Machine Yearning

https://lexicallunacy.wordpress.com/2023/08/17/review-machine-yearning-by-machine-yearning/

You had me at “robot sex ballet”.

Delightfully bonkers. Barely understood a moment of it. Loved it. There’s robots, there’s sex, there’s ballet. I mean, it delivered on the promise the girl pitching it outside gave to me.

I understand this to be a devised piece that they’re continuously workshopping as it goes along, changing slightly with successive iterations. This helps in giving it a certain chaotic edge that aids with the overall experimental air (appropriate for a show about experiments). There’s a painful, sometimes agonising beauty to this piece, and a compelling undercurrent of discomfort. The movement of it is mesmerising, with the uneasy fluidity of a lava lamp, and it’s hard not to be transfixed by it.

These performers all have a sharp confidence on stage and can use movement and expression to great emotional effect. One performer in particular, during the piece’s denouement, fixed another with an incredibly powerful stare that I afterwards described as having “a billion years of time with the birth and death of galaxies inside it”. Some actors can just do that sort of thing, and I have no idea how.

If you wish to be utterly confused but in a very artful way, then pop along and see this show. Sometimes good art goes a little over your head but you can still tell it’s good art, and you can still appreciate how powerful, emotive, and well-devised that art is.