put your heart under your feet... and walk! , Steven Cohen (Lille), Fierce Festival, performed at mac Birmingham, Friday 18 October, 2024, 5☆☆☆☆☆. Review Dan Auluk.

Photo Credit: Allan Thiebault.

put your heart under your feet... and walk! , Steven Cohen (Lille), Fierce Festival, performed at mac Birmingham, Friday 18 October, 2024,

5☆☆☆☆☆. Review Dan Auluk.

Duration: 60 mins

“Fascinating! Fearless! Ferocious and Fierce! A full force performance!”

Sometimes the spectacle and shock of a performance is so visceral that you have to look away or leave! Put your heart under your feet… and walk was an extremely uneasy watch right from the outset where we are presented with a stunningly beautiful calm stage of artefacts on the stage floor, with hanging wearable gramophones hoisted on chains and a display of unlit candles. We are presented with a video of a ink tattoo carved on the sole of a foot. Cohen’s character, an otherworldly hybrid of angel, feary and fairground queer family, walks in with coffins for stiletto’s and walking sticks for balance – a ritualistic painful intervention is about to ensue!

In Cohen’s landscape world of body where the intimate and privacy of grief is turned inside out publicly, insides and outsides of place where graphic blood video performances painfully fulfil pain of loss and connection; performances filmed in an abattoir where Cohen’s mythical like character, witnesses and is witnessed by the workers at the abattoir; the brutality of death and the cleanings and absorption of, remains, prepared for human consumption. The connection mystical creature and animal and life fading away was intense. The slow closing of an eye was profoundly moving.

Steven Cohen engages us in an unsettling and a deeply abstracted performance of grief and at times moving ceremony in memory of his partner, the dancer Elu, who passed away after 20 years of life together. An extreme cathartic yet deeply personal gesture released and unleashed with a striking visual imagination placing the faith of art as a ritual that celebrates life and isolation of death. We are told at the end that “Everything that happens is real.”; the fear installed in us of a potential choking quite literally and suffocating, remains.

What is striking, troubling and moving is the feeling of loss, guilt explored through movement, precarious and styled with care, a landscape of artefacts and objects beautifully staged with lighting that allows the audience to re-focus off the horrors they have just witnessed; unimaginable horrors on screen that may scar or scare us for life, but grief is individual, unpacked and continually processed. Here we see the sharing publicly, raising questions of emotional dissonance with the conflict we are watching.

This is a performer at the very edges of art, performance and choreography, breath-takingly themselves and us on a physical journey of pain. The remarkable stillness in Cohen’s performance, where movement is slow and painful; where often breath and observing back at the audience is just enough, appearing and disappearing on stage. This is not a performance about seeking validation, or a need to absolve or resolve but trying to connect deeper to oneself and audience and ultimately not forgetting love; often explored visually through the weight of wearing and walking of performance, such as a quartet of gramophone costume or high stilleto’s navigating through a landscape of personal objects of care and memory.

Cohen speaks “The last wish that Elu expressed to me on his deathbed was “I want to be with you forever”. It will be so.” before we see Cohen ingest a final spoonful of love of Elu, disappear right before our eyes.

Credits

Choreography, Scenography, Costumes and Interpretation: Steven Cohen

Lights: Yvan Labasse

Videos: Richard Muller & SHU

Video Management: Baptiste Evrard

External Regard: Catherine Cossa

Stage Management: Samuel Mateu

Production: Cie Steven Cohen

Co-Production: humain Trop humain – Centre Dramatique National (Montpellier), Montpellier Danse, and Dance Umbrella (Johannesburg) with the support of DRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine

Show created on June 24, 2017 at the Centre Dramatique National de Montpellier as part of the Montpellier Danse Festival.