Theatre

I‘m not sure if I always understood ‘Must’, a gorgeous but densely poetic pilgrimage through the body of New York performance artist Peggy Shaw. But I absolutely felt it. This is the third collaboration between the acclaimed music and movement company Clod Ensemble and Shaw. This time, they have assembled three live musicians and a series of projected microscopic images to recreate an extraordinary journey quite literally through Shaw’s 65-year-old flesh and bones.

And they've been through a fair bit. In the Anatomy Lecture Theatre at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, Shaw regales us with tales of broken bones over broken hearts, of surviving cancer, of giving birth when she would rather have been at Woodstock, and of her daughter having to climb out of her body because her mother was bound in stirrups: ‘This was forty years ago, before they discovered the law of gravity applied to women’, she quips.

Shaw is a performer of arch elegance. Her mellifluous voice ebbs and flows over the material like warm sea water. And when she speaks of ’my tectonic plates’ she roots both her story and herself within the context of the wider earth from whence she came.  There is a playfully nebulous element to ‘Must’ which means that even if you can't always follow her slowed-down scat rhythms, love it you will. Powerful, honest and life-affirming: if only all incisions to the body were this beautiful.

'Must: The Inside Story' played at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, Teviot Place, Edinburgh.