Skip to main content

WHIST

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Four stars

Freudian slips are showing all over the place in this new melding of physical theatre and virtual reality, played out in the top floor foyer of the Festival Theatre by Ashford based dance company, AOE. With the room adorned with a series of geometric sculptures, the audience are kitted out with a VR headset. This advises the wearer to stand over an approximation of a wormhole before signalling them to move to one or another of the sculptures in turn. Once here, the viewer is thrust into the centre of a 360 degree filmed dream sequence which, dependent on your reactions, takes you on one of 76 possible journeys drawn from Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.

Over the next fifty minutes, this dreamer had his internal urges exposed by way of a series of films involving assorted mini psycho-dramas. Backdrops included a dinner party, a library and a very Ibsenesque birdcage. Others will have had a completely different experience.

Co-produced with Gulbenkian Canterbury and tanzhaus nrw Dusseldorf, AOE's production by the company's artistic directors, Esteban Fourmi and Aoi Nakamura, fuses the hi-tech with the primal to create a series of bite-size narratives open to interpretation. Onscreen performers Robert Hayden, Tomislav English, Yen-Ching Lin, Nina Brown and Steve Rimmer deliver their wordless imaginings with studied gusto. And if such extrapolations of the unconscious aren't easily dissected, fret not. At the end of the show, the audience are given a download code to receive an instant online analysis that provides a potentially illuminating personality study. Those in search of enlightenment have all this week and next to face up to their darkest thoughts.

 
The Herald, July 25th 2017

ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h