Fringe review: Karen Houge – Dreamgirl
Blending workshop, conversation and performance, audiences are invited to break down barriers and reflect on trust. ★★★
Dreamgirl isn’t your standard Fringe show. It’s more of a meditation, a workshop and a conversation about the state of the world and how we behave towards each other. Trust is the central theme: who do we trust, and why? This idea is teased out through audience question and answers where Houge immediately sets up an atmosphere of safety. Very quickly, it feels like we all know each other, which is further developed by a series of activities (all very low pressure, consensual and completely unscary) where we break down the barriers that normally exist between complete strangers sitting next to each other in a theatre.
Around this, Houge threads a couple of performance set-pieces including a big entrance, a set-up with call and response, and projections of a documentary she made. While this is all successful enough as individual beats, it feels like it’s cramming quite a lot into an already busy show. Some if it eventually feels like distraction, which isn’t actually needed; Houge has more than enough skill and presence to sustain the smaller, more detailed beats which would give more time to talk about the issues that really matter to her. That’s not to say this isn’t an interesting hour: it is and Houge is entirely engaging. But at the moment it straddles a line between a piece of theatre and something altogether different: choosing one might create a little more space to ask and answer even harder questions.
Karen Houge: Dreamgirl is playing at the Gallery at the Courtyard of Curiosities at the Migration Museum from March 3 – 15
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