Blind Summit: The Heads

Blind Summit: The Heads

Blind Summit: The Heads

In devised work, it’s the frame that often carries the weight of really communicating a show. In work that’s experimental in form and that draws the audience into its fictions in unconventional ways, it’s the frame that creates and clarifies meaning. Blind Summit’s new production, The Heads – developed from one section of their previous three-act national and international touring hit The Table – takes this process to its material conclusion. The staging is simply three pendant frames – three cardboard picture frames to be precise, and it’s these which propose and bring nuance to the meaning of the moving images within them.

As the title suggests, much of this content is a choreography of heads. Not human heads of course, as Blind Summit are one of the small number of puppetry RFOs whose work sets out to advance this increasingly popular artform, but rather the evocatively realistic and detailed head figures for which puppeteer and designer Nick Barnes is known. Three and then more identical heads materialise in the similar but different cardboard cut-out frames. Their choreography is slow, almost ceremonial and accompanied by a mesmeric minimalist score. They hover in the zone between character (looking, appearing to respond to one another, to us) and object, agitating at the edges of where object becomes puppet, movement becomes animation. The heads are all identical, yet our unremitting focus on their movement reveals the moments when they assume characterful qualities and those where they return back to a merely aesthetic presence. Some of the material emphasises this, fluidly assembling and then deconstructing configurations of hands and heads to continually adjust our sense of just what it is we are looking at. In doing so, The Heads feels like it offers a new perspective on puppetry, constantly holding us in the magical moment of transformation that is at the heart of this artform.

This quality in the work is intriguing, as is the palpable skill involved in the increasingly precise, frenetic choreography of heads executed by its four puppeteers through and across the frames in response to the complexifying score. But the show feels like its reaching for more, or, at least, this intriguing quality doesn’t entirely satisfy in itself.

The opening images are of geometry and light: we watch lines and circles move, create shapes and disappear. The show frames the puppetry within an abstraction, inviting us to relate the heads and their worlds to the purity of shape, of light. Intellectually and formally it’s fascinating and rather hypnotically beautiful, but there is too a sense of emptiness here. Though the work references Butoh, its formal emphasis seems to lack the connection to life, the transmission of energy, really needed to harness the power of this type of dance. This is a show of surface veneer and occasionally even padding. As an audience steeped in visual languages we are quick to complete the gradually crystallising images and the rhythm and development often feels mystifying, even alienating. What is the journey we are being asked to go on? Sometimes it simply feels like we need more content: the brief presentation of stylised characters for example feels underdeveloped, as does the work with text.

Only in the closing sections does the piece start to gesture toward something more human and enticing. Suddenly, we encounter a sense of depth rather than simply cleverness and skill and it left me wanting more. More narrative or perhaps just more of a sense that something is being communicated here. For now, these remain empty heads and something more is needed to elevate the work beyond the demonstration of an idea and to apply its bountiful aesthetic pleasures to the audience and our world.

www.blindsummit.com

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About Beccy Smith

Beccy Smith is a freelance dramaturg who specialises in developing visual performance and theatre for young people, including through her own company TouchedTheatre. She is passionate about developing quality writing on and for new performance. Beccy has worked for Total Theatre Magazine as a writer, critic and editor for the past five years. She is always keen to hear from new writers interested in developing their writing on contemporary theatre forms.