Triptych
Concept and direction: Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier
Performers: Konan Dayot, Fons Dhossche, Lauren Langlois, Panos Malactos, Alexander Spirit, Fanny Sage, Eliana Stragapede/Chloe Albaret, Wan-Lun Yu
Place and date: TNC (09/XI/2022)
On the night of July 19, 2020, Peeping Tom presented The missing door and The lost room at the Teatre Grec. Long-awaited Grec festival program under threat of suspension. The new wave of the pandemic that only four months before had confined us to our homes seemed once again to want to impose its law. There was a show and a long, intense, stubborn applause, which seemed to go far beyond celebrating another extraordinary demonstration of the unclassifiable talent of the Belgian company and its amazing universe of disjointed bodies and atmospheres as disturbing as they are hypnotic. The public also applauded itself before the surprised and excited look of the actor-dancers.
Two years later, the applause resounded last Wednesday just as delivered in the Great Hall of the TNC. She silvers on her feet, as if released from the suffocation of a claw. The diptych expanded to a triptych with The hidden floor, the piece that remained unfinished due to the collective confinement. The emotion now concentrated on what had happened on stage. Again, as was already the case in Opening Night at La Veronal, unexpectedly perfect in that immensity of architectural womb that is lost in the shadows to host that fictional island that is the set of a film set. Visible plot, powerful spotlights and movements that seem dominated by the flaws of an old celluloid that has not stood the test of time. A delicate material manipulated by a capricious hand that slows down or speeds up the rhythm, rewinds or advances, or lets the tape get stuck in an obsessive spasm.
All the characters in this nightmarish triple-universe - a combination of Lynch's dreamlike insomnia, Cronenberg's "new flesh," Von Trier's psychiatric delusion, and Dark Water's new Japanese horror - seem caught between a supreme actor who plays with his existence and the hell of his own hallucinatory psyche. Not a hint of free will. Dolls that twist to alien extremes and find in this insane environment the ideal space to express themselves in all their choreographic madness. The journey towards the mystery of Peeping Tom also leads towards terror without balm.
In The Hidden Floor there is no longer any trace of the earlier rare moments of comic detente. In an apocalyptic restaurant in a submerged world there is no longer room for humanity. A damp catacomb populated by castaways; the refuge of mutant and hungry monsters that devour the remains of a past sanity. And the fear due to the intensity of the images and their horrifying metaphors is present in the room. Perhaps the most difficult emotion to reproduce on stage. A triptych that once again gives the measure of the artistic exceptionality of this company that has made its identity out of dark dreams and bodies alien to the laws of physics.
