Performed by: Ninon Noiret
Venue: Central at Assembly Roxy
Time: 2.30pm
Running time: 1 hour
Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5)
Reviewed by: Jo Sansom
‘When you tell yourself that the sea is calm but you can already feel the pull of the current.’
A story of disease, vulnerability, death and rebirth. Ninon Noiret tells her story of survival and examines her relationship with her own physicality in this show that fuses dance, acrobatics and puppetry. This may be the most touching performance I’ve witnessed this year at the Fringe!
This show was the embodiment of some of my worst fears. It made me examine my own fragility and had me quietly weeping as I left the theatre.
Within the beautiful Central area of the Assembly Roxy, the converted church works as a perfectly dramatic setting for Ninon and her Chinese pole. The audience are welcomed into the venue to the sounds of the sea, and we see on stage the pole, a crab net and three covered puppets under a sheet.
As one body moves and twitches to life, it feels like the lone performer has just been washed up on the shore of a lost island.
The show is an autobiographical tale about Ninon’s cancer diagnosis. First, it is a suspected tumour, but it is later diagnosed as blood cancer. The protagonist talks us through her stages of treatment, recovery and eventual remission.
Ninon uses spoken-word sections to tell us about the cancer and the out-of-body experience when given the news about her tumour. She explains that in French, tumour translates to ‘tu-mort’, e.g. ‘you-die’.
She then uses puppets to embody the separate parts of her own consciousness as she processes the ramifications of the news. The puppetry works effectively to highlight the fragility of the human body and provide a visual signifier for the feelings around disease and loss or change in identity.
The crab is used as a metaphor for the cancer that haunts Ninon, and as she sinks further into the disease, she is at times the crab itself as it hides under her skin and she performs beautiful, lyrical dance routines. At other times, she is taunted and running from the crab, trying desperately to escape the diagnosis that could claim her leg, her livelihood and her dreamt-for future.
When Ninon receives the news that she has been misdiagnosed, she is shocked awake to the life she may never see: the adventures she wants to have, the people she hopes to meet, the sex, the food, the parties. In a frantic realisation of the loss of possibilities, through the threat of death, she is finally awake to her own aliveness.
Ninon is such a hypnotic performer, whether she is high up, upside down on the Chinese pole, artfully dancing around the stage, using life-sized puppets or telling us her story.
The show moves from playfulness (we get regular renditions of Under the Sea… the most iconic song performed by a crab ever!) to heartbreaking monologue, captivating dance and acrobatic work with an exceptional lightness of touch.
Music is used as the heartbeat of the piece, at times light and playful and at others a dark, thunderous beat that makes the performer’s fear palpable.
Ninon performs captivating sections on the Chinese pole which are stunning to watch and radiate physical strength and skill.
As Ninon meets us in the latter sections of the show, in remission, she struggles to find her place. The disease had become her, so who is she now? Looking back towards the sea where she survived the storm, but knowing that the depths could still surge up to claim her.
She laments that part of her is missing. She is fragmented and cannot find the version of herself from before the diagnosis, the version that didn’t know pain and suffering and fear; that death could live within you.
As she learns to live with what cancer has left behind, she accepts that if what happened wasn’t a death, then it must have been a rebirth.
A hopeful and whimsical end to a devastatingly beautiful piece of theatre. I would see this again in a heartbeat, as I think I left a piece of my heart in the theatre with Ninon.
