Behaviour Review: Cock and Bull/Anonymous P at The Arches, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

four stars

Nic Green billed her timely deconstruction of the verbal and gestural language of modern (right-wing) politics as "a scratch performance", but that was rather belied by the precision of its execution by herself, Laura Bradshaw and Rosana Cade. A piece that made suprisingly musical use of familiar cliche, and found rich choreographic material in conference platform pacing and the TV sofas of political punditry, it was also, as you might expect, about the male dominance of those, ballot box crosses in black electrical tape over the women's nipples beneath their men's garb.

As exhausting to watch as it self-evidently was to perform, it lost some narrative clarity as the suiting was shed, Cade eventually centre stage in only the sort of foil wrap given to long-distance runners at the finish line, and fluffy carpet slippers. The second section, Dedication, was more reliant on music than the movement that drove the first, entitled Exorcism, and further development of the work might usefully engage another hand in honing the scoring of very promising piece.

If Cock and Bull inevitably recalled the work of Laurie Anderson at times, Chris Kondek and Christiane Kuhl's Anonymous P owes a clear debt to New York's Wooster Group, if lacking the slickness of execution. Interacting with the smartphones of the audience in sometimes disturbing ways, the company occupy two arches with an installation that bristles with technology but is often at its best when it is simplest. At heart a disturbing wake-up call about how we are all tracked and monitored in every moment of our lives, and collude surprisingly willingly in this surveillance, it employs classical myth and archive footage (particularly amusingly of a young Steve Jobs) in a cabaret that is as seductive as it is scary, if a little shapeless.