Kate Mcintosh makes art with home science

(© Phile Deprez)

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Theatre can be a laboratory. An idea Kate McIntosh takes literally in her new dance show. In Untried Untested four performers carry out experiments on gravity, air, and themselves. The result is a kind of installation that often tends towards the absurd – and that provides laughs too.

Rope, books, stones, a sack of potatoes, and balloons are all the Brussels-based New Zealand choreographer and visual artist needed to put Untried Untested together. “It’s a very visual production, with no beginning, middle, and end,” she says. “It is like looking at an installation, but an onstage one. I took the risk of working without a text for the first time. The performers are given all the time they need – there is no real plan. I hope Untried Untested comes across as a good bit subtler and stranger than my previous work. It’s certainly more visual.”
There is lots to see, especially for anyone with an eye for detail. The starting point, however, is a very simple one: four female performers carry out some simple experiments, of the kind we all tried as children. They blow up balloons until they burst, do dangerous things with stones, and play with feathers. They keep up a brisk pace and their naive, touching enthusiasm makes Untried Untested really enjoyable to look at. “The results of the experiments don’t interest me much,” observes McIntosh. “Untried Untested aims to focus on details; it is a chain of action and reaction. For once, I don’t appear myself. Although it’s not the first time, I deliberately stay off the stage: that allows me to understand my own performances better and to take a deeper look at them.”

Smashing
The line between object and subject, between material and human, is blurred in Untried Untested. One performer takes that to extremes, behaving as “dead material” and allowing the others to experiment with her. “We try to start from scratch by looking for a new relationship with the material world,” says McIntosh, “with the performers giving free rein to their sense of wonder. Physically, the show tacks between the highly intense and subtle and the exuberant and raw. The performers test the flight of the balloons, but they also use brute force to smash objects. In doing so they deliberately get themselves mixed up with the objects; ultimately, we are not that different from a balloon, at least in terms of our breathing.”

In Untried Untested McIntosh makes art with home science, creating absurdist situations that often make you laugh. “Humour is always very important for me, although there is a more serious side to it too. We live in times that are very materialist, entirely focused on objects. At the same time we have little sense of materiality and especially of our own materiality. The body is, of course, an object that returns to death.”
Tim Etchells of Forced Entertainment served as artistic adviser. In the past McIntosh appeared in his solo Although We Fell Short. “Tim helped to work out the timing and the chemistry of things alongside each other, as well as the relationship with the audience. There is something awkward in this production, something troublesome that we are keen to make the most of. The audience has to be able to wonder what it is looking at. I want the viewer to remain critical – that’s why I deliberately don’t provide any comfort.”

Untried Untested
20 & 21/4 • 20.30, €10/12
Kaaistudio’s Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Vaakstraat 81 rue Notre-Dame du Sommeil, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-201.59.59, www.kaaitheater.be