Dance
PARK, Theatre Royal, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
FOUR STARS
For choreographer Jasmin Vardimon, the truth itself is simple: people who live in cities need parks. What they don't need in this (albeit grotty) park, is The Suit and his plans for concrete redevelopments. This park is where society's human flotsam and jetsom find refuge. As Vardimon's potent mix of dance and physical theatre, spoken text and visual imagery reveals, their parklife is a complex mosaic of everyday realities and private dreamings, where possible "other selves" come to life in escapist wish-projections. All taking their cue, it seems, from the stone mermaid atop the fountain who, in a shimmer of light, morphs into the flirty, even predatory, siren the statue apparently commemorated.
If this sounds like a Disney-whimsy, it's not.This revival of PARK (2005) seethes with the loneliness and vulnerability of its characters.There's the homeless guy in a sleeping bag, the laden-down bag-lady, the haphazard busker whose default mantra of "sorry-sorry-sorry" makes him a handy target for the bully-boy who reckons he rules this roost - but even this swaggering lout has other dimensions, as the lithely mercurial Uroš Petronijevic displays, in a variety of fleeting transformations. One moment he's an English flag-waving nationalist heavy, the next a lolloping puppy-dog at the beck and call of his girlfriend. The piece is full of such surreal shape-shifting: the bag-lady emerges youthful and frisky from the chrysalis of her physical baggage, Silke Mur's vampish mermaid takes to imaginary ice for a swishly lyrical duet with Esteban Fourmi's busker - his illusion of confidence doesn't last however, and though this odd-bod group stage a protest, to the strains of "nothing's going to change my world", they, like him, were already, and always losers...
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