Erratica's Remnants is a deeply moving performance set around the atrocities of the wars fought in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 20th century. Using movement, voice-over and music, the performance visualises the pieces left behind from the country's troubled and tragic past. This event was its world premier, and saw it introduced (in its current and still not completely polished form-it will differ slightly in later performances) by artistic director Patrick Eakin Young.
A disembodied narrator tells the story of her trip to Bosnia in 1996, just a year after the end of the war, to help exhume the bodies from their mass graves. She intersperses this with memories, both real and imagined, of her Bosnian grandmother and father, both deeply affected by their own national and personal tragedies. The centre-piece of the simple set is a coiled pile of light bulbs. Throughout the performance, they flash on and off at different strengths, complimenting the crescendos and silences of the evening.
Balkan music, composed by the award winning Christian Mason, is performed by four backing vocalists who sing in both English and Bosnian, their voices combine with bass-heavy electronics by DJ and instillation artist Shelley Parker. This rearrangement of traditional Balkan music allows the musicians to form incredibly powerful harmonies, but also, at times, to create discombobulated and jarring noise, mirroring the story their voices are overlaid with.
In front of them, there is one dancer. The way she moves is at times painful to watch, her jagged motions seem unnatural, as if some unseen force is manipulating her body into uncomfortable, unbearable shapes. Mirroring, it seems to me, the way that war manipulates us into uncomfortable, unbearable situations. The dancer's powerful embodiment of these stories manages to encapsulate what is often overlooked when discussing war and its aftermath- of its unbearable loneliness, both during and after.
We are often told to think about war, particularly WWII, as having a kind of camaraderie, the notion that we are 'all in this together'. But it is quite the opposite. By going to war we are simply carving deep absences into our own lives and the lives of others. These empty spaces that surround war and loss and grief are to me made even more profound by an all-female cast. It reminds me that often it is the women who are left behind, left to pick up the pieces where their husbands, their sons, nephews, friends and lovers should be.
One thing that saves the performance from being, really, too excruciatingly dark, is the music. It rises and breaks, filling the gaps and the painful space the dancer leaves as she moves from one side of the stage to the other. And there are moments of joy in this music, moments of strength. Because of course music is the one thing that endures; its necessity most apparent in times of displacement and loss.
The most evocative image for me is when the narrator speaks about the lusciousness of Bosnia in the summer. How green it is. I visualize new roots and tendrils crawling over the mass graves, a fresh covering of grass and leaves unfurling. How nature so easily forgives and forgets the atrocities we are continually committing. This makes me think of the performance in layers, the dancer the skeleton of this country, the music of the vocalists binding its flesh back on, and a new layer of cool green grass, covering, but never forgetting.