A small pontoon stage floats on the water of St. Peter’s Basin in Salford Quays. It has its own window box of reeds. Small floating bundles of red twigs mark out a performing area in the water.
The audience looks down on this scene – in the background trams pass by and customers park cars to go and eat in one of the franchise restaurants that populate this part of town.
A dancer clambers onto the stage from underneath. She has long hair which the water mats down so it covers her face entirely and she moves in a way that isn’t entirely human.
She bends over to look in the water and a second dancer appears as her reflection. As she moves round the edge of the stage the reflection follows her. The reflection climbs onto the pontoon – her wet hair fused onto the head of the other dancer to make them look like a weird Siamese twin.
The two dancers’ hair gets dramatically flicked around as they prowl around on the stage in unison. The images they create and the way they move create a rich vein of associations. They are like something from that folk story you can never quite remember.
A third male dancer appears and the associations multiply as he appears to attract the women, then hunt them and then control them. The women’s attempts to get back in the water are reminiscent of seals on dry land. They all bend over and submerge their heads in the water for such an uncomfortable length of time that you begin to wonder whether they are human.
Much is made of the figures (costumed in light grey) being visible and living under the water – when one of them leaves a scene they are not visible ‘offstage’. At one moment all three release a bright green dye into the water. The 30 minute long show is not so much telling a story as creating a world where these aquatic half-humans dwell.
As with all good site-specific work you earn your luck. Here a vivid double rainbow and an endlessly, restlessly circling swallow skimming the surface added to the show. It also poured with rain making it possibly the only show Belgium-based Studio Eclipse have done where the audience were as wet as the performers.