Signals of the Real by Geoffrey Sykes
In its October 2014 version, performed at the “Bacovia” Theatre from Bacău, in Romania, within Contemporary Dance Festival, Signals of the Real was directed by Geoffrey Sykes – the author of the script –, choreographed by Alysha Firbank, who also performed, together with Galina Bobeicu and Cristian Osoloş, accompanied by the soprano Brânduşa Moţoc, Liviu Mera playing the cello, and Cornelia Erhan the piano.
In Signals of the Real, it’s remarkable the playright’s power to build atmosphere, move the spectator somewhere else – within an imprecise and apparently exotic space, one which “who knows”, we “have all already seen in our dreams”, as the text says. Here, even sadness becomes luminous and anguish is healed through the power of the imagination, inner freedom that enables us to regain control of our lives and ourselves.
Geoffrey Sykes did not want a show of contemporary dance properly, but a multimodal construction – a “multi-shape creation”, as he claims – where poetry, painting, music and dance combine and answer each other, where gesture dances with the light, the words uttered on stage with live music, silence with the video projections and performers with the spectators’ look. Galina Bobeicu, Cristian Osoloş and Alysha Firbank play three refugee artists from a “lost civilization”, turned into a “big mistake”. The sombre themes of the story (the war, Big Brother, the control of the individual and the instrumentalization of creativity, the freedom of conscience as a fraud by defrauding the Establishment, the alienation and the drift of the contemporary world) are all resolved in the luminous utopia of a (yet?) possible “revolution of conscience”.
Geoffrey Sykes devised his show like a poem of psychoanalytically decrypted elements, as in the creation of his mentor, James Gleeson. (For example, the sea evokes the dark depths of the unconscious). In this cathartic “fable” of all sorts of elements – exorcism of the fear smouldering in the unconscious, shielded into the heart of civilization – Alysha dances with the gentle, calm energy of the earth; Galina and Cristian, with the histrionic, changing, playful energy of the air, or with the fluid, unsubmissive energy of water. An interesting solo is that of Alysha Firbank – playing the Dancer – at the “Mohenjo-Daroo coffee shop” (an enclave of freedom through creativity, which subversively avoids the “North regime”), as soon as the press announces the failure of the expected revolution. Alysha dances in a crouching posture, with wringing and alarming moves, with balance broken near the platform – like a creature of the sea, suddenly helpless, wrecked on an arid shore, which hinders her movements like a fisherman’s net. The solo is a sequence of failures and recoveries, a hesitation between resistance and resignation. The dancer passes from the straight, proud, statuary posture to one of lament and full abandonment – lowering the eyes and arms, bending and squatting – the surrender of the body along with exhaustion of the will. From ascending, confident, almost proud movements, to desolate gestures, searching for the ground with fatigue and renunciation.
While the Dancer is performing her solo, the other two characters, the Philosopher and the Painter, withdraw anxiously into closed, defensive or reluctant postures, with their arms folded around their bodies – like in a gesture of defence or only concentration – with their heads bowed and eyes lost into the ground. There is in this sequence – without being the only one – a synergy of gestures, an interactional and emotional synchrony of the three characters – in fact, predictable and highlighted well by the choreographic design. The three characters thus externalize – amplifying through synergy – confusion, concern, deadlock, deception, vulnerability in front of a mechanism of social control, whose aggression is difficult to avert. Visual contact is suspended, none of the three looks at the others, each of them being engrossed in their own thoughts and fears. Then, Alysha, the Dancer, lies on the platform, with her arms stretched aside and her face upwards, in a posture of crucifixion; she detaches herself from the ground, with lateral spinning movements of the body, which amplify a lament movement of the head that moans woefully to the right and to the left. In virtue of a kinesic polysemantism, which associates – like in poetry – a multitude of meanings connoted to the same structure of expression, the respective sequence overlaps, at the same time, the evocation of a movement of ambush and watch, described on the horizontal level, like in the ancient warrior dances (in the Greek “pyrrhic”, for example). Some other times, Alysha slides in a crouching posture, almost wiping the soil, with a furtive creeping of haunted creature, trying to get lost somewhere, in the hollows of the ground.
In another sequence, after the ultimatum visit of the Inspector, the Dancer naps and the Philosopher and Painter dance with slow, almost hypnotic movements, as if floating in weightlessness – a drowsy dive into an “elementary music”, a quasi-vegetative regime of existence, pre-conceptual and pre-reflexive; the conscience of individuality is dissolved. Suddenly, “imagination is no longer forbidden”; newspapers announce that “a revolution took place” overnight. The hallo of Neptunian sonority is replaced by the passionate inflections of the tango – a music of life, feelings, of the fully alive creature who assumes itself with open eyes. Finally, the Inspector’s voice is uselessly threatening, powerless in front of the assault of imagination, which seems to be a key to freedom – inner freedom, in any case, which all the three characters are searching.
Signals of the Real is a parable on a possible road towards inner freedom. The story is not new, but it is necessary to be, now and then, reminded. In order to be able to believe that in the life of each of us there is still place for ourselves, beyond the habitual “to do lists”, “comme il faut”, “as required”. This road begins with a step, and the three characters take it by dancing, eventually becoming immune to what could wither their joy of living and saps of creativity. Borrowing (ironically?) the voice of the director Geoffrey Sykes, the Inspector – who subjects the refugee artists to a harsh indictment, filling the background with his face oversized through video projections – seems to be a lookalike of Big Brother, prophetically imagined, in 1984, by Orwell, in one of his dystopias, 1984. To the spectator’s comfort, Geoffrey Sykes does not hesitate to rehabilitate utopia. It feels good to go to the theatre and find out that not everything is lost. That joy and hope have not gone out of fashion and, even if it were otherwise, they may yet be restored to stage, in the applauses of the audience.
Nicoleta Blanariu