Eliza Sanders is the virtuoso maestro of performance versatility. She is a fun maker of work with no holds barred. She will take clothes off. She will put clothes on. She will dance. She is a contortionist. She will stand on her head and talk to us. She will sing story songs and recite poetry, both of which are crammed with an overabundance of words, word play, niceties, not-niceties, images, pop-jazz-folk-rock lyrics and appropriations, and slice-of-life mayhem. She will gender-fleck (I don’t know what that means, but I like the sound of it) and queer-orise (I made that up because it resonates with theorise). She will hybridise herself as an Aussie-Jewish-New York-erite of highy mobile and mercurial intelligence and sharp witticisms and observations. She will transform a clothesline into an oversized Joseph’s Technicoloured Dreamcoat spider’s web for an alien monster. She will bark furiously like a dog straining on its lead. She will throw herself around with wild abandon. She will charm and smile as she projects verbal barbs and clevernesses that evoke laughter because of the way she delivers them but whose content is really not that funny. She will wonder if God is in the present vicinity and hope that if he is in hiding he might come out, particularly if he’s in a closet. She will prance, preen, high kick, tumble, roll, splat, exhaust herself, run out of breath audibly and ultimately pull out every dance move and intricate high speed gestural hand and arm movement that she can think of. This is for us, but it is of her.  It is the artful histrionics of solo display. It is a platform for a big talent, a boundless imagination and an energy of force and confidence. She will genre-defy. Clearly a dancer – and to this shrine she bows with mandatory pure dance moments redolent with hinted-at meaning and physico-emotive fluidity that are respectfully choreographed to gentle piano music – but with so many other performative layers added that this first language of her training and background becomes swamped. There is so much to take in that it is hard to summarise or absorb critically. 

This is the second time I’ve seen this solo, the first being in one of the studios at Toi Whakaari Drama School. It is interesting seeing it in a ‘theatre’. I’m not sure how effective the transfer is or how well this piece sits in the slightly more formal setting of BATS to an audience that mixes friends and colleagues with general public. There was an intensity of effort in Eliza’s more public circumstance that was missing in the slightly less pressured environment of a school.

I also found myself wondering more about the link between movement and language. Language, even when it’s poetic, absurd or illogical in its juxtapositions and associations, carries a literalness of meaning in each word unit that can’t be removed. When married to intricate movement there is an implied connection of understanding between the word and its associated gesture. The result is pantomimed language. Except the abstracted dance gestures, which don’t go all the way into the literalness of pure mime, thereby remain meaningless. Although the meanings of the spoken words or phrases are infused into the accompanying choreography, this only highlights movement’s inability to communicate even more, given the addition of outside verbal assistance. I’ve seen this device used often in dance. Lloyd Newson, the director of UK’s DV8, does it frequently and is a master of this word-movement marriage style of work. I am often left wondering if the movement is extraneous or if it’s drawing greater attention to the verbal content and its delivery? Similarly, I wonder if the words help us view the movement in a uniquely different way. Sometimes it simply looks like a case of ‘look what I can do’. I have no answers, but I enjoy having work like this raise these questions.

A stand-out aspect for me, outside the stream-of-consciousness barrage, is the clarity and interest of the various visual images that Eliza creates. I find these more memorable and easier to retain than the numerous thematic threads that make up the complex word and poetry-driven dimension of the work. Many of these visual images are formed by a cleverly constructed mass of multicoloured cloth that morphs and changes in size and function in surprising ways. The giant cobweb I’ve already mentioned. I really enjoy its transformation into a ballroom dance partner where it becomes a kind of Jungian shadow-other through its attachment to Eliza’s heels, just like real shadows do. My thoughts shoot off in a crazy lateral direction here. I see a human dancing with a placenta-like double, its first soul-mate in the womb. An umbilical association is evoked by the thread-like stretching of the material along the ground to which she remains attached. The German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, has made much of this first embryonic relationship between child and placenta, theorising that our desire for close companionship in life is a way to re-establish this deep-seated first intimacy. My appreciation for Sloterdijk and his speculations are evoked in this kinetic moment of engagement with Eliza and her cloth double, giving testimony to the power and purpose of theatre art, and to the work of this young deep-thinking artist.

I have to say, however, I really don’t know what the game is that Eliza is setting up with her audience. The work involves direct address. She talks to us and at us all the way through. She makes us complicit but the ever-changing verbosity and musical-style singing mode keep us out. Audience members respond readily to the more obvious provocations, witticisms, sexual references/innuendos and popular song references, almost from relief, but between these moments I, for one, find myself dislocated and distanced. There is the over-the-top facade of entertainment, but this work is ugly and aggressive. Towards the end, we are seemingly invited to respond to a question regarding an odd-one-out pattern of three. Our lack of ability to reply produces dejection and Eliza immediately cocoons herself in fabric before disappearing into darkness through the seated cocoon of us. Comfort, connection, loneliness, desertion, plaintive, abusive, confrontational, messed up, unfixed. Nice frequently, and bitter too. Castles has a quality of personal buried under camouflage. It is sweet, laced heavily with sour.