Not in BADco.mpany

Review of BADco.’s Memories Are Made of This…
Chelsea Theatre – 8 November 2008

8.08pm: The show has started without me noticing. Busy reading the programme notes for Memories Are Made of This… for the third time, I missed the five members of Croatian performance collective BADco. ‘invading the space’ – our space that is. The bar area in Chelsea Theatre. It becomes clear immediately - we are in for a rather unusual performance. No three-minute call, no proscenium arch, no reminder to turn off the phone, no artificial darkness, no anonymity.

In the short ‘introduction’ that follows we are invited to join the performers in the two gallery spaces as they explain that they wanted to expand the walls to make a bigger space and put fake grass on the floor so that we ‘could all sit down and have a picnic’. Then we are lead into the auditorium.

The space has been transformed: five long tables, at each a performer, five audience members, a radio and a photocopy of F Scott Fitzgerald’s story The Crack-Up (on which the performance is loosely based). Are they memories?

The room is quickly and quietly filled with whispers. There is a feeling of secrecy and intimacy in the room.

There are fragments of dance too. I cannot stop looking at the pregnant dancer’s belly. She is so close to me that I imagine I can hear her baby’s heartbeat.

And there is more text. More words. More movement. Dancing in front of a ‘snowing’ screen. Incidental music playing from the radio. It comes and it goes. Words appear as quickly as they disappear. It is the images that stay in my mind. One dancer moving and speaking in Croatian in front of the screen. One of the other performers who is watching her laughs out loud at what she is saying. The atmosphere is intensive but relaxed.

It’s the end. There’s applause. Bows. The usual.

As I think about what just happened on my way home, it occures to me - Memories are made of this.

A.H.