Review: 100 Shades of Being is mesmerising
In the early days of the first lockdown, when I was in the 'cocooning' group, I measured my walks around the house by transferring dominos between pockets each time I completed a circuit, writes Brian Byrne. When a half-set had been transferred, I had completed four kilometres.
But that's about all of the strangeness I remember. Like I'm sure it is with most people, the days, weeks and months have all become a blur. One of mostly sameness.
The latest performance from Luna Collective, 100 Shades of Being, brings us all slam back into the first lockdown experiences. All the same, but all different too. It is 58 minutes of up close and personal with seven different people in lockdown. Which means it's intense. Very. With shades of intensity that, among other things, reflect brilliantly the multi-ethnic cast in today's different Irish spaces and right across the age demographic.
100 Shades of Being is scripted. Written from life as it has been in lockdown. But it's not only about lockdown. In the many segments, each short enough to not encumber our currently truncated attention spans, we learn in video diary flashes about the characters themselves, about others in their circle. About their feelings, fears, beliefs and prejudices, and how these can change in one way or another through the experience. We are also reminded that there's an outside world, and that our characters do sometimes think outside their lockdown. Do empathise, commiserate, get angry about. Become afraid of.
This is a very ambitious production. A very tricky one, fraught with potential failure. Yet, for all those reasons, it was the perfect one to do in the circumstances. The actors couldn't meet and perform together, on a stage or a set or a street. So each segment, each person's snatch of thought, is discrete. Individually performed without the benefit of face to face team rehearsal. That's a hard thing to pull off, but if nothing else about this pandemic, we have learned how much we can adapt, and create new ways of doing things. Not necessarily better ways, but appropriate ones for the circumstances.
The direction of 100 Shades of Being is meticulous. The passing of time in the months from March to November carefully imaged. By appropriate changes of clothes. By references to outside events. In all the clips, the characters speak to us directly, think to us out loud. Some do it throughout from the same room, but in different positions or with their possessions shifted. Others move from room to room. So there's a constant shifting of background, unlike in classic documentary where full interviews tend to be in the same place and therefore also the extracts.
It's nice too, when we have gotten so used to the often inferior videography through Zoom and Skype and Facebook, that the camerawork here is high quality. Varied in lighting to simulate household differences, but always in high resolution. Watching a screen for 58 minutes without mentally bunking off for even a few moments is not an easy undertaking. But this production is not one you can look away from once you are caught in the vortex of its intensity.
Luna Collective is a young performance art group. But its portfolio is growing fast, as is the members' confidence in pushing beyond themselves. I don't know the routes to competition in performing arts these days. But somewhere there is a big international prize waiting for 100 Shades of Being. If they can get this production before the eyes of a judging panel, they'll mesmerise them.
[VIRTUAL STANDING OVATION]
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