THREE large white screens embrace the space: at times opaque, at other times transparent, they are linked by two slatted wooden doors. It's a simple design which elegantly sustains what this mixed-media collaboration between Scotland's Theatre Cryptic and Budapest-based company The Shamans is about. At its most basic you could say the core theme is communication. But it's really more of an exploration of differences and divides and filtering influences.
Partly it's prompted by the slipperiness of words - the possible gulf between intended meaning and actual understanding - but it's also about non-verbal expression: the messages one takes from movement, music, visual images (film footage and stage design), and how they might well convey the true levels of feeling and philosophy that lie between lines of text, or words spoken by lovers.
The starting point was a line from Isobel Allende's writings - ''Tell me a story you have never told anyone before. Make it up for me.'' Cellist Anthea Haddow composed that story - a thrilling hybrid soundscore of techno-beat, soaring aria for mezzo-soprano, mellifluous string interludes, inspired by recent travels in Croatia - which was then choreographed by Eva Magyar and Csaba Horvath (of The Shamans) and set against a slipstream of projected images/text that came and went on the side-screens. The dance, with its eloquent, articulate edge of sexual tension, caught, exactly the momentary schisms in male/ female dialogue even as the film suggested a wider landscape - at once a context for and a contrast to the body-speak.
Each element is individually compelling, but the piece doesn't quite mesh and occasionally the sheer complexity and overload of images blunts, rather than enhances, the impact of a genuinely intriguing work that seeks to bridge genres, as well as different European cultures.
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