Review: UPROOTED, New Diorama

“Brazil is the forest virgin that every pervert wants to get their hands on,” said former Brazilian president and climate denier Jair Bolsonaro, after images of dystopian wildfires in the Amazon circulated the globe in 2019.

The quote also forms the central thesis of Ephemeral Ensemble’s new work of devised theatre, Uprooted. The problem is, once this provocative point has been made, that violence against the planet and against women are one and the same, Uprooted seems unsure of where to go next.

The beginning is promising, an address to the audience that manages not to feel too over-familiar. The production discusses how industrialisation and state control over women’s bodies are two sides of the same coin, how indigenous women’s connections with their land has been disrupted by colonial exploitation, and how that same colonial exploitation of Latin America has been replicated by contemporary governments and corporations.

But by spelling all this out, the show has committed the cardinal sin of wearing its political messages too blatantly, and thus the meat of the show, fails to really say anything that hasn’t already been said. At times, the dance itself also takes this over-literal approach, with performers wielding dollar bills over a woman’s corpse, or wringing an inflatable cow to death.

Once the show hits its stride, though, the imagery is subtler than this, and often arresting. A woman sequesters herself from the world in a giant skip, a glowing red beacon against the decaying jungle around her; another is stripped half-naked and assailed by giant tinfoil pipes. An oversized sheet of gauze is applied particularly creatively, released into the ether then sharply pulled back, an elemental force that nonetheless finds itself under human control.

The production's approach to movement is maximalist, and in its conception both the natural world and those who seek to destroy it, their faces obscured by gas masks, are crushingly unsubtle physical forces. If one sometimes feels overstimulated by the sheer force of the lighting, movement, electronic music and guttural screeching, that’s perhaps part of the point.

Still, too much here feels underdeveloped. Brief snatches of dialogue both in English and Spanish make one wish we could elaborate a little on the characters played by the dancers, and also perhaps explore our cultural setting a little more (we never learn, for example, where in Latin America this story is set). Occasional clever audio conceits – a radio gameshow asking increasingly chilling questions on the state of the planet, for instance – are applied too sparingly.

When we reach the climactic moment, where the threat of ecological disaster at last comes to pass, it lacks impact, overwhelmed by all that we’ve skimmed over for the past hour. There’s an attempt, in the moments before the climax, to humanise some of the characters inhabiting the unnamed Latin American country, as though the show is trying to segue from a dance piece into a conventional work of narrative theatre, but it’s too little, too late.

Ecofeminism is clearly a rich seam for theatre, both visually and because of its clear political urgency. There is a strong idea here, but for Uprooted’s messages to strike beneath the surface, it needs to be more secure in the narrative it’s trying to tell, and to refine its political messaging beyond slogans, however true and urgent those slogans might be.

Uprooted plays at New Diorama until 25 October