Festival Dance
Hocus Pocus
The Studio, Potterow
Mary Brennan
three stars
What looks like a giant window is poised, mid-air, in the on-stage darkness. Gradually, something comes - as if out of nowhere - into the frame: exactly what it is, is not immediately obvious. Even when we can make out that it’s an arm, the way it arrives -isolated, disembodied - makes you think “are my eyes deceiving me here?” And there you have the very essence of Philippe Saire’s Hocus Pocus - a conjuring up of images that aren’t always what they seem at first sight, or indeed at a second or even a third look.
The fore-arm, like the lower leg that also appears, will acquire other body parts and, after a few topsy-turvy antics, they will all come together as a man. Well, two men, actually. Who - seen from the naked waist up - get to grips with laddish friendship through gung-ho arm-wrestling and by playfully bashing each other. Clearly some Boy’s Own adventuring is called for, and Saire is soon bringing fantastical larks into play: is that a plane, that takes off to infinity and beyond - or is the feathery wings of Icarus? Either way, disaster strikes and plunges the action into a deep sea realm that threatens to billow out of the gloom and lap over the front row. Strange critters come and go, all cunningly realised by the two remarkably athletic performers, Mickaël Henrotay-Delaunay and Ismael Diartzabal, who - described as dancers - are more like contortionists as they negotiate the tight confines of the structure . So is this a dance piece? Not in a conventional sense. Its appeal - for family audiences with youngsters aged 7+ - is partly in puzzling out how the two men, and the creative team behind them, deliver such persuasive illusions. Then wondering if what you saw was done by techno whizz-wizardry, or real people…
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