Jake Orr
Dario D’Ambrosi, an Italian performance artist, has had little exposure to UK audiences before now. His work slips between the cracks of theatre, art and performance, and is perhaps an unusual thing for Wilton’s Music Hall to be embracing. But those willing to experiement will find a small season of D’Ambrosi’s work, with the headline performance of Frustration (Frustra-Azioni). D’Ambrosi’s work is not for the faint hearted, full of visual images of death, raw meat and carcasses that will leave you squirming in your seat. Yet Frustration isn’t about causing discomfort for its audience, but rather about portraying the discomfort felt by a character suffering from a mental illness.
D’Ambrosi founded Teatro Patologico in Italy, a theatrical school dedicated to helping people suffering from mental illnesses to explore theatre and their afflictions. The themes of illness, mental instability and the liveness of theatre/performance are clearly inherent in D’Ambrosi’s Frustration. Depicting the true story of a butcher who suffers from the inability to ignore the blood of the animals he butches, he is driven to despair by voices and the strange beauty of the raw meat hanging in his abattoir. Using a real carcass, lashing of blood and a pristine white room, D’Ambrosi explores this strange butcher’s tale.
Frustration is an odd piece, as alluring as it is revolting. There is beauty in the relationship that D’Ambrosi portrays between himself as the butcher and the carcass of the animal. There is tenderness and, at times, a wonderful wit given to the relationship, but it is also disturbing. In many ways this is the point of the piece; there might be a certain beauty to be found in the manner in which someone can project their love onto a dead thing, but this could easily be read as the outcome of a troubled mind.
Throughout Frustration there are large monologues that build up the ideas of blood as a living desire and the sexual attraction of skin on skin. D’Ambrosi careses the carcass, removes its inners, thrusts his groin inside it and wraps it carefully in a skimpy woman’s top. Yes it’s graphic and at times vulgar, but there really is a simplicity of action and beauty in the visual images that are created. Towards the end of the piece, we see the blood-stained Butcher in his undergarments rolling on the floor begging us to understand that he is ill. It’s a haunting image that even now is burned in my memory.
Frustation is a tantalisingly good piece of live art. It challenges and provokes, it offers dark humour and spine-chilling images. Yet it also offers awareness and understanding that this Butcher is clearly ill, suffering from a mental illness that he can’t escape from. It’s not often that London audiences are given the chance to explore the work of European live art/performance makers, and I urge you to take the chance and witness Frustation.
Frustration (Frustra-Azioni) is playing at Wilton’s Music Hall until Saturday 11 February. For more information and tickets, see Wilton’s Music Hall’s website.