How Precarious, of all people, can bemoan our addiction to all things mediatised is utterly beyond me.
In Anomie, the young dance-theatre company suggest that each of us treats urban life as a computer game in which we are the sole hero. Through the presentation of six characters, each of whom lives an unfulfilled, asocial existence governed by a single ruling principle – an obsession with film, say, or online social networking – Precarious portray a generation disengaged from each other and from reality.
Problematically, all of this applies in equal measure to Precarious’ particular breed of media-dependent theatre. It’s ironic: they lament the influx of digital technology into society while wholeheartedly succumbing to it.
Worse still, the multimedia used is entirely responsible for Anomie’s being a complete shambles. Televisions on mechanised pulleys flicker and display malfunctioning messages. Images slip out of sync with one another, even as the live action loses time with the fixed images onscreen. Legs, for example, appear five seconds after a body has stepped behind the screen. Their attempts to project into three dimensions, admirable though they are in theory, utterly fail: blurry, pixelated images don’t read with clarity and target surfaces are missed.
Not only is there no evidence of careful craft, the material technology onstage becomes a concern as flat screens collide and threaten to keel over.
When they go cold turkey on this habit, however, things improve immeasurably. With just four mattresses, they create the urban architecture simply, clearly and wittily, even managing to maintain the desired implication of digital culture. Likewise, an amorous, yet disturbing, duet takes place either side of a mattress, disembodied arms reaching through a hole in its centre to explore another anonymous body. Far more is achieved with the tools of reality, choreography and performance.
Precarious are clearly inventive practitioners with something worth saying, but you wish these media-junkies would turn off the television, face the music and dance.
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