NO EXIT (2007)

A choreographic work by Denise Fujiwara

Denise Fujiwara’s No Exit unfolds in a place beyond time as three characters realize the misery of the hell their lives have entered. “Hell is other people,” said Jean-Paul Sartre, author of the play from which Fujiwara’s work takes its name and inspiration. In Fujiwara’s vision, hell is a sitting room with three chairs, a table with a knife on it, and no exit.

One by one the performers appear. Their hard shoes and slightly old-fashioned clothes, in a palette of brown, beige and white, are colourless and ordinary. Miko Sobriera, whose character is vampirish, rakish, enters first. An aura of dislocation emanates from him and a sense of disrupted inner rhythm erupts in his facial ticks and twitches. He reaches for the knife. We wonder…what is the story? why has he come to this place? Sasha Ivanochko, the first woman to enter, looks at the man with fire in her eyes, fixing him with a blazing, hateful gaze.

Each character seems locked in a way of being and moving. As the work unfolds, recurring pain shrinks and distorts Ivanochko’s body, twisting her face into a grimace. Hope Terry’s character is provocative and prowling and offers pathetic hints of her death; she holds out her wrists, coughs and subsides, and skitters about – a woman without a centre. Sobriera blinks and convulses, poses grotesquely, or is thrown backward, racked with violent spasms. These tormented characters see a dimension beyond their room, but are unable to it; repeatedly they peer into the space beyond. The rules of gravity, space and sound seem altered in this limbo. At one point Terry falls across Sobriera’s back, and dangles as if weightless, while he does not appear to notice her. The characters “speak” but no one can hear them… soundless screams are expressed through their bodies.

Penetrating one another’s space, they attempt to touch, but cannot. Their torture is in not being able to act out their own inner drives – Terry’s promiscuous woman is rejected by the man; Ivanochko’s advances are rejected by Terry; Sobriera’s character is predatory but cannot make contact. He torments Ivanochko and slides evasively away from Terry.

Episodes of rage and despair cut through the work. Zombie-like, the performers pull on one another’s energies, viciously suppress and push one another down. Attractions that cannot lead to touching, and hatred that has no conclusion, swirl among them. At separate points in No Exit each of the performers picks up the knife from the table. When Terry’s character attacks her, Ivanochko laughs a ghastly laugh – with no material body, the blows have no effect. But the violence aimed at her does and she writhes through a gruesome psychic attack, a hideous joke.

A rhythmic clunking, a woman’s voice, a call, laughter, a cry, all echo and recur with disturbing monotony inside this haunted place. The work’s conclusion makes clear the infinity of the characters’ bleak horror.

Carol Anderson

_{Image: Hope Terry, Miko Sobriera and Sasha Ivanochko by John Lauener}