An acoustic nightmare makes FRUITS; Or The Decline of a Distant Memory an excessive amount of of a problem for me at VAULT Festival
“Who drops a watermelon?”
There’s a second halfway by way of TAKDAJA’s FRUITS; Or The Decline of a Distant Memory the place a performer lets rip an almighty primal scream. I kinda knew how they felt because the present takes place within the Cavern whose horrendous acoustics, acerbated by a miked up firm, meant that I may make out about 1 phrase in 10, if that. The present’s dreamlike ethos however, nor its multilingual nature, it looks like an enormous accessibility problem, a little bit of a disgrace given TAKDAJA’s efforts to deal with different types of entry all through its brief run.
So it’s a tough present to write down about for me, as my deafness meant I felt distanced (individuals round me had been laughing rather a lot so it’s clear that at the very least some individuals understood what was happening). All I can reply to is the visible stimuli of a extremely artistic endeavour and a completely unconventional theatrical strategy. Balloon popping, video games of pat-a-cake, Eve herself, courgette grating, a requiem for an overripe banana, the revelation that I used to be apparently carrying a baggie of coke…there’s rather a lot happening.
The offical blurb reveals there’s “three entities that are stuck in the midst of space and time search[ing] for purpose by morphing into different characters” although that handed me by, and I don’t assume it was simply audibility issues that had been the difficulty right here. Performers Mimmi Bauer, Pat Dynowska and Michał Szpak make nice use of the cavernous house right here in Helen Hebert’s set design, aided immeasurably by Theodor Spiridon’s atmospheric lighting work.
But divorced from any concepts of the theatrical mainstream, the present feels a bit too untethered, its vignettes simply too ethereally unconnected for it to take a seat as an expertise that linked with me on a visceral degree. Notionally, queer Polish migrant work would very a lot be my (cherry) jam and maybe in a distinct house, I might need developed some type of emotional reference to the fabric (I purchased into the stay art-ish This Is The Land with out a drawback) for there’s some beautiful imagery and critical intent right here – I simply need to really feel like I can hear a bit extra of it.