Theatre review: Branch Nebula – Exposure
Two middle-aged women contend with the weight of the world’s remnants in the fearlessly embodied Exposure.
Beginning with the sound of a rotor-ised pulse, a bulky, metallic-covered tarp moves from the junk in the back of the room towards the front, where the audience sits. As the tarp progresses, the sound builds to a doomed kind of pumping, almost exactly like the amplified final moments of an over-stuffed washing machine. A woman emerges. She looks as though she’d like to murder the tarp as she sheds it, and then she lays it down perfectly, as if she’s neatly covering the evidence of a violent crime, or preparing to set up a tent.
Another covered woman enters centre stage from the back, where the junk is, and when she’s free we see she has a camping chair stuck to her head and shoulders. Everything these women deal with seems to be cumbersome, and on top of that, the woman with the camping chair problem is being told by an omnipotent, masculine voice that she’s doing it wrong, she should move to the left, why can’t she listen to him and stop doing it wrong, the woman now tangled in the metallic tarp. Enter a microwave, turned on with nothing inside, so the sparks are disconcerting; a fender; a plastic sheet; a metal single-sized bed frame with springs.
All of these items – and many more – look as though they’ve come from a garage that’s been neglected for years, and the two women dance with them, attempt to fornicate with them, and they spray, dowse and bathe themselves in whatever liquid they find. There’s a pervasive steampunk vibe, though the women are dressed in soft, cotton underwear. This is Exposure.
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Having first performed for four nights in Melbourne as part of RISING, then another four nights at Syndey’s PACT Theatre, Latai Taumoepeau and Mirabelle Wouters, with the theatrical production company Branch Nebula, take over Port Adelaide’s Vitalstatistix, a venue that regularly champions experimental work. Does art become experimental as soon as it steps into the durational, performance space? As soon as those who take it in wonder what in the world the narrative might be? As soon as the artists take off their clothes? Exposure is all of this, and it is as unpleasant to watch as it is riveting and fascinating.
Taumoepeau’s and Wouters’ bodies are burdened by what will be left at the end of the world: camping gear, broken appliances, plastic containers holding insecticide, old strips of movie film. When once the women had a natural connection to these items – as in they knew how to work them, keep them clean and under control – they now must find a way to make sense of them in this strange, new world. But is the world apocalyptic, or is it menopausal? Because if Exposure had been a performance focusing on two children, or a couple in their twenties, or a young family in their thirties, the narrative – that one that takes some work to piece together and could vary from audience member to audience member – would have been something altogether different. These women, exposed in their flesh and in their relationship to life’s accumulation, are desperately trying to carry beauty, because if women do one thing well, it’s create, hold and respect beauty. So what does that look like when hampered by ugliness?
Phil Downing’s hyper sound and Karen Norris’s ghosty lighting are immersive and affective, and the performance props are a balance of carefully chosen and gathered en masse. These striking accompaniments to Taumoepeau’s and Wouters’ commanding performance makes for a vigorous show that not only examines discomfort and confusion – and a discomforting, confused grief – but leans into them.
Exposure continues at Vitalstatistix until Sunday 14 June
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