This innovative piece of dance/theatre mines filmic conventions of suspense and horror. The whip pan, the tracking shot, aerials, and the low to high level lighting are all deconstructed and drawn out through the medium of dance to extract their maximum emotional impact upon the spectator. Throughout Roadkill, one can feel and yet also analyze the way that these tricks are routinely used to provoke our animal instincts of fight or flight in film. Exploring these filmic techniques in a live performance in slow motion serves to alienate them and demand that we probe beneath our first response of breathless fear. The beauty of the dance sequences lulls us into something of a hypnagogic state that is shattered suddenly when figures spring up without warning or melt away into darkness attended by visual and auditory markers of menace.
The dancers, as is evident in their exquisite lines and focused movement are highly trained and intensely focused physical performers. There are many sequences of dance that are strong enough and thematically complex enough to function as stand-alone solo or duo dance pieces and yet they are well woven into the thematic fabric of the larger piece. The paucity of dialogue --although Roadkill is admittedly a piece whose power is derived primarily from movement-- seems to be a moment of missed opportunity in a piece that is otherwise a very powerful piece of theatre. Not to say that dialogue should step to the front in this piece, rather that when it is used, it be used as creatively as some of the other elements have been. The sound scape is outstanding; ranging from evocative grinding engine that refuses to turn over, to the zany power metal “killer” music to the chirruping birds of spring to, finally, what sounds like vultures circling overhead. The sound design along with the inventive yet minimalist set of the beaten up Toyota and spastically dysfunctional telephone booth serve to further unify the piece. Roadkill does things with Johnny Cash that I wager you won’t easily forget.
This piece zooms in on a subgenre of horror, the slasher. In this genre a couple or a group of young people go into the forest or other isolated place and begin to explore their awakening sexuality when they are discovered by a psychopathic killer who terrorizes them. On one level, this can be read as retribution for extramarital or taboo sexual explorations. The victimization of the young woman at the hands of the stranger could be read as punishment for her beauty and/or for the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake. Critics such as Carol Clover (Men, Women and Chain Saws…) point out that the manipulation of audience point of view makes the matter more complex, however. We may start out seeing the movie through the eyes of victimizer, but as the piece progresses we begin to laminate ourselves onto other characters and thus begin the terrifying and murky oscillation between the hunter and the prey. There are also usually moments of communion or at least shared past trauma between the so called “final girl” in a slasher film and the killer. These overlaps are illustrated in the doubling and redoubling in movement and intention between the young woman’s boyfriend and the stranger. They are also evoked during a number where the young woman walks all over her boyfriend, from head to foot during an entire sequence. Who is the real aggressor is it the stranger in the dark night, is it the outback itself, or do we each harbour this darkness within? These are questions, it seems, that we are meant to be pondering throughout Roadkill.
Roadkill promiscuously exploits the B-movie conviction that the plot is merely an excuse for everything else: the “good stuff”: special effects, close encounters with human psychopathology, high or low speed chases, scantily clad women in postures of abject terror, zippy one liners, and some good old fashioned gore. Nearly all the plot we have is forecast by the setting: a dark and stormy night, the middle of nowhere. Add a couple whose car breaks down, a stranger with a flashlight and a mysterious phone call and you’re right in the thick of it.
Dr. Natalie Meisner, Department of English
Mount Royal University, Calgary AB
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