Returning in the tenth anniversary year of its creation, Compagnie 111’s second work Plan B hasn’t quite the striking impression of the company’s later works (most notably the arresting and singular Sans Objet seen at the 2011 Mime Festival). What Plan B does, though, is provide an artful introduction to the principles of Compagnie 111’s work, particularly their playful response to objects large and small. This playfulness, at the heart of so much contemporary performance, is particularly striking in Compagnie 111’s work because of the scale and qualities of the objects they chose to play with, and the lightness with which they do so.
Plan B‘s dominant object is the ‘plane’ of the title, a grey-green surface, angled towards the audience. This plane, moving from a 45 degree incline, to the vertical, before finally falling to the horizontal with a rush of air, serves as the both the origin and the site of the performance. With sections of this plane cut-out and popping out, it becomes an almost alien landscape across which the four besuited performers skim, slide, leap and fall. Throughout the encounters that emerge between them there is an echo of early computer and console games, from Pong, to ‘platform’ games like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros, and this feeling carries into the structure of the work as the characters play through different levels and challenges.
A sound track redolent of cosmonautic activity, such as beeps and snatches of garbled transmissions, quantifies the otherworldly feel of the work, a feeling that mirrors the momentary weightlessness of the performers and the apparent disregard for the laws of physics. At times quietly austere, at others gently competitive, they suggest a distilled humanity – one not quite two-dimensional, but not quite three-dimensional. But they are more than mere pixelated characters and the little variations and accentuations of action serve to retain the ‘liveness’ of their world. Thus, it is this paradoxical quality that presages Compagnie 111’s later work, a quality that blends the inanimate and the animate into an evocative and poetic landscape.