With Institute, Gecko Theatre has dared to venture where surely no other dance troupe has gone before, a landscape of mental vulnerabilities. I would describe the experience of witnessing this performance as something akin to watching an early Bergman film played out on a retro-style set reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. To describe this as a 90-minute Kafkaesque nervous breakdown would be too harsh, but Gecko has certainly managed to harness angst in spade loads in this piece. It is not always an easy watch, but the production has guts, athleticism and at times extraordinary vision. By the end they pose more questions than they provide answers for, but are not afraid of asking their audiences to do some work. A young crowd at the Bristol Old Vic clearly found common ground with the raw emotion on display and shouted their approval at the end.
The pre-curtain music suggested something upbeat was coming our way, but director/dancer Amit Lahav quickly took us into a nightmare office world, where towers of filing cabinets loomed high, red lights flashed and phones rang with warnings. Bumbling to himself he furtively reached for one of the larger drawers which he pulled out to reveal a small restaurant table on which a pair of detached manikin’s hands were sitting. Lahav as ‘Martin’ reveals an inner longing for a woman called Margaret, an old flame perhaps, an unexpressed love, or just a fantasy played out as relief, a mental construct to relieve a constant threat of redundancy, or worse? Before he is picked out by a searchlight he shuts the drawer quickly and pretends to be working as ‘normal’.
Joined by fellow performers Chris Evans, Ryen Perkins-Ganges and François Testory, Lahav takes us on an unsettling journey, an essay in panic, in confusion. Are we seeing evidence of care, or is it oppression? Are the players comforters or torturers? We’re never really sure. Therein lies the conundrum that Institute poses us. Are we ever really able to stop to consider where things are leading? Do we condemn the vulnerable or make space to understand them?
Institute is no walk in the park. The enhanced sound of the dancers’ breath and breathing told us a lot of what we needed to know about their state of mind, and sometimes the physical effort of their work. There were brilliantly executed passages – at one point all four men linked arms and twisted, pivoted and tangled together as a pulsing human amoeba. And another extraordinary sequence featured a man, a door and another figure repeatedly plunging backwards and downwards through a bed, dying perhaps, or a symbol of loss played out time after time in the mind of the survivor – pure theatre at its most powerful. Dave Price’s original music always bound the action effectively.
In the director’s notes, Lahav writes that we are potentially entering a time when we are more disconnected from one another than at any other time. Institute, he says, seeks to explore the complexities in human nature and in particular to examine our impulse to care for one another. Certainly there was more than enough complexity to gaze upon here, but I’m not entirely convinced that we had sight of redemption through care on display. Gecko to its great credit and courage seeks to break down the parameters of conventional dance. Institute is more evidence of this bold theatrical initiative. ★★★☆☆ Simon Bishop 7/11/14
Photography by Richard Haughton
