Rash Dash: Two Man Show

Three women gather. They sing in close harmony, shifting and sliding cadences of beauty. Their voices are female, they are female – it goes without saying. Such certainty is positively waiting to be challenged, and it is the very saying of it that it is in question: living, as we are, as part of ‘mankind’ – how can language ever be trusted?

Performers Helen Goalen, Abbi Greenland and musician Becky Wildie are presented as part goddess/part metallic vision of the future. Kicking off in the Neolithic period, they chart the history of the patriarchy – or the merciful lack thereof – beginning from women as revered goddess, and embedded as strong equals to men in hunter-gatherer societies, to controlled, inferior beings, dominated by the men who have promoted themselves to be authors of society. Complicated? Google it (their words, not mine).

Rash Dash have a palette of tools from which they deftly pull whatever will serve the story best. Witty words tumble into skillfully executed dance duos that smash the traditional dynamic of male and female dancers. Both women lift and are lifted, spinning and weaving in and around each other with choreographic finesse; strength and skill happily co-exist with grace and flow. In these halcyon Olympian days, the anatomy of female force should be a given, but ‘tis not always so. In a burst of tribal dance, they are bare-chested, free and forceful, celebrating their bodies and their nudity in a place between the masculine and feminine: female bodies dancing with a ‘male’ attitude, an attitude free from constraint, sexualisation and self-consciousness.

A scene begins. Both performers wear dresses, but their body language is at odds with their clothes and their relationship unclear. In the midst of the tension that hangs between them, we fumble for clues – ex-partners? Estranged friends? Sisters? One calls the other Dan and we learn they are brothers. John is caring for their elderly, demented father; Dan has been notable in his absence.

The women perform the men with complete credibility, highlighting gender for what it is: a part we have learnt to play really well. Men and women have been evolving for centuries, playing different parts at different times: casting is completely up for grabs. In another of these scenes, after the inevitable death of their father, the ‘brothers’ talk to each other in their pants, bare-chested: they are easy in the bodies as their male counterparts would be. Sharing their nudity with the same frankness as their opinions.

Helen Goalan – as herself – attempts to engage with her co-performer, but Abbi is still in role as John. A fraught conversation between Goalan and John ensues: they talk about what the show is, what it’s trying to do, what the faults are: John asks Goalan what ‘he’ should be, what she wants him to be, as a man. It’s all pretty meta – but it mocks itself, so we don’t need to. Instead we can focus on what this ‘woman-man’ wants to learn, how he wants to be seen, what he has to teach, how he navigates the maze of his masculinity.

Two Man Show is playful, sophisticated and important. It is superlatively engaging and constantly surprising: a quest for finding a language that the performers can trust to represent them, as women, in an age of men. A language that can speak for them and tell their story, a language between words and song, movement and performance, a language that lets men and women speak their truths – as humans, not as gendered constructs. Watching the quest unfold is thrilling. Helen Goalen and Abbi Greenland are completely at home in the merry anarchy they have created: skillful, funny and whip smart. If this could be what the next era of humanity looks like, then bring it on.