Same Same

Dame de Pic/Cie Karine Ponties & Temporary Collective (Belgium and Czech Republic)
Esplanade Theatre Studio
Jan 20, 8pm

Two women in office blazers, skirts and heels, engaging in actions at times mundane, at times ridiculous. Same Same presented a quirky look at the work culture of banality and burnout.

When one entered the theatre, a performer, Petra Tejnorova, was already there, jiving in a corner of the stage.

Apart from her red-wired earphones and brown sports shoes, the stage colours were otherwise black and white. There were straight lines of black tape running across the white floor, giving a sense of industrial monotony.

As audience members settled down, Tejnorova’s arm and body movements gradually expanded, transitioning to cover more stage space. She was soon joined by her co-performer Tereza Ondrova.

The two women’s relationship was a curious mix of antagonism and cooperation.

In their first scene together, they positioned themselves behind a staircase-shaped platform, with only their upper bodies visible.

Eventually, Ondrova started a series of finger movements drumming on the platform surface, with Tejnorova attempting to copy them as quickly as possible. Who they were, why they were there, what they were doing – all these were questions left for audience members to surmise for themselves.

This pattern continued in various iterations throughout the hour-long performance.

At one point, the two women engaged in a competition of sorts, walking in heels around the stage while carrying a wooden board shaped like a briefcase.

At another, Tejnorova supported Ondrova as the latter, body seemingly limp from exhaustion, fell and landed in various contortions.

Their movements created images at once ridiculous and humorous, for example, Tejnorova banging her head against a pile of thin chair pads. She later used them as knee guards while throwing herself down the staircase, to gasps from the audience.

Things degenerated into greater chaos as the performance wore on, with props increasingly strewn around the stage and the women’s office wear becoming dishevelled. The evident growing physical exhaustion of the performers perhaps mirrored the mental state of workers in today’s office culture.

Scene changes were indicated by a sudden, uncomfortably loud buzzer, sometimes accompanied by a flashing green fluorescent light hung upstage centre. At this cue, the performers would abruptly stop whatever they were doing and move on to the next scene. It was not unlike life throwing rude shocks along the way, and people having no choice but to move on.

As the lights went down, the audience was left with a final image of the two women stacked on top of each other, Tejnorova making cycling movements as if they were cartoonish circus performers.

No answers were provided, but it was an image with which to contemplate the absurdity of people’s lives.