20/01/2020 Project O's Voodoo

9pm, Lilian Baylis Studio, London. Myself and four other women are ushered into a corridor and given warnings by a strangely dressed theatre attendant in case any of us have asthma or epilepsy. We are then lead through some double doors and down a slope into a dark and silent room. They’re letting us in in groups of five and we join the rest of the crowd who are poised on wooden blocks in front of a screen, waiting, expectant. Projected onto the screen are passing dates and events such as the invention of the contraceptive pill or the start of the Russian Revolution. Information passes across the screen about significant events in the lives of Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small, the founders of project O. I realise that Project O is not just about aesthetic performance, but about drawing attention to important events that demonstrate instances when certain groups have been marginalised or taunted with freedom without their human right actually having been permitted. Already the performance feels immersive. 

Once everyone is settled, two women who have been sat on bean bags behind us the whole time rise and begin to move, almost brokenly, through the rows towards the screen at the front. They snake and lurch across the floor until they reach the projection, at which point they take a hammer each and start to strike the screen. When they’ve finished there is a gaping hole so that the text is no longer visible and a cloud of dust surrounds the focal point of the room. If you have asthma they do give out masks. It seems significant that there are limitations to the extent to which the two women can actually cause destruction, perhaps this is an intended metaphor for the restrictions imposed on us through our identities merely as existing people. 

The two dancers cocoon themselves in cotton bags and are dragged once again into the audience. A sense of confusion can already be felt settling uncomfortably over the audience, exacerbated a few seconds later by a voice over a speaker which instructs that we remove our shoes and place them at the side of the room. The assistants then proceed to rearrange the benches so that an elongated space becomes available in the centre of the room. It’s interesting to now be able to see not only the performers as they slowly remove themselves from their encasements but to see the reactions of the other members of the audience. The idea behind the whole performance that it depicts ‘an attempt to never be caught or trapped, to visit and leave behind former selves, to move and transform’ rings particularly true. 

In the true spirit of an interactive performance, the voice over the speaker once again addresses us, urging us to join the performers in lying down. It feels strange and slightly uncomfortable to be lying, shoeless, on the floor of a dark room with hypnotic music playing but some people seem completely immersed. Soon, the dancers rise and begin once again to dance jerkily round the room. Eventually the whole experience seems to transform into some sort of electrifying, empowering rave and everyone around me is dancing and jolting around as if they have become part of the music. As a crowd we are simultaneously individual beings and also a mass complex release of energy. Contrary to popular belief, ‘Voodoo’ actually has very little to do with so-called ‘voodoo dolls’ and actually originates as a sensationalised pop-culture caricature of Voudon, an Afro-Caribbean religion, no doubt this is the best way to encapsulate what the two performers embody amidst the thronged vitality of the room. 

The performance doesn’t really end but rather in the midst of all the dancing the performers seem to have disappeared and the audience filters out slowly, all I’m sure with a sense similar to the one I left with, of having escaped a trap they didn’t really realise they were ever in.