Monumental
The Holy Body Tattoo/Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Edinburgh Playhouse (run ended)
Nine figures standing on pedestals come alive one by one. They twitch and jerk, but gradually their movements attain a kind of synchronicity. Four men and five women, they're dressed like office workers in shirts and ties, or in blouses tucked into trousers or skirts. Over the course of the next 80 minutes they strike poses, run through slow-motion yoga routines, count “One! Two!” and drop into mutant folk dances or - a recurring motif - paw at their hair and their heads like agitated patients in a hospital for the mentally ill. It's nearly an hour before they come off their pedestals to riot, fight, temporarily ostracise one of their number from the pack, goose-step around the stage and stand on its edge grinning at the audience.
Words projected onto an almost invisible overhead screen seem to hover mid-stage and add more anxiety and paranoia in the form of sentences like “Some days you wake and immediately start to worry” or “With bleeding inside the head there is a metallic taste at the back of the throat”. At other times projections show images of wind farms or footage of motorway traffic so speeded up the tail lights are just neon smears.
With the movement and the visuals alone this piece by Canadian company The Holy Body Tattoo would be mesmerising and unsettling enough. But a live soundtrack by cult Montreal band Godspeed You! Black Emperor, famed for loud droning soundscapes which build to multi-layered crescendos, tips it into another dimension entirely. There they are at the back of the stage as an interior curtain lifts, a shadowy octet adding sonic menace in the form of a score which runs from Steve Reich-style minimalism to what sounds like two drummers accompanying a jet engine or, in the most thrilling section, a dying dragon jamming with a sick TARDIS. With that much Sturm und Drang, Monumental is an EIF show to feel as much as to watch. Perhaps it never quite adds up to more than the sum of its parts, but the parts alone are awe-inspiring enough.
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