Image by FenLan Photography.
White Porcelain Doll is a new performance piece created and performed by Lizzie and Zaimon Vilmanis of Prying Eye Productions and current artists-in-residence at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts.
In their first full-length performance work, Prying Eye Productions have used dance, theatre and video to create a disturbing and unsettling piece, inspired by real life horror stories. White Porcelain Doll explores the experiences of kidnapped women and considers one woman’s terrifying journey as she faces a long and isolated future in a single room, accompanied only by her captor. The performance asks what happens in those endless hours after capture and a series of vignettes cleverly conveys the boredom and frustration that occurs alongside the more visceral moments of terror, panic and violence. As the captor’s demands grow, the performance moves into the chilling territory of exploring the relationship between captor and prisoner. This is seen through a series of movements and highly physicalised sequences, capturing the sense of the inequality here and the journey through pain, hysteria and numbness.
As the audience watches, they are positioned as the worst kind of voyeur; that which is witness to unspeakable acts, but is unable to change the woman’s fate. This is compounded by the fact that the performance has drawn on real-life accounts such as The Cleveland Girls and Natascha Kampusch, and as such it is only too easy to view this with those real world examples in mind. However, the performance seeks not only to recognise these stories, but honour the strength and resilience of those who endure such experiences and the woman in the piece is seen to possess a huge capacity for imagination, courage and the will to survive her ordeal.
In building the tortured atmosphere felt by the victim the pace has been made intentionally and understandably slow. However, this means that the piece drags in places and there is no capacity to address this imbalance. The lighting, in depicting the passing of time and the hours on hours of isolation gives the piece some motion, but it is still often slow and uncomfortable – although perhaps necessarily so.
The performers are excellent and the movement sequences are bold and visually very engaging, capturing these difficult events well. As dance partners and even more so as husband and wife, their challenge here is perhaps to be able to fully mask their own connection in order to depict the emptiness of the relationship on stage.
The use of video felt as though it required more development here, although it’s possible to see where the intention was and how this might emerge more effectively in the future. However, the rest of the technical effects were utilised perfectly to create the disturbing and unsettling atmosphere to this piece. The sound in particular felt as though it could easily find its way into the most terrifying of horror films.
Although this is not always an easy piece to watch, both in terms of the confronting subject matter and in terms of the pace and motion of the performance, there is a sense of vulnerability here that is raw and powerful and which makes this performance worthy of our attention.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
White Porcelain Doll
Co-Director/Choreographer/Performer – Lizzie Vilmanis
Co-Director/Choreographer/Performer – Zaimon Vilmanis
Visual Systems and Stage Manager – Tessa Smallhorn
Dramaturg – Veronica Neave
Designer: Bruce McKinven
Lighting Designer – Dan Black
Composer and Director of Photography – Ryadan Jeavons
Choreoturg – Clare Dyson
Judith Wright Centre, Fortitude Valley
www.judithwrightcentre.com
Until 2 August
