The Dwelling Place - 2** - One4Review
Review Overview
2**
4one4review | On 20, Aug 2016
The Dwelling Place
The big question around this piece is Why? Ostensibly the show, a’swirling surround multimedia performance’ is set to provide a sense of place, to transport us to the abandoned house the Wardrop brothers discovered whilst holidaying in Harris. Within this place they seek to draw out the history and challenges of life in the islands, covering history and touching on the politics surrounding life there today.
The piece is set across two rooms in the basement in Summerhall which has a few chairs, some cases and some random bric a brac installed together with many projectors and screens, voile curtains and five shirts sewn together hung from the ceiling. At the start of the piece we are told to wander at will, that we cannot expect to experience all that is going on but that is not important. So we, the audience start moving from one space and back but the images on display are not that different, our wandering is not sufficiently rewarded and 15 minutes in most of us had found a place by the wall to slump. The pace of the show was a problem – moving from having so many effects that we didn’t know where to look to having periods where nothing was happening. All of this to the overwrought and over enunciated refrains of the narrator.
By the end of the show I felt no deeper connection to the place or its people than I had at the beginning. Honestly I think they could have achieved a better result framing the significant images used and backing it with Lewis’s lovely fiddle playing. But maybe that wouldn’t have made such a compelling funding proposal…..
The Dwelling Place
Summerhall
Daily at 16.00 and 19.00 until August 19th
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