A cross between performance art, theatre and dance that’s often impenetrable and opaque. Rating
Ok
Before The Present Is Not Enough starts a performer lounges on stage, languidly sucking their toes with deliberate, almost confrontational sensuality. It’s a provocation that quietly establishes the rules of engagement: this is going to be intimate, awkward and unapologetically bodily.
The audience sits on three sides of the space, with some perched on the floor only inches from the performers – there’s nowhere to hide – for them or for us. Five stage lights on wheels are pushed around, the cast repositioning them like streetlamps to illuminate different pockets of action. The effect is atmospheric, turning the stage into a shifting landscape of half-lit encounters.
The cast of seven in varying states of nudity, lounge across the floor and drape themselves over one another while amplified recordings of a cat purring rumble through the speakers. They gaze directly at the audience, batting eyelashes, flirting and lingering in prolonged eye contact. It’s playful but also faintly predatory, like being watched by a roomful of feral cats. The sequence returns later in the piece, reinforcing the sense of looping rather than any narrative development.
The ‘costumes’ revolve around a deliberately unglamorous palette: dirty jeans and greying Y-fronts that are frequently removed or abandoned around ankles. The recurring image of trousers pooled at performers’ feet and their bare behinds becomes a visual motif, suggesting exposure but never quite settling into a clear meaning.
The set is rudimentary – oversized sponge bricks and sheets of flexible cardboard that are periodically rearranged to form makeshift structures and, even at one point, a row of urinals. In one of the evening’s more surreal tableaux, a performer sits cross-legged inside the cardboard enclosure carefully applying fake green nails to her toes while another paints an enormous cartoonish penis across a wall.
Movement is pedestrian rather than choreographic – possibly these are not trained dancers – and the piece leans into that ordinariness: they wander, stand and shift their weight. Yet there are flashes of striking imagery. At one point, three performers with trousers around their ankles and T-shirts pulled over their heads so their arms stick helplessly upward flap and stumble like confused birds while others produce strange birdcalls from the sidelines. It’s absurd but oddly beautiful, and one of the few moments where the piece coheres into something genuinely theatrical.
Music comes from a DJ set-up operated by one of the choreographers. The soundtrack blends house beats with the recurring cat purrs and recordings of disembodied American male voices that hint at the language of cruising culture.
According to the creative team, the aim was to explore “intense presence” and the experience of simply sharing space means that atmosphere certainly exists. The performers are undeniably present, insistently so. But for all the nudity and proximity, emotional connection remains elusive. The piece gestures towards themes of queer sexuality, cruising and even the shadow of the AIDS crisis, yet these ideas never quite crystallise – we never get a sense of time and place. What emerges instead is a sequence of loosely connected tableaux, more like fragments than a fully developed theatrical work.
Provocative, yes, but also curiously distant and often baffling.
A project by: Silvia Calderoni and Ilenia Caleo
Production Management: Elisa Bartolucci
Dramaturgical Advice: Anna Antonia Ferrante, and many friends
Co-production: Azienda Speciale Palaexpo (Mattatoio), Progetto Prender-si Cura, Kampnagel (Hamburg), Kunstencentrum Vooruit vzw (Ghent), Motus Vague
Supported by: progetto residenze coreografiche Lavanderia a Vapore (Torino).
With additional support from: The Italian Cultural Institute, London
The Present Is Not Enough has completed its run at the Battersea Arts Centre
