Fairy Tales by POCKETART

The Place, London
October 22, 2024

In Fairy Tales by Czech physical theatre and dance collective, POCKETART, fantasy figures are embodied and distorted, sometimes beyond recognition, and sometimes into feasible versions of women we are and see all around us.

Fairy Tales offers audiences a series of landscapes, conceptual, but nonetheless suggesting a myriad of narratives. The auditorium is hung with white sheets, and eight dancers in pastel attire enter the space, each holding a pair of shoes, some with precariously high heels. Twinkling sounds, as if heard underwater, emerge from two musicians seated downstage, who perform live throughout.

Eerily deep vocals drag this gathering of women – who have since embarked on curious, expressive, solo wanderings – down to a red hellscape, where sound roars and they are drenched in blood red light. Before long the women are singing, frolicking in meadows, overcome with light, cheeky breathlessness. They sweep their arms and pat their legs in rhythm; the disturbance of before is for now, forgotten.

Fairy Tales draws on childhood experiences, and uses tales from those times to reimagine happy, feminist endings. A sense of play and short temper, as well as animal and clown motifs and distracted rambles, all evoke the fickle moods and imaginations of children. It also implies the delusions and desires of a modern woman, the contradictions she is made to embody, and the maddening expectations imposed on her. Each woman takes on a cameo, with the strutting diva, who wreaks havoc with a Cruella de Vil cackle, once wicked, whimsical, fearless, and vulnerable.

POCKETART, as evidenced in previous works, use space with incredible ingenuity, and simplicity. Translucent curtains muddle figures into skittering shadows in the background. The use of mirrors behind the curtains adds further trippy beauty, and when the mirrors are brought onstage, they splice the space, and offer us a whole new space to admire in the form of reflection. The mirror also creates potent metaphors, as one woman battles with her shuddering reflection.

Almost as entrancing as its visual elements is the soundscape, which when not deafening, is clearly crafted to the intricacies of the movement. Voice, guitar, and synths make satisfying connections with developments onstage, rendering the sound complimentary, if not essential to the experience of the piece.

As with the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, where it is sometimes hard to distinguish good from evil, Fairy Tales teeters on an edge. Darkness in POCKETART’s Fairy Tales lies in its discordant tones and unpredictable turn of phrase. One dancer swishes a mermaid tail fashioned from a duvet before she is struck violently by a harsh sound, and writhes across the stage.

A peculiar scene, where legs are arms, shoes are worn backwards and a body is in two places at once, again suggests a childlike frivolity, but also the nonsensical world of the dreaming mind. In scenes like this, Fairy Tales risks overcrowding its elements, but ultimately finds equilibrium between things happening, movement unfolding, and more static effects to admire and ponder. This considered structure draws fascination to the tiniest gestures and creates wondrous effects from simple means.

Dance is not used performatively but rather integrated into ways of existing, ways these figures, whether real of fantastical, move though the world. In its fluidity of identity and tendency for violence, Fairy Tales reckons with delusions; delusions of our past, or perhaps the tales we tell ourselves to survive the present.

Dance Umbrella runs at various London venues and online to October 31, 2024.