Derevo, the Russian performance art troupe founded in St Petersburg, now based in Dresden, have a worldwide reputation for their strangely beautiful shows that are often as touching as they are puzzling. But their appearances in Britain are relatively rare and they have never created work here before.
So it is a real coup for Jackie Wylie, the young director of the enterprising Arches venue in Glasgow, to have brought not only Derevo but also another highly regarded group from St Petersbug, Akhe, together to produce this large-scale site-specific piece alongside Conflux, a group centred on the Glasgow-based performance artist Al Seed.
Wylie’s venue beneath the city’s main railway station, with its miles of underground passageways, bare brick walls and built-in atmosphere, is probably her best calling card. The three groups certainly exploit every nook and cranny before bringing everyone back together for a ramshackle but celebratory finale.
I can tell you about only half the show because you can see only half of it at any one performance. The audience is offered the choice of six doorways at the beginning. Behind each is a 20-minute performance, some promenade (and they really keep you moving), some seated. Then you come back and choose another. But you can see only three in one evening.
Advertisement
This does not make it any easier to figure out what is going on. We are in some sort of private museum belonging to a teasing narrator who may be the mysterious Weatherman, traces of whom haunt each vignette. Whitewashed figures run down endless corridors; a strange Pan-like figure makes a cup of tea; a man seen from above, surrounded by white dresses, wrestles with his blanket in his sleep and produces further examples of symbols already seen elsewhere. A skull, a mirror, an apple, a book and a knife all recur.
These are all parts of a whole, and being whole, the show suggests, involves following your dreams. Given Derevo’s manifesto — that man lives in a permanent state of war with the world that gave birth to him and he is currently losing — the moment of triumph at the end is short-lived and provisional. But the hallucinatory nature of the journey towards it is haunting and often beautiful.
Box office: 0141-565 1000, ends today