The way that news media feels, the constancy of it, its urgency and neediness…
it is not at all poetic, symbolic or beautiful.
And for all of the razing of towns, the earthquake, the tsunami, the nuclear emergency the numbers of dead, the numbers of injured, the numbers of displaced, the shocked and those without power, there was nothing that made me crack like dancer Trevor Patrick
standing,
face towards the light,
body opening,
hands slightly twitching…
Here between body, light and time was an enduring archetypal image that served as a portal into which I could step for me to steep myself in the sorrow of the past five days of the Japanese disasters.
As with Morphia Series (Helen Herbertsons previous work) Sunstruck is a multi-sensory experience – aural, textual, visual and olfactory.
With the sake (given to me at the start of the work) settling at the back of my palate, mellowing and changing structure it seemed to match the work unfolding in front of me. It felt as though the makers were telling me that the perception and the experience of the viewer, what happens to my body whilst in that room for 50 mins was as important as the content that is being played out in front of me.
I thought about Macbeth speech -
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
and also Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, with two men trapped within an existential circle of their own making but beyond this I was reduced to the absolute simplicity of the image. This is something that Ben Cobham and Helen continue to plough and it is fertile territory.
When the work deviated away from these striking moments a power was lost somehow, the utterances of madmen, farmers or poets threatening to tear apart the subtle and nuanced silences and Trevor Patrick’s delicate motions.
Later, I became aware of earpieces worn by the two performers (Trevor and Nick Somerville) and the two live musicians and that Helen’s hand was still present in the performance of the work as she spoke live to them.
Each performance is different and so these precious moments I have described may never be seen again but the circumstances in which they were formulated were deeply thought through, as in Morphia Series.
If Morphia Series can be described as not a moment wasted, Sunstruck seems to be about moments fleetingly grasped and then let go into the unknowing of nothingness.
And if indeed Helen’s notes for this performance are to be understood then the brutal truths of birth, life and death could not be experienced in any other way.
