★★★★
To enter into any performance art space is to toss aside any notion of traditional coherence, though after one too many brushes with the form one may find that the unexpected is, in its own way, formulaic.
Nonetheless, whatever anti-expectation expectations one may have formed for the new performance piece Perpetuation from Clockwork Collective and Lucky Samurai in association with Under the Roof, they are effectively unsettled immediately upon entry. Attendees are invited to amass in a small outdoor section of the Galleria Objets prior to the show, or to group around a striking assortment of exhibits, a monocle-sporting sculpt of a man’s head sharing space with fragmentary scraps of poetry. All of this is washed in an immersive soundscape, manned by a DJ whose occasional, apologetic fumblings with the volume dial prove indicative of the show on the whole. Even the mistakes are unusual enough to feel like part of the act.
The main action takes the audience into an (admittedly crammed) indoor space, with little separating the performers from the crowd save for a square outline. In it, a woman who may have just staggered out of the crowd, drunk, tearfully recounts a frightening story of a late-night encounter with a bouncy castle. It’s the closest to straight narrative we’ll be offered for the remainder of the evening, save for the eerie songs performed live by a duo of musicians, in tandem with the increasingly surreal happenings at the centre of things. Performers gyrate intensely, often in connection with the machinations of a mysterious automated head positioned at the back of the stage. One could read into this a push-pull of the flesh and the synthetic, of automation and human ingenuity, but it’s best to just follow the stream-of-movement rhythms of the piece.
Eventually, the first act gives way to a second with a different pair of performers, in this case an older man and a younger woman, the former wielding a supply of what could be corn syrup or pig’s blood and using it to douse the latter. Mileage may vary on the length and variance (or lack thereof) of this sequence after the previous one’s already done its strange, transportive work, but the immersive effect achieved in so limited a space with such meagre resources (not least when it comes to that enveloping soundscape) never ceases to be impressive.
Ultimately, this ambitious performance art piece is accomplished enough to make you wonder what its team could do with even greater resources. Though at a certain point apologies were made for “everything that could go wrong” having gone wrong, even this seemed of a piece with the rest.
Perpetuation ran from 7pm – 8:45pm at the Galleria Objets, Brick Lane, London.
Words by Thomas Messner
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