As the great American musical Gypsy tells us, “you gotta have a gimmick if you wanna get ahead”, and the Greek artist Dimitris Papaioannou sure has a doozy in Ink. He fills the Sadler’s Wells stage with a constant stream of water (there must be a remarkable drainage system somewhere) and surrounds the performance space with plastic curtains that look like gigantic wheelie bin liners. At one point I had the weird thought that he was a serial killer trying to destroy forensic evidence at a crime scene.
So what gives? For the next hour or so Papaioannou (dressed all in black) and the dancer Suka Horn (not dressed at all) enact a meandering, surreal duet-duel that could be read as a gay love story, a sci-fi fantasy and a horror show, all of it performed ankle-deep in water. Papaioannou isn’t a dancer or a choreographer and Ink isn’t a dance show — it’s a plastic-wrapped kinetic installation, “a play for two”.
There’s a lot of fussing about with garden hoses and nozzles as Papaioannou frequently redirects the jet of water, aiming at the walls, the floor and his partner (both men are drenched throughout). The sound of water (music is used only minimally) is matched by the thunderous aural effect of the two men manipulating large sheets of toughened plastic.
Indeed, Horn’s first entrance, crawling flattened against the floor beneath one of these translucent sheets, like a life form emerging from the primordial ooze, is one of the show’s most fantastic visual effects. The fact that he is naked and physically inchoate, and that Papaioannou is calling the shots, suggests some kind of Frankenstein narrative.
But their relationship evolves — strangers, friends, lovers, adversaries — in what the programme note suggests is “a battle between old and young, father and son, civilisation and wasteland, eroticism and torture”.
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There’s a field of golden wheat, a silly make-believe octopus, and scenes of threat and stylised torture. There’s even a birthing sequence with Papaioannou as a breastfeeding mother, but by that point I had stopped caring. Because without more cohesion and purpose, the images — as startling as some of them are — don’t add up to more than an indulgent display of visual trickery. A gimmick indeed.
★★✩✩✩
65min
To March 2, sadlerswells.com
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