Blinking marvellous

According to Tom Roden, one half of New Art Club’s dynamic duo, ‘audience participation is s**t’. I could not agree more, especially since public involvement has become the trite last resort many performance-makers turn to when short of ideas. Yet, if it is well handled, it can still work marvels, as the New Art Club’s The Visible Men demonstrated last Saturday.

The work, non-stop comedy pyrotechnics and cutting-edge dancing, relies on a disarmingly simple though effective idea: viewers are told to open and close their eyes. In this way, the actions performed on stage by the two artists appear as frames of a movie which develops in a madcap sort of way through many unexpected twists. Indeed, as Pete Shenton, the other half of the duo, points out, you can cheat and keep your eyes open all the time, thus following the frame-by-frame game with your imagination. In the end it does not matter, for it is impossible not to succumb to the engaging rhythm of the performance and its refreshingly comic inventiveness. Besides, once you are asked to confess whether you are a cheat or not, you can always redeem yourself by closing and opening your eyes in the final part of the performance. Quirky, funny and fast-paced, The Visible Men cannot be dismissed as pure theatre fun though, as there are dark undertones in its Hellzapoppin’-like narrative; see, for instance, the episode in which members of the audience look with surprise and/or interest at the corpse of a man who might have been shot or run over.

Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed this unexpected and welcome break from both the angst and cerebral commitment that underscore most contemporary theatre dance-works these days. Still, I cannot help feeling that The Visible Men, a development of the 2004 Place Prize commission The Short Still Show, could have been faster and more mesmerising had it been pruned here and there.