Blinking marvellous

According to Tom Roden, one half of New Art Club’s dynamic duo, ‘audience participation is s**t’. I could not agree more, especially since public involvement has become the trite last resort many performance-makers turn to when short of ideas. Yet, if it is well handled, it can still work marvels, as the New Art Club’s The Visible Men demonstrated last Saturday.

The work, non-stop comedy pyrotechnics and cutting-edge dancing, relies on a disarmingly simple though effective idea: viewers are told to open and close their eyes. In this way, the actions performed on stage by the two artists appear as frames of a movie which develops in a madcap sort of way through many unexpected twists. Indeed, as Pete Shenton, the other half of the duo, points out, you can cheat and keep your eyes open all the time, thus following the frame-by-frame game with your imagination. In the end it does not matter, for it is impossible not to succumb to the engaging rhythm of the performance and its refreshingly comic inventiveness.