One Point 618. Space Theatre,
Adelaide Festival Centre. May 1.
The title of Katrina Lazaroff’s new work, Involuntary, was sparked by observing the involuntary movements of someone engrossed in a football game, but it might well be titled Coercion, for the major theme running through the work is our unwitting enslavement to technology and rules and regulations. Computers, mobile phones, call waiting and Facebook: with wit and intelligence Lazaroff shows how we have allowed them to usurp control over us. With an excellent cast of two women (Veronica Shum and Jessica Statton) and two men (Tim Rodgers and Ninian Donald) who are all accomplished actors as well as dancers, the show is more dance theatre than pure dance
The show begins with a “terms and conditions” message projected onto the back screen, initially played straight but soon veering off into parody (“this show may contain traces of nuts”, “this show is not gluten free”), which is followed by a series of vignettes showing how we have become the mostly willing slaves of machines and regulations. To the accompaniment of Sascha Budimski’s whirring digital clock that dominates the stage, a voice over asks insistent questions about personal details that become ever more absurd: Have you got your credit cards handy? What is your mother’s maiden name? Did you pack your luggage yourself? to which the cast gives increasingly agitated answers. A man trying to climb a ladder is hounded by an occupational heath and safety fanatic; texting takes the place of sexual contact in a romance between Donald and Statton, which culminates in a very sweet pas de deux for their mobile phones in the dark.
Occasionally rebellion irrupts against the machine, such as in the soapbox segment, in which the cast fights for top place on a ladder where they can vent their hatred and frustration against Facebook and other technological manipulations. Another lovely scene has the performers breaking free of technology and spinning and whizzing joyfully across the stage on office stools. In the final tender duet Shum and Rodgers appear to have escaped technological control and surveillance, until Statton and Donald spring them in order to snap them with a mobile phone camera. It’s a funny yet serious ending that poses big questions about privacy and intimacy in a world dominated by the dissemination of visual images of every intimate encounter.
This is a terrifically engaging and well-crafted work that would play well to a range of audiences, and following on from the excellent Pomona Road of 2010, shows that Lazaroff is growing in confidence and range as a theatrical creator. She will be one to watch.
- MAGGIE TONKIN