News
Megalith
Megalith
Mechanimal - Zoo Southside
by Flora Gosling
Using technology can sometimes make you feel like you are being reduced to your most primitive instincts. Bashing TV remotes against tables, furiously tapping credit cards against contactless readers, and desperately seeking signal as though trying to appease some illusive Wi-Fi god. Megalith by Mechanimal draws comparisons between tech and rocks, reminding us of our fundamentally human attraction to tools as a way to plunge the audience into geological deep time.
On the stage, there are three desks – one for tech, one for music, and one for…rocks. In charge of the latter is Charles Sandford, whose interaction with stones, tools, and at one point a deer antler comes in stages: trying to get the rocks to work in a specific way, which turns into exploring their possibilities, which turns into exerting power and destruction over them, and finally examining what remains. Meanwhile, Xavier Velastin creates a heart-thumping techno soundscape that slowly turns the scene into a joyfully destructive one-man rave.
Like another production at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe that deals with deep time, You’re Safe Til 2024: Deep History, the narrative of this performance works better after the fact. In both cases, after you let it sit with you for a while you can take a step back and appreciate what it was building up towards, but the experience of watching it in the moment is less rewarding. Megalith certainly makes an impression, but it is too easy to come away feeling that you have just watched some rocks being smashed and nothing more.
Take a similar Anthropocene-themed production that performed on the same stage, Are We Not Drawn Onward to New Era by Ontroerend Goed from 2019. No-one could mistake the tree being torn apart at the beginning of the performance for anything other than a metaphor for the human destruction of nature. Symbolism and allegory needn’t be on-the-nose to be effective, and Megalith’s playfulness and bluntness are engrossing in their own way. But the minutes of a performance need to hold as much value as the hours to make it feel worthwhile, in the same way that understanding deep time means nothing if we can’t feel the days.
Three stars
