Intimacy

Challenging, poignant, intense and confronting, and heart-breaking – these are just some of the words one could use to describe the 60 minutes we share exploring Intimacy with four very diverse performers. Michelle Ryan, an exquisite dancer in her former life, uses her struggle to acceptance of MS as a basis to examine the importance of intimacy in all our lives. She shares the performance space with the impressive Vincent Crowley and Emma Bathgate and Simon Eszeky, who provide the music for the piece – which is, in truth, more cabaret than theatre.

We treat intimacy in different ways in our lives, some of us living in an invisible box that is impenetrable. We don’t need to be physically disabled to feel alienated and afraid, but Ms Ryan’s disability serves to accentuate the problems faced by those among us who are crippled on the inside. Crowley is so tall and physically strong, and yet plays a man afraid of “connecting” – pulling back when confronted with surrender. Ryan, on the other hand, has surrendered but is now making the disability work FOR her life, rather than against it. We sense the steel resilience of the inner Michelle growing stronger as the body weakens. To see Crowley pick up the incredibly fragile (physically) woman and dance with her, moving her almost useless legs, is an electric moment that cannot help but move all who see it. There is audience participation, forcing those watching as observers to become part of the shared experience.

Simon Eszeky’s exquisite guitar playing and Emma Bathgate’s soaring vocals complement at most points, though there were moments when Bathgate’s richness gives way to some extraordinarily bad notes. Since she is a gifted singer, I can only assume it is deliberate, though I cannot fathom why. Nor do I understand the truly awful dress and shoes, or the moment when she spreads her legs to reveal her crotch… Intimacy? I’m not sure. And it’s this confusion that reduces the show ultimately to an interesting experience, rather than a soaring and uplifting “happening”. There’s uncertainty about the line between reality and drama, symbolism and recollection. Are all four playing characters, or themselves, or both at different times? Ryan’s recollections of her dreams are told matter-of-factly without histrionics, but I longed for more insight, a sense of what was lost and what was gained. Ultimately, despite being gifted the perfect tool in Ryan’s creeping degeneration, Torque Show fails to move much beyond cliches in its exploration.

Perhaps a clearer narrative throughline would help tie the series of vignettes together, and find a better balance between the banal and the astonishing. True intimacy would lie in empathically sharing what we FEEL rather than what we see or dream. One thing is certain, Michelle Ryan’s final dance, performed on a couch where her useless legs are in stark contrast to her exquisite upper bodylines, is enough reason to forgive any shortcomings that precede it.

Coral Drouyn

Photographer: Rachel Roberts.