Reviews

Forgetting Natasha (tour – Ipswich)

Anne Morley-Priestman
London

Technically it’s impressive. Heather Eddington and Anna May Selby have choreographed and scripted Forgetting Natasha, a piece about a woman who’s losing her memory to the onset of early dementia. Words and dance are cut across with animated projections and other digital wizardry as Natasha’s past fragments into a nightmarish future and neither her mother nor her lover can do anything but add to her pain and despair. Multi-media come of age.

Melissa Spiccia, Josephine Darvill-Mills and Baptiste Bourgougnon are the performers, tackling Eddington’s flowing movements and reaching out-aas well as up lifts more easily than Selby’s script. I would have liked to have heard more of the words. The video artists are Kit Monkman and Tom Wexler and their work complements the human tragedy without ever overwhelming it. I saw this touring production as part of Platform East, DanceEast’s showcase for new work from the east of England.

There was a medical feel to the whole programme with Tim Blowfield’s Left exploring bereavement and Little Instruments of Apprehension by Darren Ellis confronting doctor and plastic-shrouded patient (Nicolas Sameha] and Ellis with echoes of Frankenstein’s created “monster”and a bewildering array of found instrumentation. …And Then, You Were Gone is a violent encounter for Lisa Welham and Tom Jackson Greaves by Cameron McMillan with a percussive score underlining the ferocity of their encounter. Physical theatre indeed.