Review - La Marea

A mild summer's night is probably the best time to make my way into Subiaco to watch the street performance of La Marea, a series of tableaux from Buenos Aires that are staged along a cafe strip in shop front windows and on cafe terraces. Over the course of the two hours, it was delightful to wander between the various scenes enjoying the brief window into the mind of everyday people as they go about their business on a busy shopping strip. Played out, for the most part in silence, the inner most thoughts and mental journeys of the characters are surtitled with each act and it is this which makes for a fascinating commentary on the society around us.

However what intrigued me most was the feedback one of the scenes received from a few of the audience members. Worth noting is that the 10 scenes, played out on repeat over the course of the evening, are not of the most uplifting nature: they are filled with dark and depressing concepts ranging from death and murder to torture, incest and desertion. However the scene most people appear to have issues understanding is that called 'Exercises and Piano'. Are the surtitles his inner thoughts, reality, a form of psychosis...? It is as though they understand every other scene because they empathise with it, they have been there themselves, whereas this one scene is just that little further removed from their experiences to the extent that they do not understand it, they cannot understand it.

Personally, I find this scene far easier to understand because I find it far harder to understand how the majority of the audience can empathise with the other scenes when they contain such negative thoughts and imagery. 'Exercises and Piano' is as strange a mental train of thought to have as that of getting a dog and then killing the dog. In a world where we have to much to revel in, so much to enjoy and so much to be thankful for, it is strange that we still dwell so much on the negatives of life.