Crying Out Loud Blog

[A response to Subliminati Corporation's File-Tone from Crying Out Loud's House Critic, John Ellingsworth]

It’s exactly like an encounter with one of the denizens of the 159 bus – the guy that falls into the adjacent seat and would like to have a conversation with you about the surveillance chip in his mobile phone; or the growling woman in the giant coat lying sprawled at the extreme rear; or the man with an aggressive and penetrating and incredibly far-reaching body odour, built you can imagine over a period of years, wafting and seeking. You have to stay until it’s time to get off; you’re only there so you can get somewhere else. Your best strategy is, or seems to be, passivity and stony absence. Don’t engage. Never respond.

Crawling over the back rank of the small audience a mic-ed up Jordi Querol rumbles to himself in a thick, low voice, admiring the women, playing drums on the heads of the people in front, thrusting his face into your face. Hello. It’s funny a bit, and intimidating, and maniacal, and as an opening to Subliminati Corporation’s (in-progress showing of) File-Tone, a good enough introduction to the company’s style. They work with improvisation, starting with a parodic idea and then reaching inside to give it a sharp twist – whatever the starting-point, the end will be morbid or unsettling or violent.

They work the audience over. At one point acrobat Mael Tebibi is Barack Obama (juggler Mikel Ayala is Fidel Castro, meanwhile) and to save the world he must make a daring leap from the top of a high, high ladder to the thin-looking mattress that lies beneath. Jordi drives him on. You can do it Barack! One more step! Save the whales! The audience are asked if we want to see him jump. Yes. DO YOU WANT TO SEE HIM JUMP? YES. He falls from the highest rung and rolls to a stop. Fidel Castro tests his corpse with a nudging foot.

Emerging from these improvisations are images of immigration, torture, trafficking – images that sort of kick their way through. Burly in a red dress, Jordi sits and rapidly opens and shuts the outer metal brace of an accordion while the most typical of French circus music plays; it’s funny. Then, still in the dress, Jordi is exhorted to dance. Would we like to see her dance? Yes. Mikel threatens her to dance, and to enjoy herself, and hooks a bungee cord either side of her mouth to force the shape of a smile. Then Mikel addresses the audience again: Would we like to see her sex? Would we?

As Jeunes Talents Cirque Laureates, Subliminati Corporation were giving a work-in-progress performance to conclude a week-long residency at Toynbee Studios, and in a short discussion afterwards were asked why the changes of direction, from humour to violence, were so sudden and fierce. Jordi’s answer was that the audience feel wrenched and uncomfortable ‘because they’ve said Yes’ – they’ve said Yes to wanting to seeing the girl dance, and when the scene turns they feel as though they’ve said Yes to its final outcome.

But I don’t know. Are the audience saying Yes because they really want Barack to jump from the ladder and save the whales, or because they want to see the performance fly and work at its best? And when Subliminati turn on you, aren’t you just getting slapped for participating? For being, in some way, polite? My own feeling is that the complicity of a theatre audience isn’t all the way effective as a metaphor for society’s passive role in the perpetuation of domestic violence and human rights abuse, where the proper targets are greed and ignorance and neglect – but that it perhaps works better as an analogy for that challenging interaction on the 159, where your easiest option is to nod along and just hope this person leaves and takes their problems with them.

What will be interesting is whether, in later and longer performances, the audience start to anticipate and adjust their reactions. Because if the core mechanism of File-Tone is the dramatic-tonal equivalent of flooring it through some savage S-bends, it’s hard to see how that can be sustained for a full-length piece without the company building in some further awareness of the audience’s secondary response as they wise up to what the Corporation are up to. Perhaps that’s exactly what they’ll do. Like DeFracto, Subliminati have chosen to use the luxury of their JTCE time to develop raw material which will be ordered, changed and refined at a later date – and right now it really is raw: skinless and pained and ugly and a little bit fascinating.