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Black Works This 75-minute show by the performance art troupe Station House Opera gives a whole new meaning to the notion of flour-painting. That is not a misspelling, and we could hardly be further from the world of the Dutch still-life artists. For flour is the lightest, most shifting, impressionable and impermanent of media, lighter even than sand. At the beginning there is somebody sweeping the floor, who only gradually impinges on our consciousness as part of the performance. Then the dark gauze suspended above the stage reveals itself as a giant sieve and, as it is shaken, flour sifts through like a heavy fall of snow. Cunningly lit, this looks beautiful and also seems to hold some significance: the begin-, ning of the world? The word? A body lying on the stage (flourcovered) is attached to a hook and floats upward, maintaining its pose and

thus reversing expectation of weight (it should sag, not float). Left behind on the stage is its black corpseimprint, the first of many impressions created and then obliterated in the course of the show, for the sweeping continues relentlessly, going in straight lines around the perimeter of the stage and rubbing out what has been created inside it. This obsessional activity comes to seem the dominant one, suggesting that framing and tidying come before and after artistic creation. The floorbrushes are also used like paintbrushes, making snakes, a palm tree, a horse, and finally a fish, first complete, then as a skeleton (which recalls a Chinese ideogram). But no image lasts more than a few moments. This is all very well as suggestive visual performance, but it is hardly theatre. Some kind of allegoric content is implied when the sweepers put on headphones attached to wires (an image of social control?), and then when a recorded voice barks out instructions (“Turn head anti-clockwise”) in what sounds like a parody of aerobics. There are also robotic fragments of conversation which suggest a jaundiced view of the freedom and autonomy of verbal communication. More exciting is the moment when two sweepers put on blindfolds and stride across the stage. Blindness paradoxically liberates: for the blind person there is no frame and space is

virgin. Revelations like this, despite some dullish moments, make Julian Maynard Smith’s show worth watching, □ Harry Eyres (The Times)

Black Works There is no rhythm and apparently no coordinated logic in Station House Opera’s performance. Flour is sieved from the ceiling to the floor at odd intervals. It is forever swept, left, drawn on, piled up, or pushed away so there arc plans and topograhies on stage. It is a moving landscape which happens to be inhabited and affected by these six people. Often one of them will sweep the floor in a fierce busy fashion. Shapes and swirls appear and disappear; the whole thing is like a painter’s canvas with brooms as scrubby brushes. Whether this “thing” is more performance than art or the other way around is hardly the point. Whatever it is called, the mind and eyes do the

same job. The result is an accumulative rallying of senses rather than ready-to-serve fiction. The figures are less central than usual - the echoes of their movements are equally as important as their actual presence. The audience reads the drawn boundaries like a book or a map. Drawings are sometimes of things - “that’s a lovely horse” - but more often a result of activity rather than the activity itself. Instead of a concentration on words and movements there are footprints, body prints and outlines and the undeniable theatrical magic of seeing something develop before our eyes. Sometimes monotonous instructions will come from a set of ear phones which have become detached from a person’s head. Instructions to “lock leg, lean forward, turn yourself anti clockwise” or “step, go back, turn around, go back” go on and on. Although thoughts of control and programming are obvious this is mercifully not a literal latter day Metropolis. It is more abstract. The show ends with a flourcovered Bacchanalian group, A clump of uncoordinated figures drink out of sequence or sense in a half mechanical way. Everyone feels exhausted; not from watching acrobatic feats, tricks, or listening to horrible noises but from all that thinking without answers and the preasure that brings. □ Sacha Craddock ,-(77!« Guardian)