The Descent Beckons
Some sections are giddy and silly and just plain dumb. When the piece starts, the stage is littered with piles of blowup dolls. The dancers eventually do almost everything imaginable with them–cuddle them, kick them around like beach balls, use them as bats and javelins, layer them between people to create a human Viennese torte, use them as partners in a square dance, and make them into puppets in a puppet show. In one memorable image, the dancers puts the dolls between their thighs and walk toward the audience with a doll’s leg sticking forward like a cartoon phallus. Marshall also uses the dolls as an abstract design element, as when the six dancers line up behind one another and swing the dolls overhead in slow, pretty spirals.
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There’s also some portentous symbolism concerning time. An LED clock straight from a football scoreboard registers second by second the time that’s elapsed since we entered the theater, though it doesn’t seem to time the performance or serve any other function. At certain points in the show we hear the stage manager’s voice counting down, but again the countdowns don’t seem to initiate anything or respond to anything. In a postshow discussion, Marshall defended their use as a sort of memento mori.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/John-Francis Bourke.
