| BEST BEFORE Recension by Aslaug Magnusson The piece utilizes the open space in its entirety. After having taken off their shoes the spectators distribute themselves to sit on translucent fitness balls. They will have to move around as well, as the performance occupies various sides and corners of the space. The theme of the piece is beauty, our obsession with it and the means used of correction. Promptly at the entrance we encounter an almost naked man, laid out on an operating table. He is being tattooed by a known Berlin tattoo-artist from the White Trash Tattoo Studio – it is a real tattoo. As everyone is seated, a skin-like latex screen stretched in a corner of the room lights up. Two huge grotesque disfigured shadows appear, they shrink, distort, intertwine into each other and drift apart again. The performers enter, almost float in, like plastic puppets, they move artificially with faces frozen in stale smiling grimaces. We have a transvestite, from afar looking like Marlene Dietrich, but upon closer inspection revealing a monstrous repulsiveness. A salacious blond girl, like a tantalizing Siren, trapped in a pre-pubertal body. An older red-haired woman whose breasts seam strangely deformed. And we have an androgynous Chinese and a muscular young man. In the centre of the room we have a big blow-up inner tube of a tire with a gymnastic ball in the centre. On it lays a muscle hunk, a bullnecked meat-chunk of a man, a bodybuilder: an offspring of a mad anabolic nightmare. All performers wear latex costumes, which are decorated with sexually suggestive feathers, furs or long blonde hair. Their faces are twisted grotesque due to a flaky skin and too much makeup. The Japanese reminds you of a robot, she wears wires on the back of her skull and arms. Three latex puppets that hang on swings from the ceiling are inflated by umbilical cords. We see a corner of mirrors and a fridge beholding props like latex masks and heads. A lot happens in this piece. It has an atmosphere of Vaudeville-Theatre, a beginning of last century fun fair, but in combination with a disturbing and unsettling futurism. It is a display of different bodies and conditions. Everyone seems somehow beautiful and disgusting at the same time. Yet the expiration date of their charm has already past. They provoke repulsion passing the audience sitting on the floors on gym balls. Their latex skin sweats and smells, leaving wet trails on the floor. Their movements appear remote controlled as they dance like dolls with invisible strings, jolted through electrification and tossed by invisible forces. Their loneliness is revealed in full cruelty, surrounded by other stunning monsters. A haunting scene is carried out in a corner of the hall, where both walls are covered in mirror tiles and the floor has a reflecting foil. The light directs the spectator’s attention there, as the old woman with red hair takes place, sitting cross-legged. She meditates, breaths, hyperventilates, and drifts off into a trance. Her body is multiplied in the reflections, we see her from four different angles and on the floor. As she steps behind a vertical mirror, moving her crutch along the sharp edge, the reflection of her leg creates the illusion she is floating on it. She executes the stimulation of her sex until a lonely quivering squirm of a climax, coiling up she sees us, the voyeurs looking at her and backs up into the corner full of shame, kneeling to hide her body behind the mirror. It is frightening how her hands fumble the surface of the mirror concealing her. She is nothing. Her surface is emptier than empty. She only reflects what the mirror shows, behind it there is nothing. There is another scene with all performers as a band where the frowning bull-neck grunts unintelligibly into a microphone and the two girls undulate next to him as sexy go-go dancers but wearing masks of old ugly men. On the floor the trannie and the older woman are doing sit-ups trying to kiss latex-heads between their knees. A video of the 80ies aerobic cult where grandmothers with steeled smooth bodies of 20 year-olds are going an energetic exercise with gymnastic balls. It is the parade of physicality, of distorted obsessions of sexiness and commitment to disappear in a uniform masse. Towards the end we see a row of solos in front of the suspended latex skin with a live video transmission in fish-eye optics from the video camera used as a mirror across the room. The body builder paints his face with black eye-liner, the trannie rips off her false skin to reveal an unvarnished face of a man as we listen to sound loops of sentences, distorted fragments of an oracle, declaring the fleeting temporality ob beauty. With fascination one observes this ensemble of obscurities, as the theme scrapes on the surface, where the real problems are displaced by all the dazzling shine. This can certainly be on purpose. If a freak show of beauty craze and body cult is the intension, it is successful in a rich and fascinating way. Why does the modern human tend to grant beauty such a great fetish-like priority? Is it our fear of contact with reality? And aren’t we already lonelier than ever, hermetic in our high tech houses, survival secured without the need of human contact through the magic of the internet. Is the virtual needed in reality too? Is this why latex is needed? It is a cocoon, a thin layer to protect us from the dirt and ills of life. How does it feel to wear latex? Why does it turn us on? It both sensitizes and numbs our sensory organ, the skin. Let’s take the last scene, in which the dancers gasp for air and slowly drift into a trans-like state, their noises ensuing a haunting sound collage, where as on the other side of the space the transvestite slips into a latex bag and is being vacuum pumped like a sausage. All life has been extinct by artificiality. It is a strange world we live in, and here some of most sick tumours of it are on display. But the air of the evening sky awaits the sweating bodies outside, the skin feels the evening breeze and the fresh smell of the plants. The world still exists in all its disfigurements and the incubus of this aesthetic-anaesthetic beauty-bubble gradually diffuses itself away. |
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