DDF News — 25 May 2014
'Please be Gentle' and 'Stay With Me' - Alexis Vassiliou's double bill in Project's Cube
Framing sex on stage without making it pornographic, sentimental, or unintentionally comedic, is a delicate balancing act. Likewise, showing physical intimacy between two adults without straying into the terrain of sex can be tricky.
In the confined space of Project Arts Centre’s Cube, Alexis Vassiliou’s double bill of duets has a more confrontational and explicitly sexual edge than it might have in another venue. The first of these, ‘Please Be Gentle’, presents an intense physical and emotional connection between two men. With the house lights on, the performers (Jan Van Opstal and Fabian Holle) face the audience, naked from the waist up. They begin to channel an experience of delirious happiness, beginning with subtle shivers that seem to take them by surprise. These minute convulsions increase in frequency and intensity as the piece progresses and as the performers move closer and finally embrace.
Frissons of pleasure prompted by touch are the main meat of this piece, but 'Please Be Gentle' an exploration of this phenomenon that goes beyond the physical. The men seem to inhabit a beatific state, smiles suffusing their faces as their contact with each other builds in intensity. Interlocking poses are held in a repetition of cycles. At times, they suggest sex; in other moments, the shapes the conjoined bodies form become something more abstract, more otherworldly. A pose that fuses the performers bodies into a four-legged creature (with arms for legs) recalls Plato’s myth of ‘the other half’, which has it that we were all once one half of an androgynous whole that was riven down the middle, leaving us always searching for our missing part.
‘Stay with me’ is a more tentative approach to the theme, but with more surface energy. Two much younger men (Phedon Odysseos and Vassiliou himself) are pummelled by waves of urgent sound from two speakers, played live on-stage by guitarists Filippos Filippopu and Costas Apokides. Their backs to each other, the music acts as a guiding hand to the performers that gradually brings them together to engage in an exploration of intimacy which is sometimes violent, sometimes tender, and underpinned throughout by resistance to the urge that directs them.
Although a different treatment of the theme in each case, both pieces are marked by a will to bring the audience in; the performers look outwards intermittently, in a way that seems to ask for recognition and, in a sense, participation. Although shown through the lens of male intimacy, the feeling Vassiliou and the performers tries to channel is something that is beyond sexuality or gender: the beatitude of total absorption in another being.
The double bill shows for the last time tonight (Sunday 25th)! Get tickets here.
Words Rachel Donnelly (@racklette)