Thursday 17 February 2000

Skin Flick, Feb 17 2000


By Vanessa Rowell, Kate Ellis
at La Mama until Sunday February 20, 2000
Reviewer: Kate Herbert

The audience's physical position can dictate the form and content as well as the resulting impact of a performance. The audience at Skin Flick sit with their eyes at floor level.

Chairs are set under the false stage floor and viewers heads poke through slots in the stage to watch the actors' feet go by.

Skin Flick is a collaboration between two performers, (Vanessa Rowell, Kate Ellis) a designer/director, (Anna Tregloan) lighting designer (Jen Hector) and sound artist. (David Franzke's) It is a novel idea which works only partially.

Franzke's  soundscape is a highlight. It combines  music, sound effects and voice to create an evocative sound environment.

Anna Tregloan's set design intentionally restricts the audience's view, making them a part of the design. It is cleverly lit with light spilling from below floor level, from vertical ultra-violet fluorescent tubes and tiny floor lights.

The two performers, in a series of vignettes, take advantage of the audience's limited perspective. They walk on their hands or on stilts, crawl along the floor, whisper in ears, black out parts of their bodies with lighting or costume.

Each vignette begins with a good idea but none fulfils its promise. They are short but repetitive and so they wear thing quickly. Much of Skin Flick looks like a drama class exercise.

Strangely, the greatest theatrical impact came from the surprise appearance of tiny, quirky objects. Wind-up toy fish suddenly toddle across the floor at eye level, bumping into audience.

A hailstorm of coloured ping-pong balls rains from the roof only to bounce into silence. A bevy of tiny plastic steering wheels are catapulted in the space through a curtain of telephone book pages.

This is a collaborative piece of performance that has no narrative. It is an exploration of body, space and perspective and the relationship between the audience and actor.

Skin Flick fits into a contemporary performance style that abandons the word, story and other actorly pretensions. It relies on the collision of images and resonances arising from actor so very close to audience.

It needs work to give it more substance but the design , as long as you are not claustrophobic, is inspired.


by Kate Herbert



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