Manipulate
That's It, Traverse, Edinburgh
Mary Brennan
THREE STARS
Sabine Molenaar has aptly named her company Sandman, and like that mythic figure, this Belgian performer has the knack of infiltrating your thoughts, snagging your imagination with glimpses of what might be bizarre dreams or the stuff of nightmares. Molenaar achieves this on her own, on a bare stage with just a handful of props: discarded frocks, wigs, hanging headless on wires, and most enigmatic of all, a gnarly little bonsai tree like a talismanic shrine on a table.
In time, those frocks will seem like remembered skins that her body inhabits, characterises, then sloughs off in a process of mutation. One of the wigs, too, will come into play as she shape-shifts before us. Be-wigged she's youthful, hips snaky and mesmerising in the red satin slink that stretches from waist to bare foot. Un-wigged, the close-fitting skull cap renders her a bald-pated old crone, a state she amplifies with her hunched-over body language and butoh-esque crabbing and toddling movement. Whether she is clothed or not, it's Molenaar's body that is the gleaming-white conduit for whatever state she's in.
Initially, huddled beside the table, her naked limbs are in such a dislocated jumble it's hard to discern who or what she is - primitive life form? alien blob? human being? In this, her first solo, Molenaar's unnerving ability to twist and contort herself through nuances of transformation conjures up moods that are playful, child-like, elegant or freakily grotesque - the growling howls she utters have a visceral wrench to them. Hers is a fascinating flexibility of mind and creativity, as well as of body: we're left, pinned to our seats, in admiration.
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