Shadow Play

Another visit to Russia, another trip to Moscow just to visit blackskywhite — this time to see “Bertrand’s Toys”.

The trailer, unfortunately, does the performance almost no justice: you know it’ll be something powerful, but nothing can prepare you for what it actually is.

It is very, very different from M means Magritte (of course, preceding it by 2 decades: Bertrand’s Toys were premiered in 1995)— and yet similar in some ways. That it is also breathtakingly virtuosic in execution goes without saying. And familiar concepts like agency, power, reaction, interaction, movement, aliveness, fear, chaos etc. never show up in their everyday familiar form, but always as a vector in a different basis, like a transformed coordinate system.

The main difference is, “M means Magritte” made me acutely feel things I didn’t know could be felt — like the fused sensation of time, space, sound and color. “Bertrand’s Toys” made me feel things I, deep inside, very much knew could be felt, but was hoping I’d never feel them while awake.

In its twisted world, agency really belongs not to the entities on the stage but to some force or Will, by which they are collectively possessed. And the shadow of the Will’s true act against the wall of our habitual perception sometimes looks as if one of the entities has agency, like how the shadow of a hand against a regular wall can resemble a barking dog if you squint right.

The Will is playing them like puppets. Sometimes the puppets are mechanical and uncannily alive, but all you can focus on is their exposed intricate guts with gears and God knows what other devices spinning deliriously, exterior motion from A to B a secondary side effect. Sometimes marionettes, sometimes blow-up dolls, sometimes sock puppets. Or perhaps they are actually alive, but the Will can turn them into sock puppets and wear them on its bony fingers when it so wishes. Occasionally, the bony fingers reach through a physical manifestation of two small spheres.

The Will, however, is your very own mind during a nightmare — and surely, soon enough it turns on itself with an inexhaustible supply of fears. Like in a nightmare, you can’t look away or run away — but it is exposure therapy, sort of. Where normally you would wake up screaming, instead you keep watching wide-eyed and afraid to blink, and use your full mind to process the event of having survived this.

Fear of something that looks alive but, when you touch it, isn’t. Fear of something that looks dead but, when you touch it, isn’t.

Fear of things that are too big or too small or the wrong color or dismembered. Fear of, simply, death.

Of someone you love turning on you. The opposite: Intrusive violent thoughts, fear of acting on them and being unable to stop, watching yourself in dissociated horror.

The biggest fear, though, is of realizing that you’re an alien to your own mind. That you’re a guest here and you’re not welcome.

However, even though fear is a key component of Bertrand’s Toys, it is by no means a horror show: it is playful, endlessly curious, at times even ecstatic or divine — you want to be weightless and float with the inflatable doll; you watch the white clown (one moment, a marble sculpture, another, a liquid), and you want to touch him to find out which he is. You want to grab the haunted spheres and be danced by them.

Even in the scariest moments, after you’ve processed the fear, you look for the possibility; the second thought is “what if?”.