Like any work of art, it pays to view ‘Lobsters’ armed with some knowledge. Knowing Magritte’s ‘The Lovers’ and Salvador Dali’s ‘Lobster Telephone’ helps to unravel the complexities and surrealist work of Lucy Marinkovich and provides the launching pad for a pulsating, wild and challenging 65 minutes of theatre and dance.

For Dali, the lobster was associated with erotic pain and pleasure. Marinkovich’s choreography put huge demand on the three dancers who with almost unbelievable energy and physical prowess used their technical skill to play out, at times, a shameless and unrestrained sexual fantasy involving young lovers and lobster envy. A particularly fine performance from Xin Ji.

Enter a washed-out cabaret singer ex-lobster and a suitably laconic but talented muso, Lucien Johnson, and you have a collaboration for a weird and wacky world.  They’re not called Borderline for nothing. It seems as if Dali himself is at the centre of it all: this is multi-media experience full of mysterious allusions and analogies to food and sex. Egg whites have never been so beautifully whisked or massaged, cups of tea never so sensually shared.

The audience is confronted by an almost manic and bewildering array of music. From the weird static sounds produced by a theremin to Piaf’s ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’ and an operatic aria in between, the world of Dali in all its madness comes to life.

Add Magritte’s ‘The Lovers’ to the mix and the dynamics become even more paranoiac. The painting is an unsettling image of an intimate embrace between two people whose heads are covered in cloth. The suggestion is that although they are lovers, they do not know each other well. This idea is played out exquisitely through Emmanuel Reynard’s and Lucy Marinkovich’s feverish dancing.  

There are none of the traditional classical ballet gestures (maybe a few lobster antics) to lead the narrative forward but then there is no narrative, just a series of passionate emotions wrapped around those universal themes of love and identity with liberal sprinklings of lobster ruminations from Carmel McGlone in her role as Dali’s long-abandoned lobster muse. 

Long live lobsters I say, and long live the creative energies of Borderline Arts Ensemble. 

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Edward James, wealthy English arts patron, eccentric and capricious, good on him, commissioned Salvador Dali to create work—the famous Lobster telephone (also the Mae West lips sofa…) were among the results. Of four telephones produced, one is in the collection of National Gallery of Australia—so it follows, probably, that Australian readers will be interested to know that a little show, Lobsters, all about Dali, et al surrealists, has just opened a fortnight season in Circa Theatre, Wellington. The Lobster is onstage centre for most of the riotously wonderful evening.

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Surrealism (as Paul Virilio describes it) expressed a refusal to believe in the certainty of reality, after the unspeakable atrocities of World War I. Unable to believe their own eyes and ears, artists chose instead to reject what they saw, to upset, upend, and deny the veracity of the real – celebrating instead the ‘sur-real’ – that which was above reality, on top of it, or instead of it. In their 1929 film, Un Chien Andalou, Luis Bunuel, and Salvador Dali rejected the power of vision by literally attacking the object of vision itself – in a famous scene where an eyeball is sliced open with a razor blade. Gone was the optimism of pre-war years, instead, progress and technology had become associated with the new weapons of the 20^th Century: such as gas, tanks, and machine guns. Benign objects are recrafted: a telephone,  for example, once a celebrated addition to the modern world, is revisioned by Salvador Dalí with a lobster for a handpiece…

The team from Borderline Arts Ensemble draw on this movement for the creation of their new dance and theatre work, and their first full-scale production – Lobsters. After two successful works in The Performance Arcade, and residencies in Asia and Europe, the company have opened at Circa Theatre with this bawdy, sensual, glamorous, dirty, beautiful, and melancholic cabaret of ruminations on love, sex, and longing. In the style of Maria Dabrowska’s Carnival Hound or a Robert Wilson / Tom Waits collaboration, it is a beautifully crafted performance, full of moving and heartbreaking insights into the matters of the surreal world of love.

The work is choreographed by Lucy Marinkovich, working with co-director Miranda Manasiadis, who has also composed the dramaturgy and texts.  Lucien Johnson has arranged and written a lot of the music, with a couple of songs by the Tiger Lilies and Jacques Brel, also performing the music on stage with amazing precision, sensitivity, and versatility. Marinkovich is there too, on stage with dancers Emmanuel Reynaud and Matthew Moore, and actress Carmel McGlone.

The space is draped on all three sides with pink curtains, and the floor is white. Movements are bolder, more exposed in this bright space. The black theatre lights stand out as Brechtian reminders of the presentation that is occurring, as do the use of flashcards, direct address, and the performers’ first names. Movement languages range from industrious and self-preoccupied activity, to vigorous stage-sweeping tornadoes of movement. It is a fresh and energetic choreographic style, with less of the tropes that characterise contemporary dance – unafraid of new textures, new cadences, and of working boldly with image, music, and dramaturgy. In particular I found the dancers’ preoccupation with their fingers and hands very fascinating. Moore’s final solo is a lightning fast telegram of signs and shapes with his fingers as much as his whole body, amazingly executed. The five performers are seldom in touch with one another after the opening sequence – departing from this moment of unity as dreamers in their own subjective worlds and quests for love. Figures reach for each other but never quite connect. In one scene the long trails of their blindfolds are tethered to two sides of the stage, keeping them apart. Elsewhere the body is dissected by the fleshy pink curtain – feet protruding from underneath or through its folds. In one image it is lifted like a dress to reveal two naked legs. This dissection goes further with a dance employing the hands of mannequins. It is a sexual world  – sassy and suggestive, where the costumes don’t quite hide enough of the body, and where fruity flashcards are held between McGlone’s spread legs. Throughout there is a sense of the painting, a composition of stage image that echoes David Lynch’s films or the paintings of Rene Magritte most of all.

Ceci n’est pas un pipe (this is not a pipe) – the famous painting by Magritte intones. The work (entitled The Treachery of Images) stands for the absurdism at the heart of Surrealist art. But within this bemusing statement lies a simpler truth than we are unable to admit. Of course, this isn’t a pipe, it is a painting, a painting of a pipe, a painting of a pipe that reminds us that it is not actually a pipe, whilst also being a rather good representation of a pipe. There is a sense of this double-take throughout the show, where things can be one thing, and another thing at the same time. This is wonderfully apparent in the dance with the mannequin hands, where my eye keeps returning to check where a hand holds another truncated hand at the wrist – producing a simple double-ness where the object becomes uncertain: is that her own hand on her breast? Or is it somebody else’s? Is that hand on her forehead a fringe of fingers? Or is someone else’s hand on her eyes? The same double-take occurs with a bowl of beaten egg white that becomes face-paint…

“I am not a telephone, I am a lobster,” asserts McGlone. Ceci n’est pas un téléphone. A little reading into this work reveals Dalí’s strong sexual references in the work. “He wants me to to be a mermaid standing on a bed of eyeballs while snakes lick my breasts” – she says. McGlone’s feminine subject resists the Surrealist imperative, rejecting fetishism. So does Marinkovich, who prepares a cake for Reynaud, carries it over with the cream trembling in a giant whorl before unceremoniously dumping it onto the floor in front of him. These scenes reveal a thread at the core of the dramaturgy about the struggle between a man and a woman, played out in various layers of the work, and exemplified in the imagery of the (predominantly male) Surrealist canon. Johnson begins to play Ne Me Quitte Pas on the piano. Centre-stage, McGlone lifts the microphone to her mouth. Marinkovich poises her whisk in a similar fashion. And in that delicious moment when McGlone is about to burst into song for the opening lyrics when we see the words forming behind her lips and in her plaintive eyes, Johnson cuts in with his own perfect rendition of the song, the male voice snatching the music from his female counterpart. Verse after verse this continues, until finally McGlone summons the courage to wrest the song from him, and the result is heartbreaking, full of her emotion and struggle. 

Later, Marinkovich dances in a giant blonde wig that hides her whole head with its golden curls – a faceless Dolly Parton. At the core of this work, there seems to be a tension with the fetishisation of women in a Surrealist canon, alongside a deep longing for the freedom of not caring, of being sexual, sexy, and in love. McGlone laments a lost fertility, revels in her spiny skin as a lobster… Marinkovich flaps chicken wings then slaps her raised buttocks. The work is full of women struggling to appeal, to be appealing, enjoying their beauty, but at odds with this objectification. Facial expressions are sculpted, and smiles become demonic death-grins. In the last dance, between Marinkovich and Reynaud, there is a discordance and a savagery full of anger and distance. Throughout, their characters seem to have orbited one another with equal attraction and indifference. This last dance develops Reynaud’s distracted movements and Marinkovich’s whipping storm of limbs and hair as divided, competing activities. They blunder into one another more often than they align. He is still dripping with cream from the cake that she threw on the ground. It is a kind of rite of spring for lovers, to its very last death throes, where limbs flap on the ground like the fins of two dying fish. And in the fading darkness they finally embrace, and find each other, with gasping sexual whimpering, we are left with their desire and love.

In this new century, there may be new reasons to disbelieve the senses. In an age of the alternative fact and dirty capitalism, it seems that there is a similar distrust and uncertainty in the mechanisms of progress and in the reliability of the popular definitions of reality. But perhaps today a ‘sous-reality’ is necessary, as in one that unearths the stories underneath or within the mechanisms of mainstream neo-liberal, conservative narratives: such as the (still) unresolved issue of the female subject – where women’s rights are (still) abridged, truncated, under thinly veiled dogmatism, where the female body is still a lobster, a telephone, or a mound of eyeballs. It would be nice to see works like this in such a light, and to revel in the beautiful wizardry of the artists working here – weaving music, image, light, and movement together to reveal surreal truths about how we live and love – to make meaningless, strange, surreal images that we can all understand. Lobsters is more about romance than politics, more about beauty than meaning, but the work is fresh yet (this was its world premiere), and I sense in it a potent commitment to that seething underspace, our subconscious spaces, and subjected spaces, the ‘sous-real’ that is suppressed, scary, strange, and hard to understand. Let’s make more art about that.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer