Gracefool Collective, This Really Is Too Much

Gracefool Collective, This Really Is Too Much, Blue Elephant, November 11

Kate Cox, Sofia Edstrand, Rachel Fullegar and Rebecca Holmberg of Gracefool Collective in This Really Is Too Much (photo: Lidia Crisafulli)

It’s interesting to look at the four women of Gracefool Collective — Kate Cox, Sofia Edstrand, Rachel Fullegar and Rebecca Holmberg — as they sit facing us in matching black outfits at the beginning of their collectively created This Really Is Too Much: four faces, four pairs of eyes each with a different focus and inflection expressing a range of moods from amusement to dead serious. They recite in tight unison the phrase ‘I’m telling you something…(long pause)…something important…I have the answer…’ Reminiscent of Victor Borge’s vocal punctuation, they vocalise their gestures within their text: ‘I am the answer (exhale-gain-their-trust)’ or ‘Look (point), you’ve never had it so good.’ It’s a carefully crafted opening gambit in a game the four women play knowingly with the audience. By the end of the performance the synchronous opening has given way to a colourful disarray on a floor littered with the detritus of what the program note calls ‘the downright absurd realities of what it means to be a 3-dimensional, high definition, water-drinking, salad-eating, moisturizing WO-man in modern society.’

The Collective performed a shorter pilot version of This Really Is Too Much at Resolution earlier this year; the desire to expand it into a full evening work has led to this first performance at Blue Elephant Theatre. The work as it now stands contrasts some tightly choreographed sequences (like the opening) with more flaccid sections that suggest the hyperbole and capital letters of the program note may have been an agent of expansion. There is a sense that having chosen to focus their intelligence and humour on resisting stereotypical boxes, the four women scupper their desire to emerge as individuals with their mirth in demonstrating the stereotypes. Do they need to undress repeatedly to their underwear — apart from Fullegar as the beauty queen — to prove a point, or are they merely reinforcing a stereotype for the purpose of laughs?

Gracefool Collective undressed in This Really Is Too Much (photo: Lidia Crisafulli)

It is not for nothing that the Collective has ‘fool’ in its name:

…let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That’s villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2)

William Shakespeare’s early fools provided laughter as a distraction for the crowds but later his fools took on the more powerful role of speaking truth to power through their wit. The seeds of the latter can be seen in This Really Is Too Much but the former strategy dominates.

Fullegar is cast as an intelligent beauty queen, the only one to express a coherent point of view on government, economics, politics and the state of women, but each time she makes a statement she either qualifies it with a self-deprecatory joke (‘We can combine radical feminism…and Downton Abbey’) or is overwhelmed by her raucous mates. Statements are thus given weight and then the weight is taken away.

Exceptions occur not in the text but in physical form: Fullegar’s dogged running round and round the stage in bikini and oversized heels is gutsy physical satire and the destabilization by two viciously smiling cronies of the chair Holmberg stands on as she tries to talk is a disturbingly dark image. Less dramatic but equally effective is the ironic way Edstrand expresses her gratitude while reclining on the shoulders and back of Cox and Holmberg. These moments show how close Gracefool Collective is to defining a physical language to deal with the subject of their work without having to resort to gags.

The mix between the four women, who met at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, is evident; their personalities hold well together though they have talents that remain unexplored. For four graduates of a prestigious dance school, there is little to suggest their training (though in the trailer for Resolution both Holmberg and Cox had well-defined gestural portraits) and Holmberg is a musician who could well provide a welcome ingredient to the Collective’s brand of theatre. Choosing, as they have done here, a track list as sophisticated and diverse as Steely Dan (Only A Fool Would Say That), Moondog, Barry White, Handel, Lars Hollmer, Cissy & Whitney Houston and Vivaldi does not serve the home-grown identity of the Collective as their own musical input (or silence) might. Nevertheless it is the infectious enthusiasm of the four women that drives This Really Is Too Much and that gives it cohesion despite the sense of manic dissipation with which the work comes to an end.