“It owes a lot to David Lynch … It’s very physical … you’ll really like it …” These were the things we heard from friends in the foyer before Wednesday night’s performance of Roadkill, choreographed by Splintergroup from Australia. Right on all counts. The dramaturgy of the work’s scenes and the characters certainly do owe a stylistic debt to Lynch. But if this performance is like a film, then it is a film that unfolds in ten dimensions. I mean “unfold” here in a literal sense, or as literal as one could be about dimensions: the performers carve out spaces as if from inside out. In the slow opening sequences, these are moods of boredom and frustration, emanating from Gavin Webber, that are wound so tightly you may not even notice that he and Gabrielle Nankivell are not speaking a word. As things get moving, these two start to carve space itself into insides and outsides, ups and downs, that reflect each other across the frame of the car like the two sides of a looking glass. When the third man, Grayson Millwood, appears ominously out of the darkness, this control of the stage gains a sudden, and suddenly powerful new function. It is the power to change the point of view from within a single space – to make our camera look this way or that, see inside or outside, to show multiple shots and frames at once, or to make time run forwards or backwards or nowhere at all. And this also means the power to destabilize the narrative and pull it off center. The shift and play and conflict between these dimensions becomes the narrative. As the performers rapidly expand their repertoire of tools and the number of dimensions increases, the performance becomes increasingly precise. Split personalities, explosions of athletic agility and controlled movement, flashbacks and jumpcuts, sidewise eruptions and downpours, and of course the sound and light – always the fourth and fifth performers, and sometimes more – on the stage. These too can unfold from within, or from a structured opposition of within and without, but they can also channel the vast void of the Outback, as does the blaring car radio when it jerks from country western to heavy metal to snippets of commentary on the murder case that was one inspiration for Roadkill. All together, these dislocations make a performance so supple and plastic it’s like nothing we’ve seen this year at Theatre Junction.
Michael Thomas Taylor
Assistant Professor of German
The University of Calgary
www.michaeltaylor.de
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