Red Head Reflection

I have to be honest I had not heard of this company before the show, but boy did they make an impression on me. Established in 2013, Zoo Co are led by artistic director Florence O’Mahony, and pride themselves on their ‘explosive visual imagination’. Their latest award winning production ‘Sirens’ explores gender expectations through the eyes of 3 mythological beings, the sirens, as they attempt to rewrite history and show the world who they really are. With voices that will lead any man to his death, they are forced into silence, but find a loophole when they meet a deaf man. Where can I start with this piece? It was comical but emotionally impactful, ditsy and slapstick but also maintained an underlying seriousness with its messages that although were not always very subtly given out, were very valuable. The show was a bit of a muddle through in the beginning, but quickly gained sophistication as it moved forwards, and although at first I was not a fan of the basic costum...

Imitating The Dog has worked for over 20 years fusing live performance with beautiful technical feats. In their most recent production, which they performed for the last time at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, the company re-tell Joseph Conrad’s classic novel, ‘Heart of Darkness’, and examine its relevance in 2019, stepping in and out of a cinematographic lens. 5 performers, 3 screens, 2 live cameras and an incredible tech team work effortlessly together to negotiate race, gender, nationalism, colonialism and themes of exploitation and violence, as the character Marlow (Keicha Greenidge) travels up the Congo river, and through a war torn Europe to retrieve Kurtz. Lighting is cleverly used to turn a white backdrop into a green screen, and characters are transported to the inside of a plane, an office, a barren landscape, and a concentration camp on the screens above them. Camera angles and clever movie trickery are cut between to continue the narrative, as we see snippets of a b...