News

“The Monster in the Mirror”: on the poignant experimentalism of Fluxus2’s ‘Angel-Monster’.

Edinburgh Fringe 2022

by Rhys Pearce

Having little in the way of traditional narrative – despite the fact that dance is inherently a sequentialist artform – Angel Monster is difficult to review chronologically: rather, it has a series of moments that elude any attempt at exact ordering. I do recall that, making a very sweaty arrival at the venue (Assembly Checkpoint) I felt very much at home in the early moments of the performance: the five performers, dressed only in underwear and bras, appeared no more prepared to be on stage than I did. But then, Angel-Monster has a lot to say about appearances. Above the performers, strange linen cocoons hung in the air on support ropes. These cocoons, as it turned out, were essentially inverted laundry hampers. The performance began with the five women taking up spaced-out places across the stage and unzipping each cocoon, letting the clothes held inside them cascade. Depleted of their cargo, the cocoons were pulled back up in the air and hung empty. I stared up at them, thinking that, with their hoods pulled back to look almost like petals, they resembled some kind of alien flower species that might appear in a Star Wars film. Then I thought a little more, and realised that they just looked like orchids. 

Another thing I remember well is ending up on stage myself: the performers took a reasonably lax, hands-free approach to audience participation by bringing me up on stage, asking me to sort women’s clothes into colour-coded lines that eventually formed a grid, and then leaving me to it with seemingly minimal supervision - although the choreographer / director Nerida Matthaei later informed me that she had seen me on stage, in a startling reversal of the normal dynamic between reviewer and reviewed. Perhaps that idea of an inverted perspective is a good way to get to grips with Angel Monster as a whole – for a piece that has so much to say, Angel Monster almost entirely lacks dialogue of any kind. 

Reading other reviews of Angel-Monster, I’m annoyed by the critical tendency to consider it as a dance piece that just so happens to ‘do a feminism’ – one review begins with a rating out of 5, splutters out some ‘descriptive’ sentences courtesy of thesaurus.com, then manages to leave the disclaimer that ‘as a white man’, the reviewer ‘could not truly understand the themes’, but regardless they ‘were not lost on him’ – whilst at no point deigning to tell us exactly what these themes might be. For me, Angel-Monster is closer to a feminist discourse that is nonchalantly communicated through dance – it’s like if Simone De Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’ had featured Shania Twain’s ‘Man! I Feel Like a Woman!’. 

That isn’t to say that it’s especially preachy or that it takes itself too seriously, just that it’s a mistake to not deeply and analytically consider what the piece is doing politically just as much as it is doing artistically. Angel Monster strives to have an open and honest conversation about the situation of women in a world where phrases like ‘no means no’ and ‘micro-aggression’ can single-handedly be enough to make a certain category of man (anyone from Piers Morgan to that uncle of yours with the suspiciously young girlfriend) give a derisive snort. Arguably, it’s using the artistic rule of ‘show not tell’ to circumvent the stigma that has developed around terms of feminist expression. 

Margaret Atwood argued that the male gaze causes women to become their own voyeurs – through the medium of dance, Angel Monster is able to externalise this auto-voyeurship and literally show the audience how it feels to be objectified. Rather than attempting to deconstruct or debunk the male gaze, Angel Monster holds a mirror up to it, demonstrating the impact that rampant sexual abuse as well as constant sexualisation and oppression has not only on women’s mental health, but also their very notions of self-identity. 

In this context,  the presence of  women’s clothing takes on deeper meaning. Indeed, the untapped communicative powers of a Primark haul is one of the most successful tropes of this experimental piece. Under the lens of the choreographer’s bold artistic vision, women’s garments become a poignant and powerful synecdoche of femininity as a whole; femininity which at times restrains and confines the show’s cast of women but by the end seems more to empower them when embraced and appropriated for their own ends. 

In the show’s earliest moments, the performers circle the stage, stooping to pick up clothes from off the floor where they were released out of the hampers. However, we immediately notice that they’re not donning them normally: a pair of flared trousers are tied around the torso as a sash, while a skirt might be worn as a kind of headdress in an alien’s impression of how such a garment might be worn. It’s a moment that’s meant to make us question our assumptions – not just the assumption that a skirt is worn around the waist but furthermore the assumption that women should wear skirts in the first place; as if it’s natural, rather than learned, behaviour for them to feel pressure over constantly being concerned with their appearance. Matthaei has stated that the show was partially prompted by her niece asking ‘why there are no pink trucks’, and I think one of the show’s aims is to return us to this inquisitive, childlike state by pointing out exactly how weird the things we take for granted really are. 

Having donned the feminine attire, the performers themselves seem to take on the inner turmoil that prescriptive femininity induces. It’s at this point that I feel it’s most helpful to ponder the title of Angel-Monster: an apparent  allusion to the ‘Madonna-whore’ dichotomy in which all women are compartmentalised as either being morally correct and frigid, undesirable; or sexually available and thus morally corrupt. It’s a stereotype which has disastrous consequences for the survivors of sexual abuse, lending itself to a kind of automatic victim-blaming under the assumption that the type of woman who is ‘sexually available enough to be raped’ must also be morally corrupt enough to deserve it on some level. It’s the exact thing that makes us ask ‘what was she wearing?’ rather than ‘how could he do that to her?’. More generally, it encourages women to engage in contests over who can be the best Madonna or the best whore despite the fact that these competitions and comparisons have only a negative outcome for women, sapping away energy and attention that could be used to stand in solidarity against instances of patriarchal oppression. 

And this tension is acted out as the performers – who previously had been moving in harmoniously unified and synchronised choreography – start to turn on each other. One very strong visual image is of a kind of malicious trust-fall, wherein one performer repeatedly attempted to leap past another, who had been pursuing her, only to be caught again and again each time and returned to the ground. Images of restraint become powerful visual metaphors – an earlier point of audience participation, before we were all called on stage, sees one performer, adorned in so many wrongly-worn garment that she can hardly move (many of which were put on her by other performers) come to the audience for help in removing them so she can stand up straight again. Yet perhaps the most powerful moment of visualised restraint comes as one performer is hemmed in by the other four until she’s shepherded into a circle of clothing on the floor, which then encircles her. She moves frantically, hopping this way and that in a desperate but futile attempt to escape the ring that has seemingly become something somewhere between a dancefloor and a binding circle, of the sort used to physically incarcerate a demon for the purposes of exorcism. As the audience, we can see that obviously she could just step other the clothes if she wanted to because they’re really just clothes - in the same way that items of ‘promiscuous’ clothing which have been used in rape trials to vilify the victim are really just pieces of fabric, but have been allowed to hold so much more power than that. 

After the audience had returned to their seats from arranging clothes in lines around the stage, the show began its closing act. One of the show’s few verbal elements is the refrain of ‘one in six’, a phrase repeated often over the stage’s sound system, gaining a significant focus in the closing fifteen minutes. This refrain probably alludes to the statistic that one in six Australian women are physically or sexually assaulted before they turn 15, but its abbreviation to simply ‘one in six’ allows it to also suggest the fact that only one in six women who are victims of sexual assault in the UK report the crime committed against them. The use of the statistic grounds the piece in reality – for all of the strange and wonderful interpretive dance techniques that we’re witnessing, the piece isn’t just a fanciful metaphor but an expression of a very real and still ongoing socio-political struggle. For an Edinburgh fringe audience, it probably also reminds of another statistic which made headlines last year: that 97% of women have been sexually harassed, reminding us that not only do a concerningly large number of women have their lives devastated as a direct result of patriarchy, but that furthermore all women are affected by it in some way, and we can prove this concretely. The piece addresses the temptation to deny or evade these statistics too, as the audience hear the line “I don’t see myself as one in six – he was my boyfriend” at the end of monologue that is clearly describing sexual assault. Even for women themselves, it can be easier to revoke these statistics and the actual experiences they translate into than acknowledge and confront them, and that’s exactly why this piece, as an open confrontation of all of that, is so important. 

Apart from outlining the problem, Angel-Monster too presents a solution in its finale. It begins with one performer standing in the centre of the stage, as the other four circle around her, again using women’s clothing – this time, I believe, pantyhose – to essentially tie her up. Yet at some point, this dynamic reverses - the woman in the centre takes control of her situation and the power imbalance reverts. This leads to a moment wherein the audience is presented with the same image that Angel-Monster uses on all its promotional material, which has something of the same effect we get hearing the title of a film, book, song etc. within the piece itself – we are urgently aware that this vista is the culmination of the past hour, the single most important still that had been chosen to represent the piece as a whole. The image is this: the central woman who was previously being restrained now stands boldly, almost tauntingly, with the pantyhose that had formerly bound her now being used as leashes by wish she seems to control the other four performers. It is a bold, expansive, triumphant image that communicates an astonishing amount - for one, the physical and aesthetic beauty of the performers and their dancing contrasts with their strange and unnerving composition to produce the same tonal dissonance suggested by the piece’s title, and we might get the sense that this five-headed being, this Woman-as-monolith, is precisely the ‘Angel-Monster’ to which the title refers. 

For me, it ultimately represents the idea of a woman who has conquered her own femininity – who has rejected the mould manufactured and sold to her by everyone from her traditionalist parents to Victoria’s Secret in order to construct her own idea of what it means to be a woman. This re-appraisal of womanhood is reinforced by something else heard over the sound-system: “I am not a damsel in distress. I am the dragon, and I will eat you whole.” It’s an important re-interpretation of the narrative communicated by fairy tales – that men are the protector of women from some external threat – to square with a real-life world in which actually, men are so often the very thing that women need to be protected from, as the focal statistic of ‘one in six’ tells us. It is in this image that the performance suddenly switches from delineating the male gaze and its effects to showing us exactly what the patriarchy doesn’t want us to see: that when women cease to engage in the pointless infighting that the patriarchy encourages, and instead embrace solidarity womanhood on their own terms, they become so much more powerful, compelling and terrifying (in the best possible way) than misogynist narratives can ever be.