CPPM’s LÄBU vol.2 ep.5 – Avery Gerhardt | Juuli Hyttinen

While the EAMT black box theatre was used to excellent effect for the shows in the first weekend of the LÄBU festival, Kanuti Guild Hall in Old Town allowed this weekend’s performers to reach for the rafters in a different way. Having come to Episode 5 directly from Episode 4‘s performance in the adjacent Püha Vaimu space, the main hall felt even more like an empty cathedral, with tall arching windows at the rear and old seats stacked high and deep towards the street, over the lobby below. A quick turn-around between shows that started from 1100, but the lobby’s bar thankfully had coffee and the shop with giant cookies is not too far.

Up first is Avery Gerhardt’s Southern Drawl, stage set with different areas but focused at the beginning with the performer in a podcast set-up – armchair, microphone – with a harsh bright spotlight on a tight circle of white toy elephants. The piece begins, rewinds, restarts, stops, and progresses, degrading in the way that a VHS tape would after too many viewings. The words devolving into meaningless repetition – is this character an athlete? On a dating show? Context dissolves throughout as Gerhardt’s body moves as jarringly across the stage to reset at a new position, new character, new dissolution. The sound design, by Les Sœurs Goadec, is precise and impactful.

Gerhardt’s work combines almost slapstick physicality and impeccable garbling of vocal delivery bleeding from one segment to another, emerging briefly into coherence before dispersing into shadow play like the unstrung flesh of a marionette. Contorting and ticcing across the hall, uncanny movement illustrates generational suffering – ongoing, shared, irresistible. Pop culture, prop comedy, costumes and callbacks, Gerhardt crescendos evangelistically and recedes nervously, a circularity of volume and madness that explores the lines between anxiety and pain, treatment and addiction. Beneath exquisite, almost holy light design by Rommi Ruttas and Leon Allik, Southern Drawl is confrontational in its refusal to fully engage, requiring the audience to fill in blanks left by the “disarticulated body” struggling its best to perform.

After the performance, we returned to the lobby as the stage was prepared for the next show, Juuli Hyttinen’s Crab Cage. Returning to the space we find a wrinkled screen with a pile of paper in front of it – projected onto both are videos of washed-out natural scenes. To the rear of the stage are a large metal cage and an industrial vacuum cleaner; across the stage are clusters of toiletries. To the audience’s right, a woman sits at a desk, with a laptop, effects board, and microphone. This is sound designer Vaida Vovere, providing live accompaniment and soundscapes to the performance.

Crab Cake is an exquisitely human piece reflecting on the discomfort of living in our skin, and the loss of autonomy when our body reacts to our environment despite our attempts to control or contain it. We follow Hyttinen as she metamorphoses, sloughing off and suffering, transforming in ways profound and mundane. Physically expressive, perfectly timed, and philosophically inquisitive, we witness what happens when we chase after products that will “fix” how we are – that which doesn’t kill us only makes us suffer. What do we accumulate, and what does it have to do with who we are? Do we rush too quickly to shed what we began as, in an attempt to become something new? Does the soul require physical participation?

Hyttinen’s piece gains complexity as its layers are stripped back, the live sound design amping up as both the humanity and the absurdity of the central performer increases. Props, sound effects, and spoken performance bring the figurative to the literal, culminating in something like a singalong bondage rock opera making inventive use of the industrial vacuum cleaner to express how we become trapped. Through dance, movement, poetry, and song, we are changed and newly aware of the state of our own skin.

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.