What happens when you collide a world class exponent of the nonverbal with an educated audience of festival goers? If tonight’s performance of TABAC ROUGE is any indicator, there are those who huffily and noisily walk out during the performance and those who stand for the whole of the 10 minute long bows. Similarly the show ranges and yet is riven. In the world of surrealism, which appeals to who regarding what is central.
After sell-out international seasons since its inception early in 2013, TABAC ROUGE is the hot ticket of the Sydney Festival. The Compagnie Du Hanneton is under the directorship of James Thierree and the work encompasses dance, movement, magic, circus and an indefinable otherness to create an experience rather than tell a story.
The ‘personnage’ is a dictator, confining and twisting his subjects. An opium addict, his hallucination wreaks havoc on their lives as he dismantles any reality they might have once known. The opium reference is writ large here. This is the parts of Kubla Khan that Coleridge lost and the flame to light the pipe appears as the first, and one of the few, recognizable images. Before the flame there are just bodies and ropes and flicking fluorescents and scaffolding all folded together and displayed with apparent reckless abandon for safety.
Thierree is the great grandson of Charlie Chaplain but his artistic progenitor is Buster Keaton. There is danger everywhere on this set and like the old silent footage the house falls around him in the finale. Violently practical, the setting has both a discrete aesthetic and a weird cohesion. The company make every prop or set piece from scratch.
Anything which touches the stage floor is wheeled. The chairs and larger objects are zoomed across the stage, or avoided, with the aggressive timing only a dancer can deliver. The largest piece is a scaffold wall of polished metal mirrors which dominates the stage but its ability to travel obliquely leaves a large acting area of polished floor.
The artists throw themselves across the surface and move in reptilian thrusts. They drag the setting and they climb under things to squat below as human wheels. They are hurled about as objects of the dream and when electricity is applied to the chest of the personnage they all twitch. This show is seldom still.
Why is it then that the crackle and life cannot sustain the full 90 minutes? Human beings crave understanding and will grab recognisable entities to ground them and make the environment make sense. This is when the audience laughs or draws in a communal breath. When they register that there is art in the illusion: a piece of slapstick with a camera tripod; a wonderful contortionist image; when characters propel themselves into the front rows. Imaginings like these make the sections of the work accessible but not everything is understandable. That… surely is the point.
There are words spoken towards the conclusion of the performance when the opium haze has lifted but Thierree maintains that when an audience interacts with words, they lose contact with the beauty of flesh and instinct. He prefers an audience to project their own words. The words that you take away from this production will depend on how much you clutch at the unknowable and not just the known.
TABAC ROUGE plays at Sydney Theatre as part of the Sydney Festival until 23rd January. For more about Tabac Rouge, visit http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2015/tabac-rouge