"Perfect nonsense goes on in the world" - Mystery Magnet by Miet Warlop 14-16th August 2014@ SOTA St

The first of performances in the 2014 Singapore International Festival of the Arts, Mystery Magnet is a tour de force of surprise, whimsy and unpredictability. Blurring the line between visual art and theatre, Miet Warlop’s string of surreal images forces the audience to draw parallels, links and conclusions without revealing any fixed intention or overarching message.

In the entirely wordless performance, the physical images speak for themselves, conveying a barrage of themes ranging from violence and destruction to abstraction and creation. In one surprisingly barbarous scene, a character with the head of a pom-pom pins another of its kind to a wall, forcibly stapling its fingers, hands, and arms to render it immobile, before violently mutilating it with a power drill and tearing out its guts. The entire act, though seemingly violent, is carried out with a cartoon-like quality, the guts spilled are made of red cloth, and the victim does not appear to feel pain.

This interesting juxtaposition of a viciously harmful act executed surrealistically against a cartoonish backdrop is one of the most prominent aspects of this play. Additionally, the ambiguity of the characters themselves, when merged with a visceral image like the one depicted above, creates an open-ended atmosphere welcoming of interpretation. And Mystery Magnet is chock full of these.

Its minimalist set of five shell-white walls reinforces that the piece is like a painting come to life, and as the play progresses, the space itself is transformed into an explosion of colors, the floor a mixture of shades of blue, green and white, and the set is decorated with the remains of colorful havoc. Most notably, the sound within the piece is largely diegetic. With almost no background music, attention is brought to the music of actions within the piece, such as a power drill being turned on, a paint-soaked pom-pom head banging itself on the white background, or of the steady footsteps of our characters.

In the last moments of the play, the five walls are separated to reveal a choir of papier-mâché heads, humming a symphony of notes in unison as a shark balloon is released into the air, all this occurring in midst of the devastation caused by the characters before. This haunting picture added a religious connotation to the piece, as though there were some form of sanctified holiness or harmony within the seemingly unrelated acts of violence that had been occurred before.

Like most works of abstract art, prolonged attention becomes difficult over time. Twenty minutes into this forty-five minute production, I found myself more interested in being surprised by what could possibly come next than what the images shown could mean. Regardless, Mystery Magnet’s sequence of tableaux and imagery is sure to spark interpretation, shock and surprise with the boldness of its uninhibited direction. Leave logic at the door.

Casidhe

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