This story has a weight that cannot be told with a clean chronology. It’s about love and loss and big promises which are devastating and seismic to keep. It’s about holding on to the things that matter and the memories of love on a light tower in a music festival.
It is here where the dead rise palpably and in beautiful costumes and choreography, to jiggle their bones and have discourse with those who mourn them. Frida takes the whole of the first act to be convinced to visit her Diego, who wasn’t all that gentle while she was alive.
Rather than offering a palatable chronology, Choritz divides her tale into 54 parts, some rooted in whimsy, others in blood. There are parts that are difficult to read because the authorial voice strips herself so naked and says things so raw that you, reading, feel afraid of your own thoughts.
Ultimately, Rise 76 attempts to tell too many stories but invests in none. The second part should have been fermented, sat in, frustrated, dilemma-rised, dismembered, put back together again and then had the chance for its creative team to be left conflicted as to what in the fruits they had.
Through seducing you into engaging with it, the exhibition places you in dialogue with its artworks. It constantly asks you, “What do you think?” There is an ever-present spirit of collaboration between curator and visitor, inside and outside, space and body, prompting new relationships of meaning to form, again, again.
Movement doesn’t need a thesis statement. The imagery that Transcendent shapes is unmistakeable, evocative and simple. It need not be anything more. Movement cannot lie. A single move can make you as powerful as it can make you vulnerable. And the performers beautifully hold this tension between power and vulnerability.
With direction and choreography recreated by Rusty Mowery, the show maintains a fast-paced rhythm, balancing large ensemble numbers with more intimate character-driven scenes. You’re never in doubt about what you’re getting: a Cinderella-style love story wrapped in Beverly Hills fantasy, complete with shopping montages, operatic indulgence, and sweeping emotional payoffs.
Maqoma’s work has a tendency to leave you trembling in anguish. It’s an earth shattering experience you might not be able to rationally find the vocabulary to describe. How could it be possible to say so much with just music and movement? Genesis may take you deeper you believe possible.
Ramsay is utterly formidable in this role, which brings out an immense yet delicate sense of nobility coupled with almost crippling vulnerability, and all hidden beneath the tight facade. With a profile rendered regal and indomitable by an astonishing a wig, Ramsay paints a Callas fearless, cruel, funny, irrepressibly human.
The text is penned by people much younger than Homer, which presents a flattening of the old narratives, and a simplifying of them into platitudes of anger that sees the bashing up of guys perceived to be worthy of a good bashing up, or better still, a very violent death.
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