It’s the ten year anniversary of Plan B, the ambitious brainchild of physics and architecture graduate Aurelien Bory, interdisciplinary artist Phil Soltanoff and Compagne 111. The production returns to the London International Mime Festival as both a piece of history and an ambitious attempt to bring visual dramaturgy to the technical language of circus. Although it certainly shows its age, Plan B does so with intriguing grace, making visible the development of an area of practice whose poetics has certainly changed over the years. With materials as currency, it navigates a mesmerising visual landscape only to drop its tone, overwhelmed by its own allegory, inundated by external narratives.
Plan B is widely considered to be an influential piece of work in its exploration of space and body, its use of materials and its play with sound and projection as ways to delineate and break an image. The title refers to both the geometrical language that the show flirts with, and the more allegorical idea of a plan B as that which you chose to do in case things don’t quite work out as planned- and this certainly has an impact on the shifting narrative of the show. It was, at the time, one of the first major productions to appropriate a range of stage languages, using bodies to delineate space, extracting character out of the circus routines, all with mathematical precision. In line with Bory’s previous work – Sans Objet, one of the highlights of last year’s LIMF – there’s an intrinsic and curious play with the posthuman; at times, Plan B feels coldly calculated, and at others, overwhelmed by affect. At its most essential, Plan B explores the potential of a material not only to constitute narratives, but to mold space, to create an ever changing poetic.
On this mobile wooden surface that moves with deceptive ease, contorting space and changing character with impressive fluidity, four men dive, jump, play and run. Bodies become characters, characters become objects in a familiar game of hide and seek that sees this dominant scenographic element become surface, building, wall, window, door- a recall of textures, sites and encounters that acts as tentative allegory. On an unstable surface, these men in suits search for home, yet their quest is always counterpointed, always displaced.
Part of a trilogy of works dedicated to exploring the relationship between movement and narrative, particularly in light of the dramatic tension that arises with the technicality of circus, Plan B sits alongside IJK and Plus ou moins l’infinit as a many headed monster. It’s packed with a decidedly conflicting visual language that navigates between the surreal and the iconic, the playful and the contemporary. This is often in interplay with sound, providing constructive juxtapositions that give the acrobats enough room to improvise and construct character, only to allow it to drift back into the nomadic narrative. Here, man is a creature of embodied habit, manipulated by and manipulating the environment around him.
Whilst this image is flexed and contorted, the performers loose limbed and elastic, Plan B doesn’t quite stand its ground. In part, this might have something to do with age, the show’s visual language somewhat bitten by time, overriding by sophistication. It’s not that the show’s juggling of material, bodies, volumes and sound isn’t surprising, humorous, cheeky and satisfying, but this search for place, this constant reassessment of its own ontology, becomes diluted. There’s a certain lack of commitment to following the curious logic of this material, constantly trying to be autonomous yet always swallowed by physical architecture, incomplete without it.
Plan B is undeniably dynamic, offering a constantly shifting perspective, manipulating the gaze with cinematic skill. It offers moments that are at times reflective, at others brash, and despite its age and the history it carries with it, it still has something to say. Certainly reviving a show that relies on such particular semiotics, such distinct visual language, carrying with it a baggage of symbols and potential directions of narratives never quite followed, is an event in and of itself. Plan B is, then, an archive too- trapped in the world of its own making but seemingly wild enough to try and come out.
Plan B is part of the London International Mime Festival 2013.