Thoughts on Mountain
Went to see Mountain, a new live performance by visual artist Orla Barry, at the South London Gallery this evening. To say that the piece was disappointing would be an understatement. It was a frustrating, forced, fakely entertaining experience. My main issue with Mountain was the fact that, for a long hour and a half, I basically saw a conventionally devised piece of experimental theatre performed in a gallery space. There’s fundamentally nothing wrong with that; in fact, I actually think modern theatre is much more interesting and relevant in galleries’s and other unconventional spaces. However when the gallery space is turned into a theatre stage and its function is to be host to a conventional theatre piece made by a visual artist who presents this work as an exploration of improvisation and language then there’s a slight problem…
That’s not to say visual artists can’t make theatre and if they do, it can’t be shown in a gallery space. But then, I’ll expect something different from a theatrical exprience that falls flat throughout its course, letting me crave for some dose of Bonnie Tyler or any other runny cheese’s slices the Eurovision traditionally offers at this time of the year on a Saturday night! I’ll expect the bodies to be at the heart of the work of art as opposed to have individuals pretend to be put through misery by the spins of the fortune wheel.
What Orla’s piece lacked was simplicity: by playing with the idea of fate through the use of different props, primarily lead by the spinning wheel, the live performance got trapped pretty quickly and all I saw was 3 irritatingly noisy performers, talking endlessly, exhausting themselves in repetition but unable to sustain any momentum they might have created or to deliver any substantial moments in their various acts. It just didn’t work.
It didn’t work because the piece was too cleverly devised therefore too contrived with no room for error, danger, uncertainty and, from an audience point of view not even a feeling of being kept on your toes. This obvious sense of control from every aspect of the performance destroyed not only its concept – which on paper is interesting – but most of all its reason of being. What didn’t also help was the weakness of the script: each material was banal in its delivery and content to a point that I wish the performance had used language to its strict minimum, giving instead its total space for physicality.
Fortunately, there were a few things about the piece I liked: the rare moments of “complicity” between the performers and of proximity with the audience, the set design and its overall heavenly feeling, the precision and tighteness of the movements in the physical episodes. But these were not enough to give the piece the meat it desperately needed to keep me engaged…Would have it made any difference if the piece had been conceived with a director and/or a dramaturge in the room? I’m not sure. I feel like the concept serves the purpose for a durational performance and only in this context all the ideas of fate, chance and “shows within a show” thrown in the mix could truly play equal roles to “control” the performers and therefore shape the performance.
