The sweet secret of a multi-media installation like Alive in Berlin is that you make it your own, it is you who are the creative artist. Oh, you give a courteous nod, of course, to the remarkable team – Poet Jenny Powell, Composer and Sound Designer Kerian Varaine, Video Artist Phoebe Lisbeth Kay MacKenzie, melded by Animateur Simon O’Connor – but it is you, the audience, who selects what to focus on, and makes of it what you will.

We are in the basement of what was Dunedin’s Underground Market: a slightly sinister venue for tattoo parlours, strange jewellery and cast-off clothing. It is bare now; a cavern ‘measureless to man’. Chairs are placed as in a park, singly or in twos or threes, facing in every which direction.

We are encouraged to move around, and the patrons are surprisingly unfazed by this, absorbing the mood of the work, quietly changing their seats from time to time to gain a different perspective. I become aware that I am part of other people’s view, and tilt my head to cast a more vivid shadow on the wall. Someone sits in the chair next to me and puts a hand on my knee. A friend, I hope.

I find myself thinking, this must be what words feel like when they are trapped in a poem: the oppressive ceiling and fourteen square concrete pillars in strict formation, rigid as the rhyme scheme and set rhythm of formal classical poetry. Some words have struggled out but not yet escaped, scrawled on torn scraps of paper plastered to floor, walls, even the roof. One piece, stuck over a particularly rough bit of floor, reads, somewhat ominously, “Achtung!”

Clutching her poems and a light like a single candle, Jenny Powell drifts through the vast space like the ghost of Emily Dickinson, in long pale pinafore and tangled hair, a lost soul doomed to wander the underworld forever.

In her vision, Berlin is superimposed over our Dunedin; a glorious dislocation that has Checkpoint Charlie burgeoning over Princes St, while the Beatles sing Love Me Do hidden at the back of the Disc Den, and Rattray St of bad reputation is the meeting place of spies in disguise.

In the confines of this concrete prison, the words can be frightening. “She knew too much/ They interrogated her/ She was silent/ They tortured her.” I am happier with the image of Marlene Dietrich in Gore for the Gold Guitar Awards.

As Powell reads her haunting poetry, her sing-song voice is caught and echoes around us, sometimes enhanced, sometimes muffled by an evocative soundscape – frequently the ocean, or maybe it is distant traffic. Sea-side Dunedin or bustling land-locked Berlin? 

Images flicker on the walls, some purely abstract, some suggesting dim scenes of a far-off past: the 1930s perhaps, flowers behind a picket fence, two children in grainy black and white playing innocently on a beach. Sound and film are both beautiful and disturbing. Sometimes the connection to the words is clear, sometimes hard to comprehend.

But as Animateur Simon O’Connor writes: “Jenny’s work is about displacements and fractures and things that don’t quite fit, so it would have been quite wrong … for us to have tried to make something from it that was comfortably seamless.” 

An illustrious actor himself, O’Connor is co-founder of the Talking House community arts collective, with the experience to see the potential for performance in Powell’s poetry, and to inspire the exotically creative artists Phoebe MacKenzie and Kerian Varain. I am eager to see what next they will create.

Powell is a much-praised and published poet, so it doesn’t matter that I can’t always make out the words through the rush of soundscape and the atmospheric echoes, for I can find her work in more conventional places. But I miss her jaunty jingle, Carnival of Chocolate, which with the truly tragic news of the closing of Cadbury’s factory has become a requiem:

“Roll up roll up

To the city of dreams

Roll up to the city of chocolate

The Cumberland Castle of Cadbury

The heavenly home of Flakes and Freddos

Picnics and Peppys, Chocolate Fish

Every bar you could possibly wish…”

Hrumph. We may never again follow a path of perfect pinkies around the planet …

No matter, I find pasted on the concrete floor a fragment that sums up the whole fascinating, disconcerting experience of Alive in Berlin for me: “I am an interloper, tilting the day off-balance”.  What more could we ask of art, than that it tilts us off balance? 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer