#tim etchell

“How love could be” by Tim Etchell am Audimax in Bochum

I went to Tim Etchells' performance on Monday night largely because it was being held at the yet-to-open Fox Cabaret. Taking over the space that was Fox Cinema, the last remaining adult movie theatre in Vancouver, the Fox Cabaret is now being managed by the entertainment crew who ran The Waldorf. While I rarely saw anything good at The Waldorf, I will say they at least did a lot, and tried, and here's hoping this new central location will attract some quality performing arts opportunities for artists and audiences alike. 

The first performance to kick off this space would be a sparse monologue of declarative sentences spoken and embodied by Jim Fletcher. Sight Is The Sense That Dying People Tend To Lose First was a play only in the sense that it played with the conventions of theatre, which comparatively, I prefer. The Fox was a fitting venue for such a bare performance as a large scaffold remained off to the side of the stage and the audience shifted in our makeshift fold out metal chairs in a windowless room that smelled only of paint. The room is constructed, these words are constructed, and here we all are waiting wanting to be suspended from our monotony, even if just for a moment.

As a one person show, with nothing, not a microphone, a subtle lighting scheme that flickered and dimmed concurrently with my attention span, and a body that stood and spoke and gestured, the show was undoubtedly carried by the presence and his pacing. While the words ranged from coy to cliche, "A submarine is a ship that can go underwater. A French kiss is a kiss where you put your tongue in the other person's mouth. A donkey is an inferior kind of horse. A lie is what people say when they say something that is untrue. A fact is something that can be proved . . . " I found myself never longing to see the words on paper, which kept this experience in the realm of performance, a minimal performance whose nuance speaks away from drama, which in the realm of performance, may only leave us with endurance.

Writing this for Fletcher and Fletcher alone, it is interesting to see that they don't bill it as a collaboration, but as a Tim Etchell piece (who is also this year's keynote) as performed by Jim Fletcher. I didn't stick around for the entire discussion to ask about authorship and embodiment, but I left the Fox thinking about it.