Electrifying, sensational and satisfyingly exhausted
Decipher means to figure out or make sense of something that is difficult to comprehend.
To decipher something may require not only epistemological knowledge but also embodied knowledge. You cannot decipher the smell of jasmine without actually smelling it.
Co-created by Jean Abreu and Naishi Wang, with dramaturgy by Guy Cools, Deciphers is a multidisciplinary dance performance that explores cross-cultural negotiation and connection. Both as multi-cultural immigrant artists, the pair expresses their emotions and concerns about the globally urgent issue of immigration throughout the world in today’s political and cultural climate.
The London stage never lacks shows and plays about immigration, diaspora and cross-cultural identity. What distinguishes Abreu and Wang is that, instead of interweaving those disputes into a spoken drama, they choose to illustrate their mutual journeys as immigrants through their bodies both as a site and a tool. The physicality of Deciphers is at once extremely intense yet extremely subtle, where emotions and confusions, and frustrations are not only embodied in their movements but also delicately transmitted in-between their movements. This is a realm where spoken language usually become inadequate to carry.
However, the piece also contains an entire dialectical, even philosophical sequence where Abreu and Wang discuss the notion of “completeness” (wanzheng完整) in Portuguese and Chinese. It could be an extra bonus if you understand either of the language, but it would be equally fine if you do not. Through their crawling, swirling, hugging and entangling, the emotional and physical intensity becomes undeniably weighty that you can barely breath, as if you are viscerally empathetic to their fierce struggle and oppression as immigrants. Especially if you are one yourself, it is beyond overwhelming.
Ivy Wang’s visual design and Luccie Bazzo’s lighting create a minimalist yet intimate world within the Coronet Theatre. At one moment, Bazzo’s neon-textured light projects their silhouettes in a Warholian style; in another, a warm orange hue cuts the stage into uneven halves that evoke a sense of the existential undertone of French contemporary dance. Olesia Onykiienko’s composition is restrainedly precise, surfacing at crucial moments to underscore the performers’ inner turmoil.
Lie Dormant. Men in dark times. At the beginning, Abreu and Wang draw on a vast plastic scroll that later crumples into a tangled mass, pierced by two light tubes. However terrible our world might seem for now temporarily, there is, and will always be, light.