Victory Over the Sun

Club Ponderosa 176. To put on an unperformable play, written in futurist cubo-jibberish, originally envisaged with impossible suprematist Malevich costumes, and to do so in translation, is an ambitious project. The participants were very effectively present and partially in-role as the spectators filed into the auditorium, mingling, offering tea and... Vodka! An excellent touch, although a constant circulation of fresh shots during the show could have been good (personally I had the hip flask, of course). The impression of the performance overall was one of having walked into a theatrical workshop in full flow, indifferent to the audience's presence - this is simply what the troop was doing anyway, watch if you wish. All well and as it should be. Good. But what actually left the performance lacking was not a language gap, but a dearth of imagination of how to represent the themes. There needs to be more movement in a piece that has essentially been pared down to mime. Of what there was, the choreography was good, the songs were effective, but there was little of dynamism, and often a state of stasis flavoured the rambling scenes. If the piece cannot be performed on a grand scale as some kind of allegorical ballet, then perhaps it should be effectively paraphrased into a serious of symbolic sketches, interspersed with musical or poetic refrains for flavour. Where was the conscious mechanisation of man once the Victory over the Sun was won? Meyerholdian Biomechanics would have worked a treat here. Where were the displays of mass enthusiasm or quiet, common reticence? Ultimately there were several gulfs that correspond to the gulfs between spectator and performer, performer and performance, performance and piece. Though the troop had attempted to internalise the performance, the regular stasis of it meant this was not very apparent - it was as though the frigidity of the bewildered spectator won over, as though the leap taken by the performers into the performance had not been great enough to jerk the audience into life and carry them along. We should have been dragged into such a performance, swept up by it. The piece itself had barely been brought to life because there were not enough limbs to its thematic interpretation. The piece provides the perfect opportunity to break down these barriers - indeed that is a principle theme - Victory over the Sun, dominance over the divine, democratisation of creative possibility, godmanhood, human self-determination. And yet like good capitalists we watched the performers put on a performance of a piece to be performed. A piece about creativity, fixed and defined like a heirarchy of cultural capital. There was no real victory over the sun here, just mute performers and blind spectators in ecstatic awe of the oppressive god of creation.