Klip

4
Reviewer's rating

Calling itself a cacophonic darkly comic live collage, the programme reports that the raw material of Klip was created by playing parlour games. A situation is described on a piece of paper, the paper is folded and the next player invents another situation to create a narrative. These narratives or fragments of narratives have been chopped up, rearranged and carefully merged together into a collage: a man wearing a pink g-string looking for a juicer; a journey into the mind of a chicken; pearls of wisdom from the street; a pick-up line that fails all mixed and mashed together with rhythms, twirls, shrugs, melodies in a mixture of sound, movement and dance performed by a company of four.

Perhaps the result would be light-hearted fun, the parlour game origins played out live on a stage resulting in a sort of surreal comedy made up of various elements of performing arts. There is plenty to make us smile but the piece also works at deeper levels and its chaos seems like a tightly managed message.

Chopping up a parlour game into pieces is a pretty violent thing to do; this is reflected in the repetitive head-shaking, obsessively looping one-liners and in the songs and heartfelt pleas that struggle to establish themselves amongst other fragments, often with one performer left fighting to express him- or herself through the noise of the other three.

This is a highly unusual piece which surprises with its precarious coherency, moves with its energy and tension between breaking and creating and leaves the audience with bold symbols to make their own sense of. An hour of inventive and intense performance that will stay with you long after the show is over.