Shay Mace
Step aboard Chaotica’s absurd vision of contemporary urban life, The BUS, a highly physical romp through a nameless Greek city’s streets, where every stop is named after an obstacle, a scenario, a frustration or a burden. This kaleidoscopic exploration of modernity and its constraints on the human body proves a valuable and intriguing probe surrounding spatiality and how it impacts our day-to-day lives, while simultaneously unpacking deeper themes about body image, intergenerational conflict, racial discrimination and beyond. It is an attractive, compelling inquest into space, who gets to own it, and from where they divine that authority.
Taking the eponymous mode of transport as an opening gambit, the ensemble cast of co-devisors use the steady hand of concept creator Alexandra Lioliou and Director Maritina Koutsochioni to build an engrossing world of characters, subject to Kafkaesque logics and rhtyhms of absurdity but immediately recognisable as archetypes you’d find travelling around an urban landscape filled with fracture, conflict, difficulty, and eventually, recognition. A fare evader is pursued down a seemingly endless gangway, an older woman comes face-to-face with maskless sneezing youths in the midst of a pandemic, an immigrant is told to return home after the slightest of agitation. Chaotica seek to hold up a mirror to how in confined spaces, we are ultimately all confined to one another.
Dressed up in the way you might imagine a young David Bowie would have made up toys in a dollhouse, the surreal quickly blurs into grounded lived realities, all anchored in fluid, engrossing movement and physical characterisations that capture the often buzzing environment of each scene. In vignettes, we move through the themes with ease. At points, it feels as though Chaotica could have a little more to say about each of the interactions we witness – their portents and their consequences – but instead of a holistic approach, we are given a lens to reflect on how we treat one another, and where narratives, conflict, violence and, eventually, acknowledgement of the absurd human condition, emerge from.
The use of props and moveable set pieces to create different spaces is deft, clever and consistent. Two long clothing rails with wheels are whipped around the stage, sometimes at breakneck speed, with each of the performers taking centre stage across the different scenes, and becoming set dressing themselves in the form of multiple different background characters. One of the joys of this piece is its broader framing as a tapestry of life, a vivarium, in which you could spend just as much time watching the main encounter or looking across the background at the myriad different people making their way through the same absurd conditions.
It is in this sense that Chaotica achieve the fullest sense of their aims – to remind us of the Sisyphean nature of urban sprawl, the strain it places on us, and to question how much attention we should give our frustrations against the backdrop of the futility of human existence. By painting this picture in broad strokes, they reveal much, and ask us to take away as much or as little as we see reflected onto our own lives when the curtain falls.
The BUS is vivid, imaginative, playful theatre-making of the most physical variety, with plenty of big questions burst open in its unravelling.
Recommended Drink: Pair the BUS with a crisp, bubbly Gin and Tonic, the perfect thing to arrive home to after a long commute.
You can catch The BUS one last time at Thessaloniki Fringe, tonight from 7pm at Avlaia Theater (60mins). Tickets are available through the Thessaloniki Fringe Online Box Office. The performance is undertaken in Greek with English surtitles.
Lamesha Ruddock
