Review: COUNTERPOINT OF CHAOS, His Majesty's Theatre
Caruso jumps on the bandwagon of a hot-button issue of Artificial Intelligence
Multi-tasking seems to come easy to the American dancer, choreographer, pedagogue and artistic director Maria Caruso. Based in Pittsburgh, where she founded the company Bodiography Contemporary Ballet a quarter-century ago, Caruso also creates and teaches dance around the world. (Next stop: Brazil.) Some of this work she has made for herself.
Her latest dance-theatre solo received its world premiere in London's West End for one night only on the same stage where The Phantom of the Opera has been playing for four decades. This is the third time Caruso has presented a show in the Big Smoke, and specifically in a West End venue. She seems to have set a pattern now, bringing a new solo every other year.
Her previous productions - Metamorphosis in 2022, Incarnation in 2024 - were both highly autobiographical. Counterpoint of Chaos appears to have broken that formula. Here Caruso jumps on the bandwagon of a hot-button issue: Artificial Intelligence and the interface between technology and human beings. Apart from being the lone performer, Caruso also takes credit for the show's concept, choreography and costuming.
Its premise is simple, even slim, yet workable. Caruso arrives as a bespectacled, young middle-aged secretary-type in patterned skirt, buttoned-up white blouse and thin green sweater. She fusses efficiently around a desk-like table stage right by pushing papers, shifting round a load of filing boxes and occasionally picking up and mouthing silently into an old-fashioned landline phone. Caruso establishes a presence as this character who is busy and at times more than a touch beleaguered.
And then she spots a stray box, flatter and far from the norm. Curiosity aroused, she opens it and removes (in a stylised, lightly theatrical manner) an iPhone and laptop. We don't need to know how these devices got there. All we know is that this dutiful, somewhat tired woman now has the chance to enter the world of modern communications.
The remainder of the performance is an enactment of seduction and pleasure, followed by an eventual breakdown and recovery. Voiceovers between Caruso's office worker and the machine she has activated (which is, not coincidentally, voiced by Caruso's actual husband, a bio-tech scientist billed in the hand-out as Dr A.J. Bean) help convey narrative and character development. A good example is when Caruso's onstage alter ego is heard to say 'Teach me' and her AI counterpart responds, 'I can do it for you.'
The secretary is pleased with how things are going, her body language becoming leggier and more expansively brisk and breezy. The disembodied AI even encourages a style upgrade, the cue for a costume change into a red suit with a to-the-pelvis slit up the side. So far so smooth and sexy.
But then, perhaps inevitably in this somewhat banal yet fable-like performance, things start to gradually go awry. The show's basic lighting becomes a menacing red wash, indicating that our protagonist has relinquished too much control to the machine. As frustration mounts we hear her beg, 'Tell me what to say, tell me what to do.'
Caruso's corresponding movement waxes jagged and juddering, sometimes wide in stance and at others inverted or in distorted curves. Her arms do mad windmill rotations. She runs a hand down her leg, falls to her knees, rises again to tear off jacket and blouse. Hairpins are plucked out and she rips at her tights, using the strands like flayed skin, puppet strings and even for a short-lived bit of self-strangulation. It's all a kind of anti-striptease, a desperate and de-sexing liberation leading to a well-earned collapse.
Fuelled by Ryan Onestak's percolating sound-score, which features typewriter-like clacking, guitar twang, disco thumps and plenty of electric keyboard ripples, Caruso throws herself into motion. The choreography at its height is showbiz balletic and, as such, accessible without being distinguished. But it is fit for purpose.
And what is the Caruso's underlying purpose? Questioning, I would say, and cautionary, but also sprung from a desire to signpost the value of finding of some accord with technology's ongoing, unstoppable advances. After all, the show ends with the secretary recovered and relaxed in casual garb. Balance, it seems, has been restored. There's also more than a hint of harmony between her and her AI 'helper'.
Is this convincing as dance-drama? Not entirely. But it does make you think, even if only superficially, about the world we live in. It is engaging entertainment? Reasonably. Caruso is a dedicated professional. She has performance energy, as well as the necessary offstage drive (and, presumably, funds) to keep showcasing herself in London.
There is, by the by, a director listed in the programme as Ginny Anna-Inverness. Curiously, Ginny is also the name Caruso dropped during a self-led, post-show Q&A as the moniker she has given her own AI organising identity. And what are we to make of that?
Counterpoint of Chaos was at His Majesty's Theatre on 31 May
Photo Credits: Matt Kovalcik
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