Walking through Cities On The Move after closing time is a dislocating experience, since its installations (designed to re-imagine the seething anarchy of modern Asia) scream out for people. With no one to look, the carnival dragon construction of inner tyres and bicycle frames sags like the innards of a deserted factory. The model prostitutes with their bursting papier maché breasts are unwanted goods and the artful compositions of florid plastic look like rubbish discarded by a departed crowd.
But in a corner of the gallery reinvented as a street market, the exhibition was kept alive in a solo performance by Japanese choreographer Saburo Teshigawara. The audience stood where they could, watching Teshigawara dance through a frieze of dangling plastic sieves and inflatable Spider-Men. And the overwhelming, excruciating vision of his dance seemed to be of the city as physical nightmare.
The music, provided by noise-terrorists Merzbow, deafened even those of us who'd been given earplugs. Teshigawara's small and edgily responsive body flinched as if assaulted both by the music and by unseen trauma.
At one point he gasped and waved his arms like a fish swimming through pollution. At another his mouth gaped in a silent scream, the breath juddering from his lungs.
Part of the solo's intention was to explore the city's impact on our desires and bodies and there were movements that captured with masochistic intensity the brute physicality of urban life. When Teshigawara's limbs went into uncontrolled spasm it was as if he were walking down a street and overdosing on stimuli. When his body sagged in a sudden, sickening collapse we saw and felt the vertigo of a shooting elevator ride.
It was a concentrated, often painful half hour and walking on to Waterloo Bridge afterwards seemed like a stroll in the country. But if the nightmare receded, passages of Teshigawara's solo definitely stuck.
Willingly or not, I'd added some of its most savage images to my inner city map.
*#149; ***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
