Green Eyed Zero have developed and created a giant touch screen that forms the centrepiece of their climbing-frame set, the whole of which represents a room in which two ‘mentally unwell’ characters live out their retreat. The two Circomedia-trained company members have also built this set themselves, and control their own sound and video cues via wireless remote control technology. I know this from the programme material rather than watching the show. It is interesting from a practitioner’s point of view, presumably allowing the pair a greater control over their environment, but it doesn’t add anything to the connection between audience and performance. The touch screen reacts to pressure from a body part or prop, but the technology isn’t the novelty now that it was two years ago, when Green Eyed Zero began their journey. During the performance, I was inclined to accept it as I would have accepted a large video screen with moving images, or even a blackboard which the cast drew diagrams on.
Each of the two characters has been affected by severe trauma, in both cases the distressing accidental death of a loved one. Sebastien Valade plays a character with a rare disorder that causes him to believe he is dead. He feels nothing and wants nothing from life. He detachedly manipulates juggling clubs in a way which is technically good, but which feels separate from, or additional to, the show as a whole. The juggling seems to be a metaphor for a psychological depth, an unphysical layer that is perhaps deemed unrepresentable on the stage of a ‘physical theatre’ performance. This could be interesting, but Valade’s performance is not complex enough to communicate this.
Rachel Pollard’s character has dissociative amnesia. Her story unfolds with the help of a ‘therapist’ cipher, a voiceover from the outside world, who is authoritative, sometimes patronising, and again detached from the performance. The video screen is used, like the juggling, to suggest hidden psychological depths. Folie à Deux progresses with a deepening of the two characters’ relationship with one another, leading to an improvement in one’s mental state and a deterioration in the other’s.
Green Eyed Zero clearly have a cerebrally sophisticated relationship with digital technology and juggling, but their decision to create a full-length narrative performance combining these art forms with such difficult, charged subject matter has been misguided at this stage, as it undermines the work they have done in developing the technology. As artists, they do not seem particularly engaged in telling a story, which is highlighted when the computer crashes towards the end of the performance – these things happen – halting the music and the swirling images onscreen. They both jump out of character, giggling and blustering and betraying the little trust they have built up with the audience at what should have been an incredibly intense moment in the performance, and wasn’t. In the world they had created, people’s lives hung in the balance, and even they didn’t believe in it.