Review: At the end of my hands

Six per­form­ers from inte­grat­ed com­pa­ny Equal Voic­es Arts, dressed sim­ply in grey, black, and white, enact sto­ries explor­ing Deaf cul­ture for Deaf and hear­ing audi­ences. Sto­ries such as flir­ta­tions at the swim­ming pool and get­ting bust­ed for speed­ing (hilar­i­ous!) are con­trast­ed with more touch­ing sto­ries.

The per­form­ers Kylie Willis, Alex Lodge, Mihai­lo Lad­je­vac, Shaun Fahey, Kel­ly Quirke and Joanne Klaver have dif­fer­ing lev­els of train­ing and expe­ri­ence how­ev­er they all have a high lev­el of pre­ci­sion in mime and phys­i­cal sto­ry­telling. The set­up for each sto­ry is skil­ful­ly act­ed. Usu­al­ly there is a main char­ac­ter in the sto­ry who is then sup­port­ed by oth­er char­ac­ters.  Some­times I want­ed the inci­den­tal char­ac­ters to dial their per­for­mance back a bit so the main sto­ry could stay in the spot­light.  (In the Q&A the direc­tor Lau­ra Haugh­ey con­fess­es that some­times the actors start impro­vis­ing and she’s nev­er quite sure where they’re going to end up.) Musi­cian Andy Dug­gan is on stage. His music fol­lows the action on stage which affects the audi­ence, which in turn affects the actors – even if they can’t hear what he’s play­ing.

I love a bilin­gual the­atre piece. Equal Voic­es Arts set out to “pur­pose­ful­ly explore the fusion of NZSL, mime, speech and phys­i­cal sto­ry­telling”. I look for­ward to the com­pa­ny devel­op­ing and grow­ing more shows like this fun­ny & mov­ing work.

Note: A for­mal­ly NZSL inter­pret­ed Q&A between the cre­ators of the piece and the audi­ence is held after every show.

 

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