News

Arhropoda

Arthropoda @ Traverse

February 2023, part of manipulate festival.

Paper Doll Militia’s Arthropoda offers a compromise between visual and scripted theatre: in a series of discreet scenes, some spoken, some exploring aerial choreography and physical performance, a relationship is traced from ecstatic beginnings to its violent finale. If the words can stumble and falter, the aerialism expresses the complexity of emotional states in a manner direct and affecting, with the two performers, Constanza Ruff and Lee Partridge, articulating their anguish, optimism and anger through dynamic movement and evocative gestures.

Arthropoda’s abiding imagery, of the lobster caught in the trap, is a harrowing metaphor for the relationship that ultimately contains Constanza’s character. While not unsympathetic to Partridge’s character’s trauma, the toxicity of his outbursts that gradually replace his winning, thoughtful personality. By following a chronological narrative, from their chance meeting through their time together, the precise details of the relationship reveal the contours of the woman’s containment. The problems caused by bureaucracy, being in a foreign land and dependent on a partner for a home all prevent escape. More painfully, memories of happier times and a sense of emotional obligation undermine her desire to protect herself. The descent towards violence – foreshadowed by bad dreams and bursts of shouting – is slow yet inevitably. And like the lobsters she knew from her childhood in Maine, Constanza’s marine biologist finds herself unable to reverse, to move back to safety.

Raw and vibrant, the production dresses the stage with fishing nets and lifts the performers towards the heavens, finding in the ropes a way to express the dreams of new love and the harrowing ruptures: weightlessness becomes evocative of pleasure and dislocation. Even on the ground, the performers interact with huge hoops, encircling them: at first the halo of the blessed lovers, they shape the constriction that the relationship becomes.

Despite attempts to cut down on drinking, to take up yoga, to attend therapy, the male only embraces his anger: if anything, his attempts to get better are another weapon, another entreaty to the woman he supposedly loves to stay. And in the last scenes, when she does escape, and tries to repair her life, the trauma is exposed, the consequences are faced. Hopeful, in so far as she removes herself from the situation, but leaving behind open questions about how recovery can happen, Arthropoda is a forceful reflection on masculine violence, and the power of guilt and doubt, that ascends to the heavens despite the relentless pull of gravity and injury.

Gareth K Vile