A Truefitt Collective Triple Bill of Love & Spaghetti at Blue Elephant

Love & Spaghetti, Triple Bill, Blue Elephant Theatre, May 31

Eva Escrich Gonzalez and Jay Yule in Love & Spaghetti (photo: Ross Truefitt)

Blue Elephant Theatre’s importance in London’s dance infrastructure is that you can’t hide in production values what you present on its tiny stage. What you see are the bare essentials of artistic endeavor that will always be the true starting point of any work. And because you can’t put more than a handful of people on the stage and the audience is very close, this is intimate dance, and as such it is unforgiving. That this triple bill, curated by Kasia Truefitt of A Truefitt Collective, survives the ordeal is already a measure of its success. The title of the evening — Love & Spaghetti — lumps together a commonly misunderstood subject with a commonly misunderstood pasta dish, but while each of the three works clearly chooses love as a central ingredient, spaghetti is relegated to a metaphor for the tangled relations love engenders.

Because of the spatial limitations of Blue Elephant, each work is physically small-scale, but that doesn’t mean the idea or the performance is similarly constrained. It is always preferable to have a small space and boundless ideas than small ideas and a boundless space. Marie Rambert began her ballet company — and the careers of Sir Frederick Ashton and Anthony Tudor — on the tiny stage of the Mercury Theatre, so space is no limitation to quality and ambition.

Elisha Hamilton’s Too Close to the Bone is an intimate concept that nevertheless asks for a dozen volunteers on stage, which requires a certain amount of squeezing. It is a performative exercise on power and confession where each of the volunteers in turn reads a statement from an envelope. They all have to indicate its truth or falsity by picking up a paper flower or by remaining in place. Hamilton’s role is at first to perform the turning, twisting minefield of mental processes in each calculated or spontaneous response. In the second half the roles are reversed: she performs to a text about the sexual exploitation of a girl at a party that is contained in a series of envelopes she asks her volunteers to read. Because of the problem of an inconsistent level of clarity in the reading, our attention is drawn both to the text and to Hamilton’s interpretation, like watching surtitles at an opera. But dance doesn’t need explanatory text; it can express the meaning — and a lot more — all alone.

Sorry Flowers Die by Jay Yule and Tommy Cattin is a work that thrives on intimacy by contrasting emotional and physical proximity with relational distance and space. They carefully lay out a two-cubit square of white tape that delineates the space of their domestic arrangement like a miniature reenactment of the opening scene in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. They can barely fit inside it let alone dance a mambo and as they jostle and manoeuvre around each other with burlesque exaggeration they punctuate their entanglements with a very British refrain of ‘Sorry!’ In a moment of slapstick exuberance Yule is ejected from the square and makes one of her own, much smaller, in front of the memento mori of expiring cut flowers. Seeing she’s enjoying her freedom (grooving happily to Cierro Mis Ojos), a piqued Cattin tries to muscle in but is in turn ejected. He tapes a much larger square that contains the other two and for a while he and Yule enjoy the space to be themselves until she gently but firmly takes up a section of his tape and ushers him out. Sorry Flowers Die has a lot more to it than Yule and Cattin allow; it is in a neat prose form that has a wealth of humour but hides its poetic and theatrical potential.

Truefitt’s Love & Spaghetti is the longest of the three works and builds on the preceding two to arrive (almost) at a form of cabaret. According to the program note, the work is based on a social experiment in which two strangers answered Arthur Aron’s ‘36 questions that can make you fall in love with anyone’. Some of the questions can be heard as part of a broader emotional context — Jo Cooper’s ironic choice of songs about love — in Truefitt’s adaptation of the experiment as a duet with Yule and Eva Escrich Gonzalez in which they embrace notions of connection and independence. Even spaghetti has an appearance as a length of tangled rope. There’s a wealth of ideas here, two excellent performers, and a subject that anyone can understand and enjoy. What it needs is a production that renders its voice as richly vibrant as what it’s saying.