Photo by Herman Sorgeloos
Crunching stiff through snow, a tall woman in a mink coat and high cuff hat enters the empty space left between three trailers.
The scene is set against a purgatorial vista, stormily cumulating, frozen somewhere between dissipation and breakage.
Anticipating her approach, two black trash bags are swept helplessly toward one another, colliding against her point of destination; before drifting away, into position against the longer stretch of grey metal, marking the porous border between two trailer fronts, to our right.
To our left, a third dwelling rests at a remove, with windows looking out into the audience.
Directly centre, as points on the horizon, are two votive candles burning red.
A keenly crafted sleight-of-hand both literal and metaphysical, 32 Rue Vandenbranden arises from glitch, convulsion, asymmetry, dissemblage and dismantling.
Through the howling wind, a baby cries. The tall woman bends to caress a scrunched and squealing head, crushed under the steel skirts of her lone trailer.
The tall woman enters her trailer. She opens the curtains to reveal a pregnant belly, framed beside a stout and greying woman, their portrait painted Rockwellian behind perspex windows.
Stuck in the small of a far left-hand window panel is the number 22. With no more definitive reference to location at hand, it seems we have already been misdirected.
Even as each image appears vivid, visceral, fantastic before us, we can find in this vision of rocky outcrop no signpost nor milestone, no locality to which this small and paranoid landscape might be tethered.
Another woman, a neighbour, steps into the night, alone.
The greying woman begins to sing, taking off her blouse.
A man, perhaps a husband, cries, ‘Carolina, where do you think you’re going?’
Two acrobats arrive, one body mounted on the other’s baggage. A suitcase floats, stuck, midair.
Animated according to an uncanny and counterintuitive choreography, in each of these moments the bodies express the sharp falling sleet, galing winds and tightly wound balls of electricity. They snap themselves taut and cling to door jambs and window sills; they wear each other like backpacks; they twist, contorted, double-jointed, collapsing ever into themselves, with one life creeping endlessly entropic around the rest.
The acrobats tumble out on the ice before lying down on the greying woman’s chest, greedily suckling at teats.
The man steps into the empty space, chest and pelvis thrusting in violent oscillation, crying, ‘I’m going to be a daddy!’
The greying woman evaporates, appearing now on the roof as a hawk, screeching.
The trailers quake, flash and rumble.
The tall woman disappears through the couple’s wall, while Carolina dances in the snow, the two of them wearing identical nightgowns.
Carolina is savaged by a bird.
32 Rue Vandenbranden is astonishing. Denying any ordinary sense of unity or progression, we are sated, rather, by the revelation of total disjuncture across this tangled and neurotic landscape. Deeply affective, the performance renders language inert, if not altogether impossible.
While husband and wife, perhaps, tussle and tumble in the darkness, the greying woman sings:
‘You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon.
Threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond
Well you wore out your welcome with random precision, rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions, come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!’
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
32 Rue Vandenbranden
By Peeping Tom
Concept and direction: Gabriela Carrizo & Franck Chartier
Creation and performance: Jos Baker, Eurudike de Beul, Marie Gyselbrecht, Hun-Mok Jung, Seoljin Kim, Maria Carolina Vieira (before: Sabine Molenaar)
Dramaturgy: Hildegard de Vuyst & Nico Leunen
Rehearsal assistant: Diane Fourdrignier
Sound composition: Juan Carlos Tolosa & Glenn Vervliet
Set design: Peeping Tom, Nele Dirckx, Yves Leirs & Frederik Liekens
Set construction: KVS-Atelier & Frederik Liekens
Lighting design: Filip Timmerman & Yves Leirs
Costume design: Diane Fourdrignier & Hyojung Jang
Technical direction: Filip Timmerman
Southbank Theatre, Southbank
8-11 October 2015
Melbourne Festival 2015
www.festival.melbourne
8-25 October
