At Eden Eden, Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski present a feature-length film adaptation of their play, Sorcerer. The film is accompanied by a motorised bed that faintly writhes.
Sorcerer is a film about the pleasures of being with others and of being alone. Three friends hang out and share a long and unremarkable conversation about getting dressed, headaches, ticks, compression fantasies, surgery, and their aspirations, among other things. When two of the friends go home for the night, the remaining one watches TV, dances, and takes apart their face in front of a giant mirror.
The characters find contentment in each other’s company, conversing in the placid, eerie rhythms of a sit- com in which conflict never arises. Unease is mechanically exported to the set and to the camera: the stage is demarcated by unnecessarily hot, working radiators; the sound is relentlessly hissy, the result of dozens of microphones hidden in the furniture and under the floor; and many of the shots are claustrophobically tight, cutting off attention to the expansive space of the theatre and directing it toward insular, inscrutably private gestures.
The dialogue for Sorcerer was built from transcriptions of Ed and Steven hanging out together with their friends. Sorcerer’s is a counterintuitive kind of realism, lying somewhere between the procedural and the miraculous. Magnifying a face or amplifying a couch brings the face or the couch into wild proximity via technological process. Gadgets (radiators, lighting, microphones, a mechanical squirming bed, etc.) are a way to access otherwise unavailable compassion. Or to facilitate voyeurism. Choreography is used to heighten or defamiliarise the banal in the bodies of the actors, in the same way as amplifying the couch pulls it nearer and pushes it further away at the same time. There’s the intractability of reality — both its resistance to clear meaning and its hyperbolic closeness. There’s levitation.
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