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Review: Mamoru Iriguchi’s Projector/Conjector

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Review: Mamoru Iriguchi’s Projector/Conjector

It’s difficult enough to know how to respond to a play that is billed as a love affair between a projector and a flatscreen monitor. When you add in choreographed dance, interactive images and typography, a set dressing of low resolution space invaders and cardboard swords, not to mention Tchaikovksy’s Swan Lake, you start to feel you can only be dealing with the creation of either a superbly visionary or slightly warped intellect.

Projector/Conjector, as can by now probably be appreciated, is a spectacularly odd performance. Its creator, Mamoru Iriguchi, seems to have an endearing fascination with artificial worlds, happily pulling together arcade games and reflexive performance, ballet with graphic cygnet abortion. At points it feels like one is watching the lighter side of the technophilia from Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan dramatised for the Ceefax generation, particularly during the moment his sweet characters fornicate to a backdrop of bitmap art. It’s definitely the product of a joyously exuberant mind.

Perhaps the most endearing thing about Projector/Conjector however is how light and playful it feels. Wandering skilfully through his rather obtuse imagination, Iriguchi and his co-star traipse around the stage with such ease that you can almost forget the fact that the heavy equipment balanced precariously on top of their skulls must be exceedingly uncomfortable. In addition, despite its rather graphic portrayal or violent and sexual themes, the whole performance feels like such innocent good fun; at no point does the relationship between these two pieces of equipment seem anything but tender. The performance never takes itself too seriously, instead just enjoying the delightful tongue-in-cheek nature of its content. And frankly this makes it an absolute joy to watch.

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