A black-clad, shaven headed young man recites the names of the Jonestown victims, whilst being struck about the head and body by a blindfolded woman. A third woman, also blindfold, scrubs away at the flour-covered floor, carefully delineating performers and audience. In the background, an electronic hum plays slightly too loudly for comfort. The crowd huddles against the back wall. This is Rage Actions: Hour Zero.
Over the 70 minutes of the performance, the performers take part in harsh, repetitive actions, exploring the effects of physical trauma on vocal performance, and the effects of brutality on the viewer. Each action is stretched over 12 minutes, giving the piece a durational aspect, whilst also taking the audience beyond its comfort zone, making the viewer question their tolerance for the harsh scenes played out before them; at what stage does a sight become too unpleasant, and what happens when it becomes normalised through repetition?
The workspace is sparsely decorated – the floor is coated in flour, with the fourth wall scrubbed out in front of us with rags. The lighting consists of four harsh bulbs, and the only prop is an old tin bath, half filled with freezing water. The stark, hostile atmosphere is augmented by the atonal soundscape which pervades the entire show, altering almost imperceptibly as the performance progresses.
The first action explores master/slave relationships, and the effect of repetitive, pointless activity on the disempowered individual. One performer, blindfold and kneeling, scrubs the floor; as she does so, the other company members strike at the floor with improvised weapons (tights, filled with flour and coated in golden syrup). The kneeling victim must scrub away at the spots where contact is made. As we watch, we see the aggressors growing more cruel, arranging the contacts to disorientate and startle their victim, who is becoming visibly more exhausted, frustrated and resentful.
This is followed by a scene in which the performers manipulate one another’s bodies in order to provoke involuntary changes in speech; each of the performers takes a turn at glossolalia, whilst their colleagues massage or strike them, pressing fingers into mouths and eyes to alter the sounds they make. After the silence of the first scene, the outbreak of howling, fractured noise is startling and effective; however, there is a weakness in the staging, as the performers spend too long with their backs to the crowd.
This experiment is developed further in the next scene, as the female performers take turns to sit in the ice-cold tin bath, surrounded by fragments of text, and continue to speak in tongues as they are doused with freezing water. Here, the effects are even more dramatic, and the audience’s discomfort reaches a pitch, as we are presented with a lengthy tableau of the performers back to back in the bath, muslin cloth covering their faces, tensed up against the cold.
Finally, the third group member returns, bearing sheets containing prayers, which the audience members had been asked to compose when they arrived at the venue. He reads the supplications in a flat monotone, screwing them up, and tossing them dismissively to the floor. The prayers are interposed with the names of the Jonestown dead. As he reaches the conclusion of his list, he removes six pins that he has worked into his forehead during the previous scene. In the most explicitly confrontational aspect of the performance, he bleeds over the audience’s words, challenging their complicity as voyeurs in the at times horrific spectacle presented to us. Finally, in another echo of Jonestown, we are handed a syringe filled with ‘kool-aid’, as a hypnotic loop of Jim Jones’s words fills the air.
The spectre of Jim Jones looms large over the performance, as the scenarios presented by the Rage Actions company are bookended by loops of his speeches. However, there is a more modern relevance to the piece, as the sight of group rage and torture evoke news footage of Abu Ghraib and the war on terror. Beyond these media images, the piece also forces the audience to explore the boundaries of what they are willing to experience, taking an uncomfortable scenario and stretching it to breaking point.
This first in what is scheduled to be a series of performances over the remainder of 2011, Rage Actions is a provocative, effective piece. The pacing and staging of the performance is clearly well-thought out, and avoids self-indulgence or pretension. There are issues to be developed in further performances; setting the piece in the round may help to engage the audience more directly in the events they are witnessing, and the distribution of the ‘kool-aid’ syringes could be improved, as many were left confused. However, this is an extremely promising start, and it will be interesting to see how the piece develops.
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