Costume
Jeanette Sendler
Choreography
Nicola Dahlinger
Performers
Leni Christmas, Dawn Hartley, Evelyn Holmes-Smith, Geraldine Morey
Sound
Neil McArthur
Production
Chloe Dear
Fetal Hearing was part of the performance Sound and Suspension by Metacorpus, funded by the Scottish Arts Council
St. Brides Arts Centre, Edinburgh, Juni 2000
Shuffling into a darkened space, audience members take their place around what appears to be the stage, where a performer encased in a wire-strung shell jerks and shimmies with staccato glee against the whirr of rotating springs and the rhythmic burr of concave silver sheets hung in a minimalist industrial backdrop. Suddenly noise and lights click into action from behind as a puppet-like figure entangled in a web of wires contorts and agitates.
Welcome to the world of Metacorpus, where the barriers between audience and performer are brocken down in a highly original piece of performance art. Following up their acclaimed Animated Body Appendages, the innovative interactive approach of Metacorpus, founders Jeanette Sendler, Anna Cocciadiffero and Chloe Dear in Sound and Suspension has all the playful elements of a psychedelic 1960s happening, but brought up-to-date with a mix of stimulating physical theatre, fantastical visuals and ambient sound collages. Costumes continue to play an integral rather than simply decorous role, providing the leaping-off point for a look at the outside world through the perceptions of the unborn.
In the first part, the attractions in various parts of the room build into a pulsating alternative take on the scientific workings of the inner ear. An audience member becomes entwined in the twisting butterfly cochlea shell.
Others watch the atonal balloon-scraping squall of two silver-clad performers pushing discs along wires. All heads turn for the figure who appears suspended on the high rope, silken tubes draping from her body like a ballgown train and swaying as she improvises bends of the body.
The second half offers a Zen-like contrast; we sit like a kindergarten class around a womb-like carpet and watch the awakening of four foetuses curled up like new-born pups in the centre of a cotton spiral of intestines. Bathed in lights and stirring gradually to Neil McArthur´s soothing ambient soundtrack, their immediate surroundings are explored with quivering movements, Nicola Dahlinger´s choreography entrancing with the slightest of shifts against heartbeat accompaniment as they flex, strech apart and return together. Bewitching, intoxicatingly fresh, Metacorpus make sense of the desire to return to the womb.
The Scotsman, Juni 2000
Something lies at the heart - and soul - of what Metacorpus does that is hard to condense into words. In part, it´s a kind of unspoilt curiosity, our willingness to be caught up in the wonderment of being alive. If these seem very innocent, childlike qualities then you should know that the work produced by costume artists Anna Cocciadiferro and Jeanette Sendler is both intricate and sophisticated in concept and realisation. Each of them provides a highly individual performance under the umbrella title Sound and Suspension. Inverted Labyrinth sees Cocciadiferro delve into the hidden anatomical depths of the ear to find the structures that will inform her designs, all ready to resonate and quiver at the slightest sound. She´s then translated these into costume "reponses", surreal garments that evoke the very process of hearing. Background machinerries wheeze, rasp, grate, and screech and the bodies inside the costumes react. Sendler´s Foetal Hearing is an inner journey of a different kind. Neil MacAthur´s score ranges from lulling serenity to sudden, abrasive clatter, with an underlying reassurance of sonorous pulsing. This is the landscape of the womb where four figures gradually rise into a Buthohesqe dance, as if the sounds encouraged them to move their limbs. There´s an eerie, underwater feel and a sense of protected calm. These are haunting images, plangent with symbolism and spirituality. The Herald, Juni 2000