Natura Morte

When a piece makes explicit reference to its own slipperiness even before it has properly begun, you’re either in for something quite special, or something that likes to think it is.

"Don’t try to understand," a reassuring female voice advises us, "just enjoy the images…" And we need such succor, having just been herded into a smoky room constructed from doors, some bearing names such as "Lazy Palm", "Misty Tornado" and "Ice Rib" across their lintels.

If that wasn’t enough, at one end of the space there’s a Mephisto-like figure clanging various percussive instruments while barking inaudible commands to the other end of the room, where a man sits amid a bank of flickering screens, his beard, dark hat and vaudevillian attire being part Orthodox Jew, part circus ringmaster.

This is Natura Morte, the biggest performance piece the Arches has produced and one inspired by the rumbling, part-subterranean building itself.

A collaboration between Dresden-based dance company Derevo, St Petersburg theatre mavericks Akhe and the Arches’ own physical theatre project Conflux, it’s as puzzling as it’s powerful. The voice, we learn, is that of the Weatherman, a millionaire artist who has created eight rooms, each apparently concerned with one of eight pieces of still life – or natura morte: a bottle, a glass, an apple, a mirror, a book, a knife, a rose and a skull.

Now we must each choose which of the doors to go through and which performances we will subsequently see. Out of the eight parallel 20-minute pieces, we will each only see three, and with every performance changing slightly, it’s likely that each audience member’s experience will be entirely different.

It’s tempting to read ideas of free will, responsibility and unique life paths into such a set-up, just as it is to ally the apple with knowledge or temptation, the skull with death, the hastily flicked and torn pages of a book with ephemerality (and a heck of a lot of books meet their end here) and so on, but to labour such points would be to sap the piece’s sensual and emotional power – qualities that oozed from the first performance I saw, a largely solo piece from Devero founder Anton Adasinskiy, who also directs.

Mutating from cowering crone to robotic, terrifying dictator to mournful widow, he can devastate with a glance and break a heart with a tendon’s twitch.

Though not as powerful, the subsequent segments are at once disconcerting, playful, humorous and brimming with soul. At some point in each piece there is the clacking of the ringmaster’s boots, come to sabotage the endeavours of the performers like some sacred – or profane – arch trickster.

The attempt to tie everything up in a moralising ensemble finale (life is short, so follow your dreams) feels somehow superfluous. Let’s not try to understand; let’s simply enjoy the ride; Natura Morte is special enough.