COMPANY NAME: Ernst Fischer/ Leone Cats Baril	TITLE OF SHOW: Out of Bounds Double Bill
DATE OF VISIT:31/03/00	VENUE: Jackson’s Lane

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Leone Cats Baril began with a stunning image – her seemingly disembodied head spotlighted and wrapped in clear plastic. She spent a little while playing with the plastic, breathing in to make it taut across her face and exhaling to blow it out, playing her tongue across the surface inside, chewing the plastic. There were other beautiful images in the piece also, however as a whole I personally failed to understand the significance of it. To give Ms Baril credit, the piece did not seem to be 48 minutes long, although it did seem long.

 

There was no set at all, the stage was entirely bare. Ms Baril wore a transparent plastic raincoat which she manipulated cleverly in many different ways during the show. She wore no make-up and so the minimalism of the visual décor was complete. She has an admirably eloquent body, and treated us to various beautifully lit gestures and shapes – including a stunning sequence where the sleeves of her coat fell down over her hands while she squatted with her back to the audience, flapping frantically like a bird caught in an oil spill in its death throes - but I couldn’t help thinking that for someone with such facility, she really wasn’t saying much with it.

 

A section in the second half of the piece which involved a monologue in Spanish was mildly amusing, however no more than that because I didn’t speak Spanish. So I suspect the whole point of it was lost on me. Unfortunately I felt that way during most of the piece. I could follow no logic in the relationships between the sections, or in what Ms Baril was doing in individual sections.

 

Ernst Fischer and Co. provided as dramatic a contrast, in many ways, from Ms Baril’s work as one could possibly imagine. The stage was set elaborately from the beginning in a stunning colour scheme of red, black and white. The performers were quite androgynous; all 5 of them were painted white and wore black dresses. Often it was impossible to tell what sex they were.

 

The piece was highly dramatic, both visually and psychologically: the concept seemed to attack and take delight in exposing virtually every taboo known to Western society: nudity, excrement, sex, self-mutilation and death. Like Ms Baril’s work, I did not really understand most of it. However the images and relationships formed between characters were so strong that I did not lose interest for a moment.

 

The concept of the set was extremely clever, with much use of props and costume (taken both on and off) throughout the piece. The contrast between the tiny paper house spotlit onstage at the beginning, with its homey breakfast-time conversation, and the rest of the piece with its very dark overtones and shocking scenarios, was consummate. The piece obviously dealt with the subconscious things that people do not want to acknowledge, with characters who seemed extremely unbalanced, twisted, or dazed. Other characters seemed fixated on invisible or pointless tasks, such as the beautiful opening visual of a character frenetically winding up a long black stain ribbon laid out across the stage like a spider web originating in the mouth of one of the other characters, who squatted in the centre dazed like an opium addict.

 

Feathers were one of the recurring themes, appearing in angel’s wings, feather boas, and an extraordinary sequence where a woman in men’s clothing grotesquely tarred and feathered herself using stage blood and red feathers. The bizarre finishing touch to this charade was the discovery of a rubber penis inside a prop. The performer covered the penis with her mouth and then stood – as she took two strings attached to the sides of the prop and tied them behind her head we realised it was a beak, which, when tied on, completely hid the penis. There were too many similarly shocking episodes to describe them all. The whole piece, I felt, used this kind of psychological manipulation to shock and repulse the audience in ways which were variously clever and consistently revolting. I had the feeling this was the intent – if so, it succeeded!

 

However my reaction to this show as a whole was quite mixed. Both companies had merits but my biggest complaint is that there was very little that I could label ‘dance’. Leone Cats Baril obviously had the capability but, I thought, failed to exploit it. Ernst Fischer had all the theatricality and drama I would look for in good dance, and I felt I was watching talented performers, but I could not in all good conscience call this a show of dance. Maybe performance art comes closer.