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Soup by transdisciplinary group HEADONBODY was conceived as a “witch’s brew” of performances intended to serve as a “kinetic shrine to a lost parent and a frantic meditation on the process of grief, reaching for a shared catharsis with the audience”. Its mediums promised to be the “brutish, sensual, ridiculous and vulnerable.”
Guests, upon arriving at the arched doorway of the Chapel Royal at Dublin Castle were thanked for coming by a short figure in a long red velvet dress, whose head was entirely obscured by a shimmering and fringed headress, as tight and elastic as hosiery. The guests then made their way to a shoal of seats arranged before the chapel’s altar, while Procol Harum’s “A Paler Shade of White” played with the sad gravitas of weeping baroque rock “…She said, there is no reason / And the truth is plain to see…”
The performance began. On her stage, the nave and altar place of the Gothic-revivalist’s church densely sculptured interior, the host (Deirdre Griffin) moved through a retinue of masked characters, each unified by their relationship to two poles of feeling: deference and mania. In deference, the host peeled a still-life display of root vegetables beneath a task light, deforming their lovely, ripe bounty. Then, in the same wave of enthusiasm, she mock-fed supper to four, defaced, polystyrene busts, whose faces had been defaced with bright markers– the scene elicited laughter. It was a takedown of the conventions of the dinner-party, working in the way a David Lynch scene of domesticity works – making a suggestion of gore and filth lurking just beneath a clean middle-class surface.
When manic, the host’s body writhed and muscled in glorious tap dance and wild wheeling. The chapel’s flickering lights bounced off the hosts’ slight body, encased in a golden metallic unitard – magnifying its slightness to Herculean presence –gaining frightening magnitude and fever, like a demeanted soul trapped in a body, or space, however divine. Who was the taskmaster then, that these two poles of feeling were responsible to? It wasn’t obvious, but the only references to the outside world were radio clips of heresay, if didactic radio announcements by Gay Byrne “Get yourself a pen, or a pencil, or a quill, or a goose” and Marian Finucane “If you happen to be in the West of Ireland this weekend…” The reading of a Darina Allen recipe and the cost of a grocery shop at Dunnes Stores. It seemed then, that some of the conventions that insulate Irish middle class existence, were cast as oppressive. Ultimately though, our host, was able to marry their two conflicting feelings of deference and mania to make a controlled, and cathartic getaway, aided by the slippery quality of their golden lurex garb.
Faith in interpretation is requisite to criticism. Yet, isn’t it a narrow parameter for any art piece to have to be reducible to specific meaning? Soup, makes a case that the delicacy of artistic suggestion should be an end that needs no further defense.
*Soup was nominated for Dublin Fringe Radical Spirit Award and Best Performer
