High Performance Packing Tape

High Performance Packing Tape is proper festival fare.  It is ‘out there’, experimental and risky.  At first it feels dull and abstemious and elicits a sense of weary cynicism but slowly it builds, with a dogged sincerity, and, transporting the audience, it ends on a high evocative note.

Lee Wilson, a man with a superbly fit and strong body, is the solo performer.  The show opens with him lying on the floor blowing up an enormous clear balloon and yes in the true sense of ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ it does explode with an audience-shattering bang.  There are a number of such shocks throughout, along with the most vivid strobe lighting I have ever experienced.

Then Wilson transports cardboard boxes and next tries to balance on a cardboard box construction.  It feels like watching a bespectacled boy challenging him-self and the environment - a kind of boys own contest with self.  It is unsmooth and unaesthetic and not dance – that is to start with.

Wilson creates a tightrope made of packing tape.  That sticky clear packing tape we have probably all used from time to time.  He walks the tightrope and when he falls off, he falls onto a stash of exercise balls that had been blown up with cacophony of sound, sometime earlier on.  The experimenting becomes more complex and intense and the performance’s penultimate moment is Wilson flying naked through the air in a cradle of sticky packing tape.

Industrial noises and the noise of tape being unraveled and used are mixed together as sound track (Phil Downing).  These recorded noises, combined with the heavily mic’d sounds of what is happening in front of the audience, are mixed and merged with finesse.

Unique and unforgettable.

Suzanne Sandow

Photographer: Tristan Still

Credits

Performer - Lee Wilson

Sound Designer – Phil Downing

Designer – Mickie Quick