Mixed Double

[Martin del Amo and Rosie Dennis]

Went to the Performance Space last night to see Mixed Double, two short works by Martin del Amo and Rosie Dennis. Despite their comedy there was a dark shadow in both pieces, a sombre grounding that made their separate choices to fade to black at the end of their pieces somehow appropriate.

Never moving from her single position, spotlit against a black wall, Rosie set a frenetic pace of repetitious looping movement, accompanied by precise enunciation of the same text, again, again, again. And then a change, allowing us to see an aspect that we hadn't before, the connection between a movement, a statement or a reported statement. She fills out her surroundings as she progresses. I enjoyed the way her blurred speed warped time as I sat on the floor watching. 'She said/she said.' 'Warm wet/warm wet.' Its obsessive, she's compelled to return again and again to that which she has already covered. I recognise in her performance a trained impulse that afflicted me when I worked in a call centre for a few months: pick up pencil; put down pencil; talk on phone; process order; pick up pencil, put down pencil ... arrghh! She's worn down by the end, hemmed in and trapped.

Martin negotiated comedic observation and tragic revelation, inhabiting an open stage on which he was always in the middle, between abstract movement, between different heights, limbs, and bodily tensions. He stated his obsession with water and his fear of fire, before observing the danger of the sea compared with the relative safety of domestic swimming pools. Martin delineated spatial and thematic categories on the floor; the sea is over there, here are the pools, the white seas birds are up there. But there was always the prospect of drowning, the seas swallowing up one's body. The categories overlap too much, they can't be held apart. And then the final conflagration: he evokes the image of people who, sheltering from a bush fire in a swimming pool, are boiled alive. Expansive limbs twisting and reaching across the floor. Sweat, darkness and uneasy breath.