Electric Hotel
By God Electric Hotel is a cool
show. As the audience settles into their seats, the atmosphere is more akin to
a festival main stage than a theatre auditorium. It helps that we’re outdoors
in the shadow of a rusty gas tower skeleton, the clouds insolently floating by
us in a twilight sky and a vacancy light flickering anxiously – the Electric
Hotel is open for business. It’s all distinctly 1950s American epic but forget
the shiny innocence of the ‘70s nostalgia for those years: this is no
Happy Days; more a winking acknowledgment to the eerie and
disturbing world of David Lynch.
narrative to the piece. Instead we are invited to experience seemingly random
passages of movement that flow seamlessly into transporting periods of
synchronicity. We may all be alone in this world but we are also inexplicably
linked, director David Rosenberg and choreographer Frauke Requardt seem to be
saying.
Requardt’s choreography blends sharp angles with a
free form lucidity that both attracts and repels. We watch as a couple are
repeatedly drawn into a fight; a maid with an unnerving sense of over-familiarity bustles rather threateningly from room to room; a man alternates
between ‘rocking out’ and boyishly playing ‘Indians’; and a desperately lonely
woman tries to make connections.
It is not only the dreamlike images that conjure a
Lynchian feel, but also Ben and Max Ringham’s meticulously crafted and
evocative soundtrack, which is played into individual headsets. The level of
sophistication within this sound design is magical, at times breathtaking,
tricking the brain with disconcerting regularity. As our strangers pace their
airless glass cages we are at once pulled into these claustrophobic
environments and, as the wind whips around us, distinctly kept at arm’s
length.
Electric Hotel may not be as
poignant as the creators want it to be, or as illuminating about ‘life’. But
afterwards it leaves palpable traces, with every sound and lighting state
heightened for the walk home. It is a unique and rather uplifting experience
and, for the visual and aural dexterity alone, you don’t want to be the one that hasn’t seen
it.
– Honour Bayes
