Review: As The Flames Rose, We Danced to the Sirens, the Sirens, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

She swoons. On the video tape, she swoons. In black and white, she swoons. Her eyelids slide shut and she rocks back on her heels and she teeters towards the floor. A man rushes into shot to catch her and does so with some force. He swoops in and snatches her. Her face is first startled, instinctively terrified, then it softens into a meek, woozy look up, past his chin and into his eyes. She breathes in his scent and melts into his chest.

This scene repeats and repeats on a jagged loop, as if it contains some crucial evidential detail. It does: that dance as old as time – damsel and her saviour. This is the crux of Sleepwalk Collective’s razor-sharp meditation on the gender politics of pop culture, in which women are frail delicacies, ripe for the fucking. Even their names are pure allure: Greta Garbo, Bridget Bardot, Marilyn Monroe. The same vowels slip out of your lips with a silent kiss.

Sensuality – sometimes spoofishly overblown – is all here. Iara Solano Arana stands in the spotlight, under a cropped blonde wig, and speaks into the microphone. “The blonde in the black dress;” she is all shoulders and collar bone. Her voice is deep and lush and wispy, though Spanish clicks snick the back of her throat. Her words are like satin, like a spritz of perfume. They are kissed rather than spoken. Saliva clicks in her mouth. Meaning is carried by sensation as much as anything else.

Arana starts by placing a microphone against her ankle. There is an hot foreign country, where crickets chirrup ceaselessly, in her legs; a kennel in her crotch; a seascape in her navel and a storm in her chest. The body is a world in and of itself. The body speaks. It’s means something. Everything perhaps.

“If you want me to drink it,” Arana smooches, nonchalantly tipping some wine into a glass, “like a man trying to have sex with a woman…” And she does: slumping in her chair, legs wide, making eyes at some unseen floozie. She repeats the action as a woman newly in love and as other tropes with no counterpoint in reality. All of which exist though, adopted as shorthand for some fixed fiction dreamt up, no doubt, by men.

No wonder that these brittle waifs, these tender ingenues, die over and over again: tied to the train tracks, hollering out for a hero. They cut themselves down the middle, sawing themselves in half like glamourous assistants. Inside, not guts, but a moonlit lagoon; paradise, perfectly non-existent. “I will cry till your clothes are soaked through and then you call and tell me… ‘Darling, it’s ok. You’re safe now.”

This is a tingle of a show. One that purrs into your ear and brushes the hairs on your arm, that runs fingers through your hair and down the back of your neck, that traces its tongue over your lips and lets its scent run up you nostrils. It winks and turns away and it doesn’t look back. It never looks back. It is truly a siren.

And, like every siren, it’s a hollow construct. An illusion. Alluring, yes, but unreal.

Photograph: Alex Brenner