Grace Watts
503Fusions is a look at four different perspectives of one city. Emerging writers, performers, directors and musicians all collaborate to form these distinctive mini-plays. The underlining theme throughout is the feeling of a heartbeat of the city, and unique soundscapes portray this rhythmical harmony within each scene.
First we have Night, written and performed by Karis Halsall in a fresh, subtle and concise manner. Halsall’s clarity makes the audience consider how “mass remembering” is our generation’s main emotion – that unless we archive our lives within media we can’t remember it. Halsall is fair to say that we live in a world where we need to prove to others we exist, and this is highlighted beautifully by Sam Organ’s original soundscape.
Tommy Sissons is an emerging artist I’m sure I’ll see again. Sissons has great flow to his spoken word and, whilst the demise of our youth is not a new subject, Sissons’s epilogue for the youth is heart-breaking and real. The musicians, Normanton Street, punctuate Sissons’s performance with a heavy and soulful bass, pulling the audience in only to be jolted by a great use of light, which is integral throughout the 503Fusions.
A lighter reflection on the 503Fusions theme is supplied by Gemma Rogers, with Nick Rogers and Dominic Kennedy. Rogers gives a gritty yet charming performance and the collaboration with the indie London vibe of the music creates a comic and endearing scene.
In Night II there is a wonderful electricity to Deanna Rodger’s performance, taking her character from the awkwardness of real life and linking it with the astrophysical mass and motion of our cosmos. The theme of light is prominent, and Rodger’s connections to the burning neon lights of the city in comparison to the power of the sun is visceral, which is helped by music from Tuesday Born to create a strong backbone for this performance.
Fusion is the perfect description for this show and is a credit to all the four directors involved. They successfully fuse the media of light, sound and word to create seamless performances, and the description of this being an experimental series just doesn’t do it justice. I can’t wait to see more cross-artform collaborations from Theatre503.
503Fusions played at Theatre503. For more information, see the Theatre503 website.