Anima- Tmesis

Theatre has, since its earliest incarnation, been based on a compact: the audience will give their time, money and attention to the performer, and they will receive something in return: a narrative, an insight or an emotion. This reciprocity across the footlights is what creates the magic of live theatre. When it is ignored, it leaves an audience with the almost irresistible urge to stand up and walk out, shout abuse, or start talking amongst themselves. Of course the theatregoers of Bristol, being English, did no such thing. But didn’t we mutter afterwards (once we had given Tmesis a thoroughly undeserved round of applause).
It would be ridiculous to declare that watching Anima was like being raped, but at the core of such luvvyish hyperbole does lie a kernel of truth. For an hour, the audience is expected to take what the performers choose to give it, with no interest or concern for their needs, wants or pleasures. That is not to say that an audience need a strict narrative flow that they can follow: but what they do deserve is something more than two people rambling around a stage incomprehensibly, wrapped up in their own enjoyment like a couple of three-year-olds who have forced their parents to sit down to watch their ‘show’. The David Glass Ensemble were masters of dark and incomprehensible physical theatre, yet their shows - like Hansel Gretel Machine - still oozed beauty and poignancy that could move an audience to tears. Tmesis offer neither engrossing, enriching or elucidating theatre nor the physical fluidity and skill that would at least lift the performance into the more purely aesthetic realm of modern dance. If the intent is to provoke the audience into thinking, agitprop style, about the relationship that should exist between onlooker and performer, then this show is a great success. But I suspect that that is simply an unfortunate by-product and that Anima is shallow, overlong, inaccessible and ultimately chronically self-indulgent.