Mouth Wash and Razor Blades: A Playground of the Surreal

Originally published on fakewhale.xyz

 

As I watch ‘Mouth Wash and Razor Blades’, I feel as though I’m spiralling through a hallucinatory trip, reminiscent of the chaos of my tube journey to the venue. I begin to wonder whether my drink was spiked.

A bare stage, harshly lit by exposed spotlights. An announcement ‘Pickpockets operate in public bathrooms. Not the park, not the train station, not the crowded marketplace where wallets practically beg to be stolen’ — breaks each time the performer drops a precariously balanced box from his head. For most of the show, the stage is occupied by six inflatable blue dinosaurs. Initially playing badminton, they then drag the collapsed body of a man across the stage. No one cares. Everyone on stage, a playground of the surreal, is busy continuing with their mundane nonsense.

With barely any dance as we know it, the piece unfolds as an erratic sequence of vignettes, each a cacophony of the absurd. These composites unravel with escalating chaos. A line of four performers wrestle to wear a pair of glasses before engaging in a synchronised toothbrushing ritual, collectively spitting into a shared glass. A man dressed in an infinite loop of sweatshirts zips them on and off in a Sisyphean display, only to finally reveal his identity beneath the layers. Another figure, clumsily hopping on stage to sing off-key, drops a box of individually wrapped squeaky toys. Scattered across the floor, they are used by the dinosaurs to bury the hapless announcer who had earlier warned about pickpockets. The impression is that of an exaggerated synthesis of a hectic tube journey, someone fiddling with toiletries, singing out of pitch, huffing impatiently, or accidentally dropping all their belongings on the floor. This time, however, this parody of the banal unfolds on stage all at once, under clinical lighting, before a disoriented and silent crowd. A few dance moves repeat energetically to emphasise the cyclical inexorability of time. With the cast’s piercing seriousness, the performance demands no embellishment, cutting through with raw intensity.

Throughout, the audience is occasionally blinded by a moving mirrored paper dangling from the ceiling and clashing with the spotlights. These sharp, almost intrusive moments of light contribute to the overwhelming feeling of psychoactive confusion. The choreographer, with his signature pink fluorescent wig, spends most of the show in a cardboard box that had dropped from the ceiling onto his long-limbed figure at the start, like he’s timidly hiding from the outside, with no control over what’s going on. He’s only set free at the end, when he moves towards the buried man to gently lie atop his figure. As the crying of squeaky toys intensifies, he furtively nicks the announcer’s wallet and walks away.

Bemused and bewildered, I leave this hallucinogenic experience, feeling the show somehow captured the absurdity of this time when no one knows what’s going on, and yet everyone relentlessly continues with erratic nonsense. A reminder, perhaps, that amidst the absurd, we must keep moving on, even if we’re not entirely sure why.

 

Mouth Wash and Razor Blades, a performance by Casper Dillen / Small Sample Size Theatre, premiered on January 18th at The Place as part of a triple-bill during the festival Resolution.

 

Concept, Direction, Choreography: Casper Dillen
Composer: Gia Dreyer
Costume design: Dodam Gwon
Assistant director: Dann Xiao
Scenography: Casper Dillen
Performers: Agelos Kotzias, Cameron Jarvie, Casper Dillen, Christy Taylor, Cizzoe Yi Wang, Dann Xiao, Edgar Ocampo Pazmino, Haedong Lee, Jamie Myles, Maieuran Sathananthan, Noah Henry, Qibai Ting, Romain Nagata, Tomio Shota, William James (JJ), Yujie Duan