Trilogy, BAC

Nic Green’s much-trumpeted Trilogy arrived at BAC this week for a one night only performance as part of the arts centre’s Burst Festival. Recommended by the Guardian and picked out by the organisers as a highlight of the festival, Trilogy’s London airing is a pre-cursor to a summer run in Edinburgh. But is the show worthy of the growing hype surrounding it?

Not exactly.

As the title suggests Trilogy, which Green has spent two years devising, is split into three parts incorporating contemporary dance, film footage and dramatic reconstruction. It features Green, her sidekick Laura Bradshaw and a number of the other performers attempting to give the feminist movement a kick up the backside.

This noble endeavour ultimately fails due to Trilogy's failure to successfully communicate the theories and ideas that drive the show. This can be seen most clearly in the section when 100 ladies flood the stage to dance naked. It is certainly a joyous moment, as is the denoument in which female members of the audience are invited to join the fleshy throng in a sing-a-long of Womens' Instute anthem, Jerusalem.

Yet, while it is good fun there isn’t the feeling that a powerful political event is taking place. The performers’ hero Germaine Greer has herself criticised female artists for constantly using the naked body in perfomance (“The woman who displays her own body as her artwork seems to me to be travelling in the tracks of an outworn tradition that spirals downward and inward to nothingness”) and the justification for being naked on stage to help progress the feminist cause is not made with any great success and as a result the communal act fails to resonate as loudly as it might.

Lack of clarity is not just a problem with the politics of the piece. Perhaps I’m not well versed enough in the medium, but to my mind the the contemporary dance scattered throughout Trilogy did little to illuminate proceedings and technical problems often meant what was being said on stage, through microphones and in the films projected onto a big screen, was lost.

This caused the biggest nuisance in the second section, a recreation of Town Bloody Hall, a film made by DA Pennebaker of the public debate, chaired by Norman Mailer, that took place in New York in 1971, featuring a number of iconic feminists including Greer, Jacqueline Ceballos and Jill Johnston.

Unfortunately the film was virtually inaudible, making it tough to come to any conclusions about it or the staged recreations and dancing that was going on in front of the screen.

Although, it must be said one assertion in this section did come across loud and clear, the message being that Mailer was a misogynist. Unfortunately, due to the poor sound quality the audience didn't have the opportunity to judge for themselves.

This kind of earnest hectoring cropped up throughout Trilogy, most worryingly in its final section when Green and Bradshaw displayed images of women who have been stoned, hung and had their genitals mutilated.

These horrific pictures were, with a gross lack of fairness and faux-casualness, generalised as symptoms of a male dominated society, rather then held up for what they really are - the result of skewed religious law and masculine fascism in specific countries and cultures.

This is an area that deserves to be studied, railed against and explored in great depth, not conflated into the vague “dissatisfactions “ Green feels “as a young woman living in our time.”

Will Gore