Sean Burnett Dugdale-Martin
House of Sand is back with Eliza Sanders’ new solo show, directed by Charley Allanah. Part dance, part theatre, part lecture, part improv, Manage Your Expectations aims to take the idea of “trigger warning” to its absurdist extreme using humour to ask the question how ‘informed’ can we really be and asking “how much do we really want to know?”
We enter into Te Auaha’s Tapere Iti stage for the 8pm show. Upstage, there is a camera on a tripod aimed at the audience. Just behind it is a screen that will be projected upon, and under the screen and tripod are many little toy hands, the kind you can stick your finger in the wrist of, standing upright, almost waving at the audience. The only other thing on the stage is a pair of little toy feet pointing towards upstage, near where you walk in. They’re similar to the hands where you can put your finger in the ankle.
The first clip (editors are Daniel Nodder, Alec Katsourakis, Jack Sullivan) plays against the screen upstage. It’s a short video of a child on a chair with their family behind them. The family waits in two lines facing each other, arms out and interlocked, waiting to catch the child when they fall backwards. A trust fall. The child bends their legs and jumps forwards instead of backwards. The family screams and the video ends abruptly. This is the scene set as Sanders makes her entrance. This clip sets a thematic tone for Manage Your Expectations in terms of assumed knowledge and assumed correct understanding.
A key facet to informed consent is the communication of what you are consenting to. Assuming informed consent can be explained and then agreed upon by every person is almost assuming that every person is a clear communicator who can accurately depict an event needing informed consent for, and also that people can interpret each other correctly. The communication element of trigger warning and being informed is where I believe the first part of two part performance is based on.
Sanders has crafted a lengthy monologue explaining, re-explaining and tangentially explaining tangents of what is going on in the space. It’s a fun piece of literary gymnastics that Sanders takes us through with style, winning us over early with her earnest sense of play and fun. In this section, I catch myself zoning out every now and then, since there is a lot of talking, but I feel like this was almost intentional, as during this first part Sanders also plays clips and videos during some of her explanations, almost deliberately distracting us. To me, this shifts the focus from the struggle of the communicator to the struggle of the listener, trying to interpret all the information correctly in a busy and distracting world.
Sanders casts the retrospective net wide with this new, realistically pessimistic perception on all consent and informed knowledge, through history. All of your ancestors. We are the best communicators we have ever been as a species and we are still getting it kinda wrong on a daily basis, what does that say about the thousands that have come before us? A shuddering thought that takes us into the second section of the performance, the more physical and visceral part.
The physicality in this latter half reminds me a lot of The Body Keeps The Score, which is a book about the bodies transformation of trauma. Sanders provides visceral physicalities which evoke, for me, a sense of the body and its carried ancestry that can only be explained physically. The body has ethereal clarity in its movements and proves the point that trigger warnings, and other examples of warning or consent, are impossibilities. Good intentions, hopefully, in a context where there is no verbal equivalent for any physical thing.
For a chunk of this section the lights are dim and Sanders is nude. She molds clay in a cleverly timed live feed video to emulate the creation of a single human. The sound (Jazmine Mary), lighting (Deb McGuire, AV associate Piper May Kilmister-Smith) and costume (or lack of) design gives this moment an ancient, primordial feeling. It is one of the many resounding moments this show has had me thinking about for days to come.
Beyond the second segment, there is a secret third. This part does not have a conclusion, but is the reality of exploring life in two parts, and how life does simply keep going. Sanders has packed this piece with thought and I enjoy it all greatly. My only piece of feedback on the show as whole would be to list it at 70 minutes instead of 60, since that is what it clocked in at when I watched it.
If luck would have it and this review is out before their final showing Saturday 2nd March then I encourage you to drop everything and watch it! Regardless, more info here.