KLIP

Beware the press blurb: KLIP may be called 'live collage' but there's not a gluestick in sight.

KLIP is not just experimental theatre, it is award-winning, Dadaesque, Danish EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE.

Celebrated early 20th century German artist Kurt Schwitters made collages out of found fragments. By enacting absurd stories and patterns found in parlour games like Consequences, theatre company Livingstones Kabinet aims to do in live theatre what Schwitters did in collage. Chaos is ordered and then reordered and broken apart. What happens is something like this:

Part 1

Gnomic aphorisms, e.g. "Just because a mother forgets the words of a lullaby and sings lalalala, it does not mean the baby will not get to sleep."

Emotive keyboard music, Scot with nice voice sings.

Danish Depardieu lookalike strips, revealing pink g-string. He talks about juicers.

Pig leg is raised.

Pig leg is lowered

Short girl starts to jerk. She jerks faster. Rest of company joins in.

Part 2

Same as above, just different people do it.

For all KLIP begins with a statement that any 'spiritual or intellectual insight' derived from the piece is 'unintentional', there is an artistic agenda—to demonstrate the fragility of any imposition of sense or order on our incoherent world of chaos. However, without reading the production notes in advance, the audience could well fail to appreciate that any sort of order has been imposed let alone subsequently re/disordered.

KLIP is too classily executed to be lightly dismissed, but it is experimentalism no better in experience than it is in explanation.