While people often have mixed feelings about mime, few have probably considered stop-motion animation for a live audience as the provenance of Marcel Marceau.
I had the pleasure of watching Antechamber from French performance duo Stereoptik as part of London Mime festival at The Barbican and was both charmed and confused.
Confronted by a large film screen, bookended by two drawing-boards with surrounding percussive and art gubbins, we are, in effect, offered a blank canvas. What unfolds is a live, real-time animation in which the two artists’ positioning and drawing of lovers in a landscape is captured on cameras and projected.
The effect is an irresistibly hypnotic sequence of charcoal and pen strokes, interlaced with tactile backgrounds of paper, plastic and materials which, on first glance, appear to be light in meaning and on second and third form seasonal landscapes across continents.
For at least 15 minutes, we are absorbed in the technical making of a love story, as a heteronormative couple are moved in and out of the revolving, animated contexts. Stereoptik (Romain Bermond and Jean-Baptiste Maillet) tend to the filmed paper stages like a cross between scientists and master craftsman. The rehearsal process must have been a painstaking feat of patience.
At this point, the plot is smudgy—we are aware that our two figures first encountered each other as students living across the street from each other in Paris’s ‘antechambers’. Our hero, sitting at a desk, in a room that initially appears to be a red hot city, waves to a feminine figure, who transforms into a diaphanous mermaid, moving through the rainforest backgrounds of our hero’s student textbook.
In the second part of the presentation, we are shown Antechamber the Film. The textures and constantly changing perceptions of depth in this animation are fully realised as the antechamber and worlds of the student’s imagination are made more cohesive. While he is presented as a figure made of text and academic references, our heroine motions at him to join a party she is hosting in the opposite building. The fluent, draftsman-like courtship of landscapes and continents ensues.
While this piece is ointment to sore eyes and a technical triumph, we are confusingly offered a love story with no conflict or challenge to its smooth unfolding. What remain are lovely impressions of a happy ever after that fill the screen from beginning to end.