Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Performers: Lucia Chocarro, Fionn Cox-Davies, Chris Evans, Madeleine Fairminer, Anna Finkel, Amit Lahav, Katie Lusby, Ryen Perkins-Gangnes, Uros Petronijevic, Dan Watson, Kenny Wing Tao Ho.
We are all slaves to one kind of dance or another, even the most freest of souls have to answer to some faceless leader who marks out the time between the tick and the tock with a sense of rhythm, from birth to the time of our death, we are married to life, to a job, to the system, and it is only over time that we lose the affection for the wedding dress and the all trimmings we associate with ignorance and purity and begin to see the faceless ones who call the tune as nothing more than puppets themselves.
The sense that we belong to ourselves and the depriving of one’s owns dreams as the dress of confinement is slipped onto us from birth like corporate chains of nationality, is the overriding thought that theatre company Gecko portray in their fascinating dance/physical theatre production of The Wedding; a production that is a sensation before the eyes and one that cannot be helped to be enjoyed, regardless of the fact that the words are spoken in a range of languages, for this is the point, we are bound by emotions, by feelings and if a movement is strong enough, language is no barrier to bringing the curtain down on the Wizard from Oz like force that controls the day to day and keeps us chained.
Created by Amit Lahav, The Wedding is beautiful, symbolic, natural and possessive, a day of happiness when you are born soon turns to numbers and filling out forms, no longer free, you become engaged and subsumed by the state, a take-over in which you know no better, but in which over time you only feel the resentment begin to build,
To characterise this in any play would be an achievement of spirit, but to do so through the medium of dance and intense choreography, of perfect and dramatic timing, that is the passion in which Gecko succeed and give absolute meaning to.
A force of theatre quite unlike anything else, The Wedding is charming, brutal and expressive, it is the sledgehammer to the thoughts that we have all been looking at life with the wrong sense of loyalty.
Ian D. Hall