Love Gasoline!

Marcel Duchamp was an artist who is famed for creating work in the cubist style and had a huge impact on the conceptual art movement, particularly Dadaism – He’s the one who famously exhibited a porcelain urinal under the title Fountain. It’s fitting that two of his most famous works, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) and Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2 should be used as the subject of a multimedia contemporary dance piece.

Well worth making your way down to see this engaging show that manages to fuse so many influences into a coherent whole.

Using dance, video footage, song and lipsynch, the cast of this playful performance represent the Nude, The Bride and many Bachelors of the artworks. Tolan Lawrence and Tyree Marshall dance and prance around the stage with fantastic energy and, as they flirt and play around the space, B. Ehst enters as the Nude. Ehst is entrancing onstage, lip synching to a narrative monologue that repeats and contradicts whilst strutting around the stage. Questions are raised as to who is who and who is what. Are we watching the art or are we the art?

Love Gasoline! is an interesting piece created and directed by interdisciplinary performer Stacy Dawson Stearns who has crafted a humorous and intimate performance that embraces the erotic physicality of Duchamp’s work whilst portraying the counterpoint of the mechanisation of the human form that appears throughout his work. This is portrayed well in the differing styles of choreography that each of the three performers onstage work within and the use of dialogue and monologue that differentiate the characters.

It sometimes seems that Venue 13 is often overlooked as a Fringe space as it feels a little way out but it’s only a ten-minute walk from the Royal Mile and it’s well worth making your way down to see this engaging show that manages to fuse so many influences into a coherent whole.