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If you’re fascinated by the translatability of words between different national languages, and in the constancy of meaning between different modes of communication, then this is a must performance in which to be a 'participant observer'. The enactment prompted in me a number of thoughts: for example, what ‘words’ would be used if the speakers' two languages were French and German, instead of French and English? It was a Frenchman, Abbé Charles-Michel de l'Épée, who intuited that the manual signing of the deaf he observed was a language, which he used as a basis for a teaching system to others. Why did the English still persist with the belief in the supremacy of the spoken word and lip-reading? And where did fact end and fiction begin in the story of the two lovers? The performance was more about entertaining ideas, and how these ideas may be enacted, than in being overtly entertaining. Being relatively recently bereaved it struck many chords and re-affirmed what I took to be an existential perspective - we are what we do and how we do it; the unexamined word and deed are probably not worth very much. StruwelPeter (Unverified), 09/09/09 This is a quirky short piece of theatre, only 50 minutes long, in which a French lady named Chloé Déchery delivers a sort of lecture to the audience in which the ambivalence of language and its potential for catastrophic misunderstanding is juxtaposed with other methods of communication - in particular, expressive body language, mime and dance, contrasted with the flatness of the printed word, and the fleetingness of images. But it isn’t really a lecture so much as a kind of performance; one of those that challenges its audience by blurring the boundaries of genre and forcing them outside their comfort zone. Similarly, though it had the potential to be very funny, its humour was always undercut by troubling dark undertones of pain and tragedy, and an odd mixture of random factoids with predictions of the inevitability of death and other such uncomfortable observations. I’m not sure this entirely came off, but the lady performer was very engaging with her mesmerizing black eyes and exquisitely graceful movement (although, she kept telling us, she wasn’t a dancer). It was reasonably entertaining but it’s not going to make you gasp and stretch your eyes. Andrea Hopkins (DI Reviewer), 07/09/09 |
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