The story is as old as time—boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy can’t be with girl because he is damned to be chained to a rock with birds pecking at his insides for eternity. Or at least such is the twist on the Greek myth of Prometheus in the production of B at the Exposure Arts Festival.
Written, directed, designed and choreographed by Becky Bridger and Emily McCann, B takes an unexpected look at Prometheus— the immortal who was punished for giving fire to mankind by having birds eat at his liver daily.
The title B is derived from these “Byrds,” who prove to play a central role in this production’s exploration of the resilience of the human mind under pressure.
“We really wanted to work with showing a descent into madness, and the Prometheus myth gave us a good story that we could manipulate and set to music using dance,” McCann said.
Both Bridger and McCann thought Exposure would be the perfect venue to test drive their production.
“We were having a hard time finding a venue to put our shows up in and we thought it would be a great opportunity.”
Unlike more conventional forms of theatre, this production primarily concerns itself with the movement of the body as a means for narration.
“Becky and I both have dance backgrounds and really feel strongly about the body being used as a form of expression—to show emotion and to tell stories—so naturally B is mostly movement and dance,” McCann said.
Movement and dance are, in fact, well orchestrated in this piece. Even though many of the actors do not come from dance backgrounds, they manage a natural fluidity that makes the acting of this play striking.
Yet, even though the cast did an excellent job of mastering their bodies, with minimal text and an unconventional narrative, the meaning and intention of this piece was significantly diluted.
The set and costumes did much to construct the story visually. The Byrds (Alex Brown, Paromita Kar, and Helen Kotsonis-Jay) menacingly vamped behind three screens which provided the backdrop of the story, while Prometheus (Eirik Rutherford) sat eternally chained to his rock. The costumes flowed along with the actors’ movements and were particularly effective in portraying the binding of Prometheus to his mountainside, but also to his love Fhyre (Laurie Hutchison), and how his bondage transforms him.
Effective as they were, the set and costumes were minimalist, at worst reminiscent of a childhood living room production—intimate, expressive, but not all together comprehensible.
Because the text was so sparse, it created an indelible gap in the translation of the message of the play—one that may be lost entirely if the viewer had no working knowledge of the subject material. Even those who are familiar with the myth may get lost in a sea of tumultuous movements and dramatic overtones that pay more attention to form than content.
The play is full of good intent as a way to step away from a more traditional theatre experience to discover the powerful emotional transfer involved in physical theatre. But, it should be noted that just because there is movement, doesn’t mean that meaning will undoubtedly follow.
The major flaw of this performance was not in its execution, but that it upheld many, if not most, of the artistic clichés attributed to experimental theatre. Because of the plays highly abstract tendencies, many viewers may feel intimidated by its form of expression, allowing for only a restricted audience demographic.
Added text or more enticing music are both ways in which this piece could attempt to couple a more coherent narrative with a greater artistic expression to create a stronger audience connection. By doing away with some of the ambiguity of the production and curbing the tendency for over-the-top abstraction, the directors could make the characters less allegorical and more accessible to a live audience.
One thing that can be agreed upon is that physical theatre has the ability to evoke very distinctive responses from its viewers, something that McCann welcomes.
“I think that it is a good thing for people to leave questioning what they’ve seen,” she said. “I would hope, above all, that the audience responds in some way, whether they hated it, loved it, didn’t understand it etc., because that is the nature of innovative theatre.”
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