With a flurry of Awards, Fringe has departed, but her footprints remain in the form of several visual art exhibitions. The Blue Oyster Performance Series linked these to their more ephemeral sisters, the performing arts, with extraordinary live events, some designed to kick off the exhibitions. There were strange intimate occurrences in the Blue Oyster’s own gallery space, notably the macabre Stagpipes and Wheezebox, with Alexander Bennett’s own body integrated into his bizarre musical instruments.

Most dramatic and on a larger scale is Red River’s Core, ‘an installation with moving parts’, and winner of Fringe Best Production Design. Directed by Katrina Thomson, creator of last year’s stunning 3^rd Horse, the performance is followed up by the exhibition of gorgeous photos of the images created. Either could stand alone, but each gains from its counterpart.

The exhibition in the gallery runs for a month: you go in your own time, you look at what you like for as long as you like. The performance is a one-off, strictly controlled event with the audience herded into an apparently derelict basement in High St, Old Dunedin.

The actor/spectator relationship has been explored in many permutations during Fringe, but for the audience Core presents the most disempowering of all. The venue is pitch-black, and we are admitted only in small groups. We have no notion where we are being led, what we are sitting on, even who is beside or behind us, let alone what we are facing. Right out of our comfort zones, in fact, unsettled and braced for anything.

Out of the absolute darkness comes a wailing sound that develops into drunken singing, the sort that can be heard, loud and uninhibited, on a deserted street late at night, incoherent but full of passion. As it dies away there is at last a gleam of light, and at a considerable distance in the vast space we discern a small circular stage. It could be a fat plinth for a statue, or the trunk of a massive tree that has been felled.

The light fades. When it returns a girl sits motionless on the stage, her arms wrapped round her knees, gazing out of a window. The dark shuts down again. This establishes the pattern by which we are exposed to a succession of arresting tableaux: one or two figures posed on the stage, still or in repetitive motion. All are mysteriously but intently focused, in their activity or their inactivity, on whatever is at the core of their being.

A man shovels earth, a couple dances, a woman in a suit writes frenetically, bare-chested tattooed boxers fight, a woman in pyjamas sleeps sweetly. My favourite is an androgynous figure who carefully scrubs clean a small puffy cloud.

Some of the images are peaceful, some disturbing. Once, the light reveals simply a huge pile of discarded shoes. In our underground dungeon this conjures frightening thoughts of gas chambers. The last image though is hauntingly lovely: thistledown blown softly along a shaft of light.

It is extraordinary how smoothly and silently the choreographed figures appear and disappear from their circular plinth. They establish a hypnotic rhythm of their own, enhanced by music but no words. The lighting is gloriously effective, both on the little stage, and in a luminous wash of colour against the far wall.

The vignettes are a little like a slide show, but so far off they put me more in mind of the diascopes we made as children: shoeboxes with cellophane lids to give a coloured glow, and a peephole to view a scene in miniature, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. This distancing is effective in itself, but it is frustrating not to be able to read expressions.

Hence the added value of the photographic exhibition on display at the Blue Oyster Gallery. The pictures of the scenes are not only beautiful; they are large enough to provide more detail than was apparent in performance. With the actors’ faces visible, it is possible to interpret more clearly the tableaux presented.

Thomson, assisted by her Red Rivercrew, has yet again displayed remarkable organisational skill: this cannot have been easy to stage. The intense dark, the large empty space with no apparent wings, and the succession of disparate characters present a challenge that is met. Core is a visually gorgeous work. More importantly we are left with the sense of having been led along an intriguing path to expand our own imaginations, and to think a little more deeply about what motivates us, what lies at the core of our own lives.
_______________________________
For more production details, click on the title above. Go to Home page to see other Reviews, recent Comments and Forum postings (under Chat Back), and News.