monumental at the Edinburgh Playhouse.
Nits. You know how the word nits makes you itch? Here it is again: nits. Tiny lice crawling through your primary school hair waiting for mother with the nit comb to get them out. The plastic teeth go through your wet mop and – pop! – one jumps from your scalp and makes a skittery bid for escape across the tiles. Nits.
monumental (yes, with a small ‘m’) by Holy Body Tattoo makes you itch like nits make you itch. It makes your skin crawl like with the crucifying itches of a morphine drip. Unfortunately for those sitting near me last night, it is almost impossible to watch monumental and not fidget. Fidget and itch. Because suddenly the stray hair that always falls out touches your neck and ARGH! It has to be itched and flicked with an involuntary twitch. Like reading the word ‘nits’, the visuals of monumental make the skin start to prickle, become too sensitive to the air in the auditorium and eventually succumb to randomised itches.
Technically, athletically and musically, monumental is undeniably great. But I very nearly ran from the room at several points. And all because I wanted to ITCH. The nine dancers on their Apple Store plinths rub, rub, rub hands and fingers up and down raw skin. Then the hands wash and wash like Lady Macbeth haunting the night. And when this is finally over, they claw through their hair, tugging it repeatedly like there is something to be washed out. But there is nothing, nothing to be irritating them apart, perhaps, from their polyester M&S office-wear.
Against the soaring, scarring, head-fucking sounds of Godspeed You! Black Emperor they keep returning periodically to this OCD clawing at the skin. Washing and washing with invisible water. They do other stuff too, like march in semi-military style and keep going in incessant loops of repeated movements interrupted only by momentary stumbles and falls. But it’s the fucking itching that makes me have to stop watching and stare for a bit at the ruby red walls of the Edinburgh Playhouse (I decide in one of these respites from the itch-watching that the décor is a bit Holman Hunty).
We’re stuck in a nightmare of identikit corporate workers repeating and repeating the same exhausting, damaging movements. Their soft bodies and the skin they share with animals are being eroded by the circulatory idiocy of the actions they repeat and repeat and repeat.
The thing about monumental, you see, is that it’s a very accurate re-creation of the horrors of humanity trapped in a concrete world that people march on and on and on through until they literally start tearing their own skin off. Which certainly puts it in the category of things that are extremely impressive to watch, but also borderline unbearable.
So they march and march, claw and claw, teeth, hair, skin and nails contrasting with the saturating sweat. One falls into a heap and still keeps up the hair-raking and the hand-rubbing. She’s almost hitting herself, her strokes turning to blunt blows. And I really am going to look away this time, I tell myself. I’m about to close my eyes and shut the image out when”¦a hug. A little embrace that stops the abuse she’s inflicting on her body. The hugger pins her arms to her sides and, for a moment, stops them breaking any more of the skin. And before all the noise starts again there is just this. A tiny moment of stillness. Or, rather, a monumental moment of stillness.
