About Time You Saw: Two Man ShowBy Gilly Hopper
Abbi Greenland and Helen Goalen, Rash Dash founders, are often creatively led by impulse and improvisation. They hate over intellectualizing and love to be surprised. In Two Man Show, their latest work about how patriarchy is bad for everyone, Abbi and Helen combine physical theatre and live music to great affect. Two women play women, and then embody men (John and Dan) and then women and then cleverly you lose sense of precisely which sex they are supposedly portraying.
What is it to be a man in a feminist future? “This show is an invitation to men to be part of the change. If you’re not already. It’s an invitation to create a new language that will allow us to think new thoughts. It’s an invitation to create more space for the people we really are.” The wittily named Two Man Show acknowledges that it’s hard to talk about masculinity and patriarchy when the words that exist aren’t good enough. Blending music, dance and theatre, Two Man Show speaks to the audience in a raw and visceral performance style. Depicting the sensual experience of being a body, as well as the cerebral experience of being, Rash Dash’s articulate physical style is refreshingly unqiue.
Witness to 60 minutes of total physical exertion, I observed Abbi and Helen repeatedly remold themselves, transforming from sculptures to songstresses, muses to loutish and lackadaisical but loving lads. Through a series of contemporary dance interludes, Abbi and Helen reshape one another, highlighting our unfixed and mutable states. The role of clothing in gender identification is cleverly interwoven, with tutus turning to bridal veils and later boxer pants and then no pants at all. In one of the most valid moments to ever have actors appear nude on stage, the primitiveness of our bare state proved vital to Rash Dash’s story telling – aggressive, pure and freeing. Dance sequences lay reference to the civilising processes of our ancestors and back tracking further choreography was suggestive of our primate origins. The interpretative component of the work, misreading and re-reading of the work is a strong selling point.
Photo Credit: The Other Richard
What a wonderful piece of work. Moving, argumentative, songly, entertaining and communicates the contradictions and clarities of humankind. Expect a loud and raucous discussion of gender, language and humankind.
Two Man Show is at The Soho Theatre until 1st October
