Red shoes! High heels! As I write those words I know they will set your heart and mind racing with images and associations.
Shoes, in many and various fairytales, denote transformation, and often signify the awakening of female sexuality, the burden of full-blown sexuality descending on the growing female body, and the escape from the shackles of the father into the shackles of the lover. There’s Cinderella’s glass slipper, the twelve princesses with their gold dancing shoes, worn out nightly – and of course Hans Christian Andersen’s red shoes. They are all coming-of-age stories, and paint complex soul pictures – but in The Red Shoes, the dancing shoes, with their usual associations of sexuality and feminine freedom and rebellion, become a terrible and oppressive burden.
In their show Red Shoes, Upswing take associations and references from Andersen’s tale, but mix these with imagery from other archetypal stories – most notably Red Riding Hood, which in its archaic version pulls no punches about being a story about the loss of virginity.
The set is a square floorspace carpeted with Virginia Creeper leaves, deep autumnal reds. Eleven or twelve tall poles make a forest, with stretches of clingfilm wound between them. Enter two young women in dungarees, sporting ponytails and red hoodies.
So, the wordless story we get is of the lust for, and the act of striving to win, the red shoes, which are to be found blossoming like flowers atop two of the poles; the angsty, antsy dance that the shoes bestow on their bearer-wearers; the entanglement in the wild forest; and the escape from the burden of the shoes – although in this version, there is a kind of ambivalent one-shoe-on one-shoe-off resolution. The relationship between the two female characters is played out nicely throughout the piece, as they move from innocent sisterhood into sexual rivalry (via the shoes) and out into mature friendship.
The poles are used, of course, to represent forest trees, for climbing up and swinging from (just three or four are true circus-style Chinese Poles, the others being décor) and these two female performers are good strong climbers and swingers. I find myself noting that within circus-theatre practice (as opposed, say, to pole dancing!) pole work is more often than not associated with male acrobats rather than female aerialists, with a focus on a typically masculine upper-body strength, and it is interesting to observe how very differently the pole work here is to much that I’ve seen in other circus productions. There is (obviously, considering the nature of the tale) a lot of emphasis on held leg-lines and poised feet. The movement work – solo and doubles at various different points in the show – is fluid and graceful, and at times the poles seem to almost melt into silks.
The clingfilm earns its keep in an exciting corseting cum bondage scene of tangling and wrapping, as each of the young women, running through the ‘forest’ helter-skelter in her new red shoes, spins and turns the film around her body. The shoes themselves are truly lovely, and I see more than one little (and not-so-little) girl in the audience looking lustfully at the beribboned red footwear as it waves aloft at the end of a well-turned leg.
All-in-all a very nicely realised piece of new circus-theatre work. It’s a pretty simple narrative, prettily done. There is perhaps more that could be done with the Red Shoes / Red Riding Hood theme (see, for example, the various works by Kneehigh that use the same source material) and it might be good to see a little more of the dark side of these tales creep in – but what’s presented is all well and good. A word here also for the soundtrack, which creates just the right mix of whimsicality, fairytale wonder and slight eeriness.
Seeing the piece inside a shopping centre on a busy Saturday afternoon didn’t seem like the ideal setting – this is far from the company’s fault, but I found the way that that the carefully-designed set was squeezed into a space also occupied (on three levels, and thus right at the top of the poles’ height as well as at floor level) by multi-coloured balloons, shop fronts and plastic signage a little bit disconcerting. But such is the nature of street arts and performance in public spaces – whatever aesthetic chosen has to somehow accept that it will be placed next to all sorts of inappropriate other things. It’s just I suppose that outdoors at least the poles, nicely decorated with foliage and the ‘nests’ of shoes, would at least have stood out against the sky. However, given the weather in Winchester this Hat Fair weekend – and the fact that almost all of the planned outdoor shows got delayed, abridged or cancelled – we should be grateful that Upswing got programmed into a shopping centre!