantly) – but their real selves, incommunicable and difficult and messy, really hurt and awed me.


At times – *times* – the sketchiness seems to underly a lack of dramaturgical rigour and the force behind the piece is quite hard to figure out. One wonders why they don’t tell the story of making the show more openly and clearly in order to lend a useful frame to their work – I think you really want to know more about what the process taught them about the embedded complications of the process, probably, and this isn’t really touched upon.


But all of that is so eminently forgiveable because I walked out, no word of a lie, beaming with tears in my eyes.

________

Hotter by Mary Higgins and Ell Potter is on at Paradise Augustines until the end of the month.




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