In the Magdalen Laundry and Industrial School, the scene is set, with two rows of seats and stools for the perching, and cushions for crouching, lining either side of the runway stage. Woodman’s “cold slow shock,” performed also by Woodman, proposes that “risk is often pursued and avoided in the same breath.”[1] Entering from a side door, Woodman appears, an orange electrical cord trailing behind him and an air of having found said cord in “a cupboard out the back.” “This is a 15-metre electrical cord,” he professes. “This is not a 15-metre electrical cord,” he counters, flipping the script, and playing with notions of “sometimes what you see is [not] what you get.” Like a philosophical chair that is not a chair, the found cord becomes a bridge and not a bridge, as Woodman, with the aid of an audience member, raises the cord in the air, diagonally across the stage that isn’t really a stage either. And in that moment, the cord could have become a single chain of nucleotides replete with cold-shock proteins bound to it, and Woodman a manifestation of the cardiorespiratory cold shock response in a health and safety demonstration.

With five varied responses compressed into bite-sized packages, from talk of UFOs, which both do and don’t exist, things flow slowly, effortlessly into Tinning’s multi-faceted “Sandunga.” The title drawn from colloquial Spanish, references “an individual’s inner life flavour and rhythm,”[2] and in this incarnation, with composer Louis Frere-Harvey, Tinning lays “down a movement language for [himself]” as he retraces “steps to belonging.”[3] Spanning the personal to a broader sense, as Tinning repeatedly, purposefully taps his right fist to his heart, “a diaspora holds many things,” shaped and changed over time, though empowerment, support, and “solidarity with many peoples at once.”[4]

Green’s “Slipping into Filth” summons from the adjoining room. Performed by Mara Galagher and Avril Eatherley, in costumes, like “Sundunga” also designed by Andrew Treloar, it is time to “go back into the burrow with you,” having offered “all of my skin [to] you” and received “fruit in return.”[5] Galagher, in a Rapunzel-long wig, sits on the floor, ruminating over a mandarin, whether recently received or to be given, as yet unclear. Sound designer Robin Fox has conjured a subterranean feel, befitting an excavation, laced with what appears to be the sounds of a mischief of rats scurrying. Long has it been said that rats have a commensal relationship with humans, eating at the same table. Perhaps I imagined this, and joined it to Galagher’s long fingernails operating like inquisitive paws, paws she later uses to select a tendril of Eatherley’s wig, and nibble, nibble, nibble to the drip, drip, drip of the downpipe. Though the cold of the environment feels bone deep, Galagher’s movements suggest a graceful nimbleness, even when she gnaws at her own feet and transforms a hanging potted plant into a leafy headdress, all but obscuring her face. Rats being social, empathetic to the last, and clean animals, perhaps the “filth” of the title speaks to how some humans view other species that live alongside us, in the shadows, cleaning up our excess of waste material.