TAIBHSE’s Physical Poetry Composes Its Own Score

TAIBHSE begins with a microphone dangling in a beam of light. Director-performer Eoin McCaul enters and holds his hands up to it, rubbing them together as he circles it. This is movement as sound. Dance which composes its score through the action of dancing. There is a self-reflexive totality to the movement, a movement which simultaneously reaches for evocation and drags us back to physical literalism.

Reaching up to the microphone, he sniffs at it. The source of the noise seems to feed his body. He sucks it in - and this act of sucking, of taking away, only serves the microphone more, giving it more sound to amplify. Curiosity feeds the technology. The source of the sound is all-present and all-consuming, asserting its identity as keenly as the sound it produces. Simultaneously, the microphone is a predator to fear, a shower to bathe in, a victim to bite, and a lover to rest on. The body wants a close-up, but this is a microphone, not a camera. McCaul, topless, evokes Alan Strang, but the horse is a microphone. Synergistically, they form a Cronenbergian body: he inhales the technology and, together, they make amplified sound.

It’s super awkward for me to talk about a dance show because to quote is to describe, and pinning down in words here feels like offering an interpretation-as-quote rather than a quote itself. As I watched TAIBHSE, Eoin McCaul’s latest piece at BATS, I wrangled constantly with this question. How do I begin to analyse when I don’t know how to read the show I’m watching. I don’t know how to pin down the pieces which constitute the whole. This position, I think, is informed by my relation with the work of McCaul’s that I’d previously seen. Cleansed and Request Programme were both highly attentive to their own complication of hermeneutic analysis, restlessly throwing out questions about their own form. A consistent thread, as a reviewer, between those two shows, was the dialogue which they provoked inside my head. Much of my recollection of those shows is in the way they forced me to think. Think deeply as I watched. There was something distancing about the way in which they bypassed narrative convention and prioritised probing questions about their own theatrical construction. With TAIBHSE, I initially struggled to find moments to cling onto. I struggled to put together the pieces. The internal monologue, raring to go, was silenced. 

In terms of promotional material, ‘Ghosts and light’ seems to be as far as McCaul is happy to go. With this nebulous blurb in mind, a provocation as much as a description, I spent much of the show unsure whether there was a definitive meaning to find, or if the show was somehow forging meaning out of its invitation to its audience members to prescribe one onto the shapes, onto the movement, onto the light. However, I realised that the questions about meaning had been supplanted by questions about the possibility of meaning. And it was only then that I considered the fact that perhaps McCaul’s intention might be to stunt thought, is to have us receive the images with an unmediated, bodily immediacy. This review, therefore, is mostly interested in the recognition of patterns, and bodily feeling.

The audience enter the black box studio to find the stage’s back wall removed. Perhaps weirdly, blackbox shows often use the safety curtain as the back wall, so you get into a rhythm of feeling like the auditorium should be on the other side. But we sit, looking out at a hazy, fuzzy Fitzpatrick Hall, dimly lit and spatially disorienting. It looks like there might be a gauze between the stage and the auditorium behind it. It looks like it might be doing something with mirrors. Either way, disorientation of space, I say hesitantly, seems to be a recurring theme.

Spatial disorientation is conjured through the sheets of light which McCaul turns on and moves through. After the show, Eoin suggested that he begins with image. I think this manifested itself most clearly, for me, in the negotiation between the two dimensional and the three-dimensional. In the second part of the show’s first section, the show seems to ask how the three dimensional body can relate to the seemingly two-dimensional thin walls of light which streak across the stage. However, bearing in mind the initial relationship with the microphone, McCaul encourages us to observe a reciprocal relationship with the light. Where the sniffing, the taking-away of the microphone only serves to exhibit its functionality, here the transgression of the light’s path destabilises its surface, offering us a greater sense of its reach and dynamism. Interference is productive.

But to move in relation to the light doesn’t simply mean to enter and exit its glare. It also means to turn it on, and demonstrate a recurrent interaction with the source. He turns on his own lights. The clicking of the smoke machine is amplified in Dilan Shant’s organic and propulsive soundscape. McCaul seems interested in the artifice of the process, the temptation to imagine, but which he revokes with grounding actions which, like the interaction with the microphone, disorient and undermine. 

The coup de theatre, which I’m using in all seriousness, is the middle sequence. Now this is almost as tricky to describe as the show’s movement. But it’s tricky not in that I’m trying to describe motion, but because you probably won’t believe me. It strikes me as an enormous shame this was only on for one day because I’ve never seen a moment in Cambridge theatre better built for word-of-mouth. The friends I’ve subsequently described the show to have uniformly asked ‘when’s it on until?’

And seemingly I described it well enough for them so let’s give it a shot:

From the lighting booth at the top of the Fitzpatrick Hall’s back wall comes a long, gradually expanding cone of light. It starts from a bright point in the distance, points down towards us and becomes just big enough to envelop the 20-person audience. Like an intangible planetarium, smoke, wriggling and spiraling, coasts on the cylindrical walls of light. Maybe the best way to describe it is that it felt like standing beneath an expansive, cloudy sky in a desolate landscape, looking down a highway into the sun. Stunning stuff. You bathe both in its profound beauty and marvel, slack-jawed, at the technical audacity of what Finlay Wyer has conjured with McCaul. Cambridge or not Cambridge, this is - cue Mark-Holland-on-Eoin-McCaul buzzword - thrilling!

Moreover, as a piece about origin points, be they microphones or lights, the vision of the glowing origin point of the lights, at the centre of the effect, feels like a continuation of McCaul’s inquiry. Only here the source is as much the sun, or the beginning of the universe, as it is a light’s relationship to its emanation.

McCaul’s arms, like a drowning body, rise through the light and disappear, interacting playfully with the tunnel of light. This tunnel of light is one he transgresses. In some ways, nevertheless, I wondered whether the show needed McCaul’s physical presence, if it was a stunning lightshow with an arbitrary physical commentary. The body enters and exits the light. It looks like the hand is drowning as it enters the tunnel, the tunnel in which the audience are enveloped.

There is, however, an interestingly inverted depiction of the idea of supernatural materiality. Rather than being an immaterial ghost passing through material walls, McCaul is a material body passing through immaterial walls. This, for the show as a whole, feels essential. It sits at the heart of the dialogue between the two dimensional and the three dimensional, an idea taken further in the show’s third and final section, where McCaul’s body is, for the first time, wholly backlit. He becomes two-dimensional.

I found this section the most elliptical. It wasn’t as playful as the first nor as visually thrilling as the second. My most distinct memory is of McCaul’s stillness in the light, statuesque. The relationship with the light here seems perhaps more agreeable, with less of a conflict between surfaces. But, centrally I embraced the silence of my internal monologue, the inability to express what I couldn’t pin down. I just let the motion soak over me. I could try and fail to categorise, reaching for vague nonspecifics like ‘cinematic’ and ‘balletic’, but it wouldn’t be as helpful as to simply say that, at the same time I had decided to let the combination of McCaul’s body, Sam Quinn’s glaring orange light, and epic score wash over me, I noticed that, for the first time, the audience was being bathed in light.

The sources of light across the show, moreover, become increasingly visible. They begin out of view, above and in the wings, then we see a point of origin, and then, in the third section, the materiality is centred. Bulbs are scattered across the floor, and a rig of large, glowing spotlights form the set. In the first section, we watch light. In the second, we are surrounded by light, and, in the third, we are lit. Where Eoin’s body is rendered two-dimensional, ours are rendered clearly visible. Perhaps there is something reciprocal about this; we project meaning onto the show as it projects light onto us. But it always remains unknowable, through light. Which seems to align with McCaul’s show description: ghosts and light. And it feels wrong to attempt anything more specific than that.

So yeah, I had a really tricky time getting under the skin of this show. The thing flies by, though. 

This review feels a bit like orbiting the piece, scrambling to get a hold of it. And I don’t think I properly have. In a way, I feel like Eoin at the beginning, only the microphone is the show. I lurch towards the show; I sniff at it; I breathe it in. And something reciprocal has taken place.