Review: PORCA MISERIA, Barbican Theatre

Sometimes show titles are spot-on perfect, albeit unintentionally. Porca Miseria is, in the Italian vernacular, an expression of frustration, something I would use when losing a cufflink or after sitting through a three hour-plus triptych of dance works that is, in the English vernacular, patently bobbins.

Trajal Harrell has an unusual background, having developed dance pieces in his early career to be shown principally in New York art galleries and the Bronx Museum as installations rather than on theatre stages. In 2017, his well-received Hoochie Koochie at the Barbican Art Gallery took the form of a ten-hour rolling stream of live performance and films between ten and sixty minutes long. Directed and choreographed by Harrell, this follow-up is another series of ideas with each having an individual visual setting.

Deathbed is an art installation about Harrell's time spent with African-American choreographer and activist Katherine Dunham. Unusually, the piece takes place entirely on the Barbican Theatre stage with the audience seated on chairs or sat around on cushions. To the sound of Creedence Clearwater's "Have You Ever Seen The Rain", the dancers casually dance from a dressing room towards the audience. Their attire starts off with fur coats with movements more akin to a catwalk than voguing. Over and over, they re-dress and then return with new outfits in bright neon colours as a series of digits are slowly read out like a half-assed numbers station. A wicker puppet bird is pulled out for a quick jaunt before it disappears. The music moves onto long violin notes then switches to Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" asking "can I handle the seasons of my life?".

Through much of the proceedings, the dancers move with the laidback insouciance of a summer Sunday afternoon, only marginally picking up the pace with bolder hip movements as an operatic voice breaks out. Two geisha dolls get a brief outing and the wicker bird returns for a short while before the powerful song "More Than A Paycheck" rings out. In a sudden break from the increasingly scattershot approach, the final scene sees the lighting switch from a constant brightness to a more crepuscular setting and one of the performers is portrayed deep in their grief. More and more clothes are piled onto them and, soon after, they are lifted onto the shoulders of pallbearers and carried off. Aside from this last dramatic act, Deathbed is a disappointingly dull and self-involved affair which gives precious little insight into what Harrell really thought of Dunham the woman.

After an hour-long interval, Harrell's film O Medea offers some hope for something a tad more tangible. A close-up on a performer in a well-lit room shows him standing with eyes closed tight and hands held up in front of him. He slowly swivels his palms around back and forth for several minutes as if undecided about whether to block out the light or allow it to come through. Whether he is contemplating the existential grief of the title character or what to have for lunch is unknown. The camera pulls back and, in a meta-moment which promises more than it delivers, we see a film crew and a covid-masked woman looking on. The remainder of the film focuses on a quartet of dancers who are introduced lying on the floor gently swaying with their hands also in front of them. They soon rise up to run around a circle above which a pendulum swings; like the joggers in my local park, it is hard to discern whether they are running to or from something but run they do. The mathematical symbols on the performers' backs could equally be allusions to some mystical formula or to the Ed Sheeran discography. Again, with negligible context and little dramatic texture, this is an unengaging work which demands far more of the audience than it gives.

The third and last part of Porca Miseria is titled Maggie The Cat and is inspired by Tennessee Williams' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. It returns to Deathbed's choreographical tenets: vogueing is the main art form on display with dancers constantly changing what they wear. This time, though, Harrell joins in throughout on vocals singing vague and repetitive lyrics and, in place of fur jackets, the dancers stride around this time adorned in towels, bedsheets and cushions duct-taped to their bodies. The choreography is loose and the movements relaxed as the performers approach the front of the stage. The corps have an admirable diversity in terms of gender, race and body size but are severely under-utilised; though they move with purpose, there is little opportunity to show off their skills other than some impressive walking around on toes.

As with Hoochie Koochie, Harrell has shown that he is able and willing to call on a vast number of influences from the Japanese art form of butoh to the 1960s avant garde dance movements and the NYC ballroom scene popularised in Pose. Unfortunately, the cavalcade of ideas deployed in Porca Miseria is almost entirely shorn of visual context and so it's very difficult to really get to grips with anything in it, either mentally or emotionally. Unlike Peeping Tom's own triptych - another show seen at the Barbican this year that displayed an avalanche of motion and ideas - the connections to the stated inspirational women are tenuous at best and, hence, there is no obvious larger concept to frame the actions. A general lack of wit, humour, energy and pacing doesn't help and, ultimately, all three pieces come across as far more enervating than inventive.

Abstract works like these naturally invite multiple interpretations but, when Harrell gives us so little to hang those interpretations onto, that is beyond frustrating. This, on top of the simplistic choreography and an obscure artistic vision, will invite accusations that Porca Miseria is an indulgent and deliberately obtuse work. While Harrell may have been inspired by the visual arts he originally performed in front of, this trio of pieces is not a pretty picture.

Porca Miseria, 12-14 May, Barbican Theatre

Photo credit: Tristram Kenton

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