The work itself is by turns lyrical, powerful and humorous, with Gellman and fellow performer Kieran Law using the Chinese pole as a floor for a piece that owes as much to dance as it does to circus. They mingle with the audience within the space, giving an incredibly intimate feel to the performance, while the soundtrack’s ambient noises – heard through headphones worn by each audience member, and plugged into the iPhone which each person is given at the start of the show – provide various background shadings to the work.
The lighting design for Blindscape is audience-provided and controlled, and also contingent on everyone’s ability to first acoustically locate ‘light’, represented by windchimes. This was great fun for a while, as everyone bounced around in the space like molecules in a jar, with Gellman and Law appearing and disappearing. (It did eventually start feeling a little like a mini-game inside the work: I wouldn’t have been surprised if my iPhone had insisted I complete a round of live human Tetris before allowing me to continue watching the performance.)
Luckily, the mini-game was fairly forgiving, and petered out halfway through the performance, switching to a more straightforward (though still heavy on the audience participation) format, with some innovative, surprising and thoroughly fun use of the technology on show.
Of course, the limitations of a young technology mean that there are problems. There is extensive explanation required. The app has a tendency to direct audience members into inanimate objects and walls, and forced me to climb around a curtain at least once. There are facets of the carefully-explained instructions that never seem to serve any clear purpose. And in at least one instance, an entire performed work went unlit because nobody could manage to get their screens to light up in time, leaving indecision: to try to watch the work with the minimal light from a dark screen, or to continue to wander around searching for light.
All that said, though, this was an incredibly fun experience, a great way to frame a work, and really very successful. (I would also like to applaud myself for not making a single ‘There’s an app for that’ joke, although they have been scrolling through my head like a marquee since the minute I got home.)
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Blindscape
Initiating creator: Skye Gellman
Co-creator: Kieran Law
Game programmer: Dylan Sale
Sound designer: Thom Browning
Producer: Gareth Hart
Performed by Skye Gellman and Kieran Law
Arts House, Meat Market, North Melbourne
May 19 – 23 and 25 – 27
Next Wave Festival
May 19 – 27
