September 7, 2009
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.