Flesh Mirror

In dim light, people sit at a table, face down, unmoving.  Asleep, unconscious, dead?  No – they begin to speak, as much to each other as to us, of what they see – see not imagine.  Masses of colour, shapes that might be something else...  As they reveal these visions, they are filmed by an abled camera operator with a long, slow developing shot that is projected on a huge screen above them...

And so begins Flesh Mirror which, via constantly changing choreography, sound and video, creates parallel – or alternative – realities.

When they leave the table and move in their wheelchairs, their show opens out – expands - wider and wider.  More characters – some walking, some lurking, some thrusting their way into the piece – are added – or add themselves. 

Weave Movement Theatre is an inclusive and collaborative enterprise.  Its members are disabled.  On stage there are people in wheelchairs, people with halting speech, people with inhibited movement difficulties...   They demonstrate and communicate their realities.  They tell stories.  They describe their experiences of life – deeper, more fascinating, more intuitive, bolder and penetrating than those of abled people.

There’s development in the way these varied performers commandeer the video equipment from the abled operators who have been giving us images of them, but there is no ‘plot’, no cause-and-effect logic.  The focus shifts from ensemble to individuals – and back again.  The performers attempt screaming.  That becomes competitive. Who has the best scream? 

There‘s humour in the way the performers – who all know each other and don’t disguise that – are so openly competitive for attention.  But there are sudden changes of tone too.   At one point, two performers, centre stage, imitate bird calls perfectly.  Why is this so moving?  It’s not the accuracy of the calls: it’s the yearning to connect that is inherent in them.  There is profound quiet and stillness as a man tells with broken speech of an horrific accident which has left him irrevocably brain damaged... and how that has changed not just himself, but how he sees the world.

And that’s before the show lurches back into comedy with satire on pop culture and attempts to take over all this and ‘normalise’ the show.  Thwarted attempts to sing Lennon’s Imagine are deliciously ironic: we’ve been imagining the whole time.

I can’t describe or characterise all of Flesh Mirror.  There are elements and sequences I confess I do not understand.  Much of the show works on a purely emotional or perhaps aesthetic level.  It’s ‘strange’ and original.  It is not random.  You can tell that all of what happens is planned and deliberate.  It is defiant, it demands your attention, and it asserts that it and these people and their realities are worthy of you attention.  Rewarding of your attention.  You can, if you want, remain detached, puzzled, alienated, even bored.  Or you can be simply open to it, surrender to it, immerse yourself in it.  If you disabled, you may recognise these people.  And if you are abled and open, you find you are rewarded: you are taken into other realms.

The performer/collaborators are: Janice Florence, Trevor Dunn, Anthony Riddel, Sonia Marcon, Emma Norton and David Baker. 

Michael Brindley