All That Is Wrong, from Ghent based young theatre company, Ontroerend Goed (the name translates as something like ‘Feel Estate’), is more performance piece than play. An eighteen year old woman, Anna Jakoba Ryckewaert (Koba), a writer and performer, is stuck. Her director suggests she work with her natural medium – ‘stuckness’ – to create a show.
The final product is a simple blend of basic performance and technology where Koba takes to blackboards with white chalk and lists everything that distresses her, starting with the personal (‘skinny, not anorexic’) then reaching further to include as much of the world’s fucked-upness she can squeeze in.
At first All That is Wrong seems too simple and you begin to think it won’t sustain the audience’s attention. Yet it does, and does without becoming self-indulgent; you get caught up in it. Koba is writing upside down so the audience can read her words while she’s facing us and she writes quickly and neatly which in itself is impressive. Koba scribbles more and more quickly, the words spill out of her as if time is running out. Some would say it is.
The obvious route would have been to make this piece a monologue because watching someone write doesn’t suggest a compelling experience of performance but here’s one reason why it works: the links and associations between Koba’s thoughts contain their own stories and they are stories we remember and relate to. All That Is Wrong speaks to the despairing, grieving and furious 18 year old in all of us who looked around and said ‘Who let the world get this way?’ ‘How do we go on?’ Another reason for its success is that Koba naturally commands your attention; her intensity is intriguing. She quietly insists you go with her and you do. Then there’s the power of the list, something that works so well in performance as well as in writing.
Koba’s co-performer, Zach Hatch, supports the work on stage by filming it, and making sure the scribe gets everything down. The two use slide projectors to put the words up on the walls of the space; Koba’s thoughts roam around the theatre, becoming more insistent. The sound track of low soft tunnelling music is just right. Hatch places magnetic letters over the top of the chalked words and then when the blackboards are assembled in one piece and hoisted, these metal letters tumble down, making an exquisite shattering sound.
All That Is Wrong is a beguiling, lonely and brave work that, without pretension, does exactly what it intends: to present adolescent angst you can’t step back from. Koba’s final words attest to the face that she writes and will keep on writing. Hatch photographs the words on the blackboards and gives each audience member a print-out as they leave after the show ends, an appropriately moving touch.
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Sat 19 Oct at 2013
Arts Centre Melbourne
Image: Melbourne Festival website
