Not Waiting by Mary Paterson

Intermission

Soho Theatre

22-24 April 2009

Intermission. The middle. The in-between. The time when you have a drink in the bar, or the performer in Pacitti Company’s Intermission drinks beer in the middle of the stage. Thinking time, when something has ended and before something else has begun. Intermission. When the world is still going on around you.

At the start of Pacitti Company’s show, Sheila Ghelani – the only performer onstage throughout – unveils nine cloaked figures. Like furniture stored under dustsheets, these figures have been waiting quietly, while the audience fills the auditorium. Ghelani reveals them to be nine microphones, each bearing a label: ‘Fiction’, ‘Glossary’, ‘Fact’, ‘False Starts.’ She moves between the mics, talking straight to the audience with the confidence of a practised speaker, the determination of someone with something to say.

At first it is obvious what these different mics stand for. At ‘Glossary’, Ghelani reads out a litany of terms to describe immigration; at ‘High Horse’ she describes a set of reasons why ‘they’ shouldn’t come ‘here’; at ‘Fact’ she tells us about the emigration and immigration of the swallow. The mics are different sides to an argument, different means of expression – even if they’re different means that could be used by the same person. But before long, this clarity of purpose is dissolved. Ghelani’s subjects become more personal – sex, death, love, ambition – and she stands at ‘High Horse’ wondering why things have turned out for her the way they have. ‘…And I feed myself,’ she says, ‘I mean, that’s not the done thing, is it? In this day and age – for a woman to feed herself.’

At these moments, the simple set-up on stage stops being a device for communication and becomes a very urgent means of understanding the complexities of another mind. The mics, with their neat labels, might stand for different points of view, but Ghelani (and it does feel like Ghelani, a real person and not a character performed, who is confronting us on stage) won’t be divided up and packaged neatly. She needs all these mics and more; she needs to stand at them and amid them; she has an opinion and also something further, something in-between.

When she is not speaking with soft determination into the microphone, Ghelani fixes the audience with an electric stare and dances towards us. She flicks her wrists in flamenco, or shakes her hips to the punch-line of a joke, and all the time her eyes are fixed on us, fixating us with the sharp sting of another person appearing in full. The thrill of Intermission is in the shocking vitality of this person on stage: the complexity of her thoughts and the richness of the way she moves. When she tackles death Ghelani walks to the microphone called ‘Fact’ and falls silent. This vital, full person – Stops. It is an apt metaphor for the unknowable-ness of death. For the audience watching, for a short, shivering moment, it also enacts the loss and terror that death brings. It’s a relief when Ghelani returns to us, smiling a knowing smile, full of life and energy once again.

This energy is sustained, in part, by a continuous soundtrack that ripens Ghelani’s conversational language. Sometimes a musical accompaniment, sometimes famous words uttered by famous people, and once, most memorably, the looped, rhythmic sound of someone weeping, the soundtrack both drives Ghelani’s speech forwards and snags the words back again. The rhythm acts as imperative and remainder, providing a continuous flow that connects the work to itself, as well as an atmospheric counter-reading of Ghelani’s thoughts. When she talks about love, for example, it is to the jaunty sound of a marching band, an incongruous mix that emphasises the banality of the list of sexual positions she recites. But this incongruity also emphasises the importance of Ghelani’s description of a single lover’s glance. The music drives the rhythm of the list only to dilute its sexual content - and, therefore, the latent eroticism of a woman reciting it on stage – which emboldens, instead, the eroticism of something far more personal.

In fact, Intermission is made up entirely of ‘something far more personal’. Pacitti Company’s in-between time is not a waiting room for life, it’s the very stuff of life itself. It is the thoughts and opinions that don’t have a department to fit into. It’s the mess that spills into a human being. And what can you do with all this information? The final, iconic scene poses a question about what it means to understand another person in full. Do you see her energy burning bright, or do you watch her energy burn away?

Mary Paterson is a writer and producer, and Co-Director of Open Dialogues. mary@opendialogues.com

Ecology up the money tree: Pacitti Company's A Forest by David Berridge

A Forest

Conceived and directed by Robert Pacitti

Co-devised and performed by Richard Eton, Sheila Ghelani and Robert Pacitti

The Pit, Barbican

7-9 April

There’s been little about nature in the shows at this years SPILL. Or, at least, not much about the non-, other- or more-than human bits of it, if one excludes the dogs and horses of Castellucci. So, feeling a bit eco-starved, I felt somewhat expectant waiting outside the Barbican’s Pit to see a show called A Forest.

Actually, A Forest, too, had little in the way of nature, if by that I meant pastoral landscapes, lush vegetation, living animals, or just lots of green. For their hour long show Pacitti Company had modified the Pit into a small space in which a circle of chairs surrounded an island of 2p pieces. If the shape suggested an island biogeography, with all the uniqueness and variability Darwin found so exciting on the Galapagos Islands, then its bronze mass suggested geography had become money slightly quicker than money had become landscape.

A man lying on the coins. I can’t remember if he was naked at the beginning of the show, but he was naked at the end, and in the beginning, if he wasn’t, he acted as if he wished he was. He writhed on the coins, kissing and licking them. At the end of the show a bare tree was arranged above his naked body, both trapping and growing out of his body like some mutant rib-cage extension. No leaves, though, or not until two other performers had pinned a show-off, greedy foliage of fifty pound notes to its branches.

In-between these two scenes, A Forest sought to construct its own biogeography, defined by how body, nature, and money were all a part of some slightly traumatic ecosystem of desire. Central to this eco-restoration endeavor was a man stood at a microphone telling stories. The details haven’t stayed with me, and maybe that was the point. If the style and tone of his narratives reminded me of folk stories, he had a relish for details that stood out from and even abolished the narrative, proposing instead an immediate, visceral value. A man threading his eyes with red thread, for example, or sticking pins in his heart.

Over on the other side of coin island was its ring-mistress. On entering the Pit all of the audience were handed two pence pieces, before finding bald dolls on their seats. The woman came round with a money box, and everyone placed their coins inside. That seemed the end of the matter, but then the woman was back to show the audience, not the money box but both her breasts. Later she came round with a tray on which was a pair of pigs trotters. Were these the principle raw materials on which this economy-ecology depends? Later still, she collected the bald dolls, covering them in coins, both burial and blessing.

Her relationship to the man in the middle was more hands-on. Not that the man didn’t have actions to perform under his own volition. At one point he ran around the circle of coins, like a lurcher running and running until it just collapses. But ultimately his movements were determined by the woman, who tied antlers to his back. Or she ran back and forth over the coins, jumping over his naked body. Such actions summed up the tone of their relationship and the piece as a whole: caught in a tension between conscious and unconscious; autonomy and projection; flow of narrative against the fixed, iconographic image.

The naked man with the antlers on his back captured a lot of these tensions. As an image was it a mythical creation, or product of performance’s capitalist need for ever new product diversification, or both? Similarly, A Forest used storytelling to see if its conservative forms and agendas could be applicable to a more political, Queer agenda. Or does the poetic power of such stories always overwhelm the political interests of a particular teller and time? Pacitti Company hopes for the former, but tentatively, and A Forest was a laboratory for such a hope.

Take the coins themselves and how they were lit. Sometimes they were isolated in the space: a warm light gave them a semi-magical bronze-becoming-gold aura. Other times the light was more flat and the coins were part of the broader environment. Not totally ordinary, of course, because it was an enormous very non-everyday number of 2p pieces. If we can’t make stories our own, or insert them into our own political and performance agendas, we can at least work back and forth between their magic and their almost-everydayness, and see what, if anything, happens.

David Berridge writes and edits the blogzine More Milk Yvette: A Journal of the Broken Screen. moremilkyvette@gmail.com