Suspended
Natasha Davis
Chelsea Theatre, as part of Sacred, US Radical Season
On the threshold between locations, spaces and memories is the body, a physical liminal identity. Suspended explores the fractions of ourselves we leave behind, the experience of migration through a score of memories. In a series of performative acts, Natasha Davis traces her personal history through artefacts of her memories- jars, necklaces, objects, clothes. Her transnational experience is laid across a space that becomes the exhibit of her history, questioning our relationship to our past and the liminality of our bodies as they spread across the fragments we leave behind.
Strings hold her hair suspended across the room, high above the audience, who are invited to free her. With each cut string, a bit of her hair remains trapped, the space a living memory of her initial ritual, displaced throughout this landscape of foreign bodies. In another act, Natasha stands on a crate of apples; in tension with her body on this precarious surface is an exercise of remembrance, of placement, of playing with time. Natasha engages in a ritual of place and time, re-enacting with each installation a fragment of her life across borders and countries.
It is her physical and emotional engagement with the rituals that is problematic in the piece. Consistent in her every move, Natasha becomes another artefact in the social map of her memories. It is within moments of tension and risk that the performance becomes truly engaging, evocative and challenging, because we see a transformation in Natasha, her emotional presence in a liminal act caught between a performance space and a real memory. When every object is treated with too much care, the ritual becomes disembodied, and the displacement of that particular moment of personal history remains an abstracted image.
Natasha poses an important question on the way geographic and physical borders affect our cultural identity, and the way our scattered memories become fragments of our existence caught in liminality. Yet I longed for an exploration of more personal rituals where I can observe a transformation beyond the evocative beauty of the installations. Despite this, the blend of image, ritual, artefact, music and film brought traces of a Balkan concern with the natural, the ineffable and the tactile.
Tagged: Chelsea Theatre, Natasha Davis, Sacred Festival