This intriguing if – to my Fringe-fogged brain – intangible performance triptych from Emergency Chorus is based around three pieces that in their own wry, mysterious way deal with the human need to predict the future.
In the first part creator-performers Ben Kulvichit and Clara Potter-Sweet address anachronistic forms of weather prediction: we’re all familiar with the barometer, but what about the storm glass, a sort of Victorian instrument that allegedly changed colour if a storm was imminent? And then there’s the tempest prognosticator, a hysterically complicated instrument based around a ‘jury’ of 12 leeches, who would move about within it as they sensed an imminent storm? Kukvichit and Potter-Sweet discuss these while offering rudimentary, rhythmic movement over tottering drums and gentle eddies of feedback. It’s cool: it’s not really a ‘dance’ piece in the sense that the duo are trained dancers, but it has a not dissimilar sensibility to a dance work, an evocation rather than an explanation.
In the second and most abstract part the duo are deep in a cave system, their torches attempting to penetrate a wall of dry ice, stalactites clinging to the ceiling. The soundtrack is now a cacophonous post-rock roar, drums penetrating our heads like drills. Towards the end a babble of human voices expressing worries about the future rings out.
It’s not immediately clear why they were in a cave system, but in the more lucid part three we meet Roger the Hermit, a mystical cave-dwelling figure retrieved from the Mendip Hills, who allegedly makes unerringly accurate predictions of the future. Interviewed by Potter-Sweet as a now sharply dressed, Today-style presenter, Roger (that’s Kulvichit in a robe and comedy beard) at first seems like an incredibly old, incredibly confused man. But at the risk of spoilering one of the more tangible things to happen in Ways of Knowing, he eventually throws off his dodderiness only to launch into an alarmingly slick corporate pitch for his prediction methodology.
I liked Ways of Knowing, but it feels more like a short anthology of live art works inspired by a similar subject than three sequences firing in sympatico with each other. I’m not sure it really imparted any great insight about the human need for certainly about the future, so much as riffed around interestingly on the idea. Still, that’s not to dismiss it – it may not be a major work, but it’s an evocative and enjoyable one.
