Chris Cunningham
Vivid Live – Sydney Opera House Theatre, Sydney
Sunday 5th June 2011
What. Just. Happened?
Due to unforseen errors of some sort of technical nature, Chris Cunningham’s afternoon performance is delayed by an hour. To make up for this grave transgression, Opera House management do the unthinkable and offer every ticket-holder free drinks. It’s an unprecedented move but an inspired one; if there’s any show where the audience would need some extra Dutch courage, it’s Cunningham’s. Guiding himself to the blackened stage with a torch (no floor crew for this man), the UK filmmaker fires up the engines and proceeds to amaze, awe, shock and sicken for the better part of the next sixty minutes.
Patrons would obviously approach a live gig by the man who ushered the
nightmarish clip for Aphex Twin’s ‘Come To Daddy’ into the world with a grain of salt, but it’s really hard to know what we're in for until it actually hits. Opening with an amazing clip of the recently deceased Gil Scot-Herron’s ‘NY Is Killing Me’, Cunningham sets up how things will go in his cinema—repeated visuals staggered in time to the beat; images from varying perspectives moving both against and in sync with each other across multiple screens; and an inspired, visual emphasis on diagetic sound.
After lingering on Scot-Herron’s ghostly visage, Cunningham well and truly opens the show with a murderous electronic drum track that is perfectly timed to warp and pull apart a sleeping girl’s face. Despite how much "crazy" YouTube stuff you’ve seen, the sheer power of watching eyes roll, lips curl and head split apart in eerie syncopated perfection really is the next level of terrifying. The following disparate scenes almost all feature some kind of nudity or violence, with one particular scene of sexual partners beating the living shit out of each other offered in rewind, tilt and fast-forward. Supernatural synthesised groans blow through the theatre, while the beats become more tightly wound and schizophrenic in a similar vein to the experimental artists Cunningham has worked with previously. By the time he reaches his full-blown tour de force,
Rubber Johnny, programmed lasers shoot out from his station in precise rhythmic bursts, that match the unravelling madness happening on screen. It’s hard to know where to look and then it’s hard to look at all.
The show is uncomfortable and jarring but also deliciously primal, as if Cunningham's subsumed himself in modern society’s collective head, picked out our darkest urges and synced them to music. Though over-indulgent at times, the relentlessness of Cunningham’s approach is perhaps his point; it’s no so much about the disconnected, cool video tricks as it is the story of disconnection he can tell with them.
I won’t be sleeping tonight.
Jonno Seidler