Review: Electric Hotel, Sadlers Wells Off-site

Written for Culture Wars

David Rosenberg has (almost) cracked the formula. Two years ago, in Contains Violence, he placed us on the balcony of the Lyric Hammersmith, equipped with headphones and binoculars, to watch a contemporary Hitchcockian hostage thriller take place in offices across the square. His influence worked its way into Shunt’s Money – on which he collaborated – which had us peer down with a bird’s eye view on a sauna and a cluttered breakfast room through two layers of thick perspex. In both, the sense of distance and separation that this division of space caused overwhelmed the possibility of connection. We watched from afar, illicit voyeurs always unregistered, but also always unsure of what we were really witnessing. Through the glass, it could barely make half-sense. The whole remained perplexing. Questions of identity, motive and relationship were left hanging and unanswerable, even before one attempted to reconcile the inexplicably surreal. Interesting – and, indeed, well-tested by writers since Beckett and Pinter – though that is, the division left an already ambiguous score impossibly out of reach.

Electric Hotel maintains all the mystery enforced by the glass partition by refusing us a closer inspection and keeping up at arms length, but its chief success is to make the barrier seem semi-permeable. This time Rosenberg, co-directing with choreographer Frauke Requardt, manages to draw us in. Or even: through. Simultaneously invested (even if still not quite empathetically) and utterly outside, our perspective multiplies: we’re within and without, attached but adrift.

In the midst of an urban wasteland, crowded with jagged, thick-set metal cast-offs, there sits a chunk of elsewhere. Announcing itself as the Electric Hotel is a four-storey, glass-fronted building bejewelled with the sort of winking neon signs that entice passing tourists, preying on their naivety with glitter and dazzle. It’s almost as if the structure has been wrenched from its Costa del Sol or Copacabana foundations. A sliver of Americana, of Tropicana in a gloomy industrial dystopia. Yet, for all that it’s out of place – an exotic asteroid more accustomed to palm trees than this balmy breeze – it fits: perfectly trashy; an eyesore rightly tucked out of sight.

Sitting at its base, looking up, the sensory experience is not dissimilar to a drive-in movie, the sort that all-American characters visit in all-American films. First – foremost – you’re struck by the verticality. Looming large above you, the structure is similarly imposing. It’s grander than you’d expect. We’re used to peering across a stage, watching through, yet here we crane our necks and look up at. I say ‘at’ on account of the flatness caused by the glass. We know the spaces behind to be three-dimensional, but we can’t feel them as such. Instead, they seem to be oddly framed and in perspective. Half-and-half. When performers appear on balaconies the difference is noticeable; they’re suddenly sharing the same space as us and breathing the same air. It feels less claustrophic, more real. Add to that the effect of its lighting, glowing synthetically against the cloud-filled dusky sky, and it seems attractive and hypnotic, seducing us like moths and standing out a mile. Cleverly, Börkur Jónsson’s design and Natasha Chivers’s lighting seem aware of this screen-like pull. At one point a rectangle of familiar proportions appears, electric blue and framed in white, nodding to the reflection of the screen.

Then there’s the conscious mediatisation of the soundtrack, which we receive through (very comfortable) headphones. Again, I use the word ‘soundtrack’ carefully, as it sits entirely aside and on top of the action, rather than emanating from it as we usually expect of live work. When we see taut calves in red stilettos almost frogmarching down the hall, we hear footsteps echoing; when we hear this saliva-churning click of tongue and cheek, we see a maid turning gum around in her mouth. Swimmer’s splash, phones ring, guitars break out into song. And yet, they don’t. The disruption of the relationship between sound and image is constant. Synchronised, yes, but disjointed. Like a film’s score, Ben and Max Ringham’s soundtrack sits on top of the action as a separate entity.

The remarkable thing about Electric Hotel – what makes it both distancing and enticing, half-and-half – is it’s wielding together of sensations caused by different media, as if Rosenberg has had opportunity to cherry-pick the choicest effects of various art-forms. First, there’s the astonishment of its actual occurrence, live and in the moment. We marvel at the miracle of its precision in synchronicity, both between performers themselves and with the pre-recorded soundtrack. Then, there are more mediatised effects: the distortion of things and the controlled (but consciously registered) pull on our focus, the awareness of one’s panning gaze, zooming-in and zooming-out. The combined design is also able to make use of trickery, manipulating the confusion of vision caused by the glass screen such that the live seems specially effected or edited into the impossible. Often characters skip through space, exiting through one door and appearing instantaneously in another.

The result is a wealth of cultural resonances. In its amplification of monotony, there’s David Lynch. In the compartmentalisation of individual narratives, there’s Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual. There’s Charlie Kaufman in the fantastical, physics-defying landscapes and Harold Pinter in the menace of the unexplained. Running alongside these (at least, for me) are echoes of Lars von Trier, Matthew Bourne, Darran Aronofsky, Sofia Coppola and Jeff Koons, not to mention a performance lineage of Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, the Wooster Group and Shunt itself.

Electric Hotel works – where Contains Violence and Money struggled – because Rosenberg has understood the limitations of this format and turned them to his advantage. Behind the glass, nuanced psychology and character gets lost – flattened, even. Here Rosenberg gives us archetypes, characters as costumes: surly maids, pregnant women, chain-smoking neurotics and an awkward (possibly disabled) child imprisoned by an extravagant dental brace. His menacing, Pinteresque intruders are not simply men in suits, but piranha-jawed creatures. He paints not in watercolours, but in marker pens. It’s vivid, emboldened and darkly cartoonish. Beside that is the realisation that any hope of naturalism, even when infused with brash surrealism, doesn’t read. The choreography, though it is built out of everyday actions, allows an abstract expressionism that echoes his characters.

Content-wise, the piece’s thrust is the notion of unseen synchronicity; that, across a single hotel let alone a city or the world as a whole, the private actions of individuals mirror and echo. Requardt builds a symphony out of that idea, blending harmony, discord and cacophony with his choreography. Admittedy, it’s a touch Amelie, but the concept that, at any given moment, a thousand phones ring, ten-thousand fists strike and a million orgasms peak remains softly delightful. As the menace swells, however, as the singular narrative of the boy in braces takes over, piranha-men multiplying, the piece becomes harder to follow. While it intensifies in force, the elevation of one strand over others seems arbitrary and, in leaping out of the panorama, one feels a touch ill-equipped to gage its significance. Electric Hotel is better when looping; cycling through repetitions, redirecting focus and allowing distortion to patterns. Perhaps this elongated strand marks the cycle’s breaking point, the overpowering of pattern by distortion, which anticipates the somehow unsatisfying quality of repetition that stops suddenly and arbitrarily. I don’t know.

I’ve jumbled thoughts in the process of writing this over a few days; it’s become untamed and grown messier than I’d hoped, but I’ll end with a challenge to Rosenberg (should he be reading). With all the channelling of different media, the ability to meld together effects from film, literature and live performance, I really missed one aspect of live work: communality. Cocooned in my headset, cut off from the real responses around me, the rest of the audience felt to me a hindrance. I wanted a clearer view and a sense of isolation: just me and the Electric Hotel, alone in a sparse, deserted, urban landscape. Yes, there’s a moment where the soundscape shifts to our space, tunes into our frequency, as if those around you have burst into chatter and shared jokes, causing you to look around and remember their presence, but that is a one-off, almost an interval that makes you remember yourself. It is a snag that shows how remote and lonely the rest has been. How, then, can this format yield a shared experience? Next time. Next time...