CPPM’s LÄBU vol.2 ep.4 – Ana Trif | Charis Taplin

The second and final weekend of CPPM’s LÄBU festival took place on the stages of the Kanuti Guild Hall, beginning with Ana Trif and Charis Taplin’s Episode 4. This gem of a venue is yet another I had not previously visited, mistaking it for a museum, but have added to my calendar-checking list. On this sunny Saturday morning, The Cure and other throwback tunes were playing throughout the bar and lobby area, which I didn’t at first realise is “under the bleachers”, so to speak, from the seating in the main guild hall. Before the first show we gathered, students and artists and performers greeting one another, even strangers becoming familiar from attending earlier episodes.

This episode was staged not in the main hall, but the adjacent black-box theatre, beginning with Ana Trif’s Linia Maternă, a reflection on personal and family history along the “maternal line”. On entering the space, we find the floor laid with needlework textiles and stones, with an accordion player sitting in the front row and the windowsill stage-right laid with candles, photos, and small boxes. After we settle into our seats, Trif begins the show by entering carrying a stone, held like a baby, that she then transforms: into map and terrain, a gun, an export, herself. 

A rumination on migration as an artist at a personal crossroads, we explore the political history and social realities of identity, industry, and religion in the 20th century Balkans, where maps occasionally moved around people. Questions about the meaning of home and the value of tradition permeate this incredible telling, with video projections and live music used to help illustrate a moment in time, a place in the past, a glimpse of understanding. Family legends and oral histories are measured out as literal and figurative yarns, spinning shadows and history from photos and found items, ancient and fresh pain. No one died where they were born, she tells us, and we watch, spell-bound, as the body remembers the weight of all the years before. This is an incredibly well-balanced story, well-paced and immensely told.

A break back out in the lobby, then we re-enter the space for the second show of this double-header, Charis Taplin’s A second silence even denser, based around the work and life of Brasilian poet Alejandra Pizarnik. The stage is set theatrically, with a small tub at centre, a coat rack, a line of magazines, pills, and water. The show begins with voices, and Taplin winding up a old toy in the beam of a flashlight, professional clothing juxtaposed with the child’s toy in a mimicry of its motion. This show runs like a collection of vignettes, almost, circling themes of desire, family, identity and suffering; a woman both going through the motions and drowning under the weight of her unspoken screams. 

Props, costume, and a silent other performer add layer and detail without definition, focus firmly centred on Taplin’s still body and trembling hands, whether moving through experiences of pain or submitting to the practical tenderness of caretaking. We are periodically transported between scenes by audio tracks – voices in a busy market, poetry, messages left or letters read. Taplin herself sings, glamourous and pregnant, as she submerges herself once more. Even the sound of a battery-operated hand fan becomes its own musical commentary to the action. Her movement is strange and animal, vulnerable in its self-awareness, comic and uncanny. The application and removal of costumes and make-up are their own rituals and transitions in Taplin’s near-unspoken performance of poetry, love, and distance. With light design adding varying warmth from low angles, we watch a delicate marionette melt into collapse: feeble, febrile, and regressing to foetal. 

EAMT’s current cohort of Contemporary Physical Performance Making (CPPM) MA students has another year left to their program, the artists can be seen in the ongoing Exprompt series as well as in open classes presented throughout the coming year.

Author: Laurie

Laurie likes alliteration, ambiance, and lists with three things.