Frankie Thompson and Liv Ello: Body Show
Ed Fringe 2023
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Ed Fringe 2023 -
Frankie Thompson and Liv Ello have created something brilliant. Body Show, much like the Adam Curtis documentaries it is being compared to, is a show that you’d have to go through frame by frame to extract all the meaning from (I think I’d also go through it frame by frame just to see Thompson’s elastic facial expressions in 4K detail). There are sections that feel like real high-level performance art, that PhD students should write essays on instead of reviews, and then there are sections that are gut-bustlingly funny, tender, and joyous. AND THEN there are sections that are desperately sad, hopeless, oppressive and (purposefully) muddled and messy. Altogether this is sure to be one of the most innovative and provoking shows at the fringe this year.
The show is about our bodies, how we fit in them, what they should be like, what boxes they go in, how we draw lines around and through them, how they react to the world we’ve made for ourselves. a world in which the mediatisation and capitalistic commodification of literally everything has (irreparably?) damaged our relationships with our bodies and our world. That might sound a bit like a conversation you have drunk at 3am (probably with me sorry), but Thompson and Ello navigate it with such energy, in an entirely non-pretentious and overwhelmingly convincing way that it’s arguments are impossible to ignore.
As you enter Thompson (in pink-ish wedding dress) and Ello (in wedding suit) stand behind some kind of papier-mâché (I presume) cake, or is it the mushroom cloud from an atomic blast? Much like the rest of the show, this is open to interpretation. Open to interpretation in the way that all good art is, but, considering the themes of fluidity, of external expectation, of rigid lines, creating a show in which each person who comes to it will make their own meaning out of it, will bring to it their own experiences and transform it into something new, is a brilliant achievement. It defies categories and never indulges in exposition, it bombards you with found footage in a chaotic collage of video and sound, and, perhaps most importantly, it draws on the personal (Thompson’s experience of eating disorders and Ello’s of gender dysphoria) to create the universal.
It’s open-endedness does not mean that it’s unfocused, it is a scalpel-sharp critique of a capitalistic cultural decline, a decline which offers individuals ever more freedom to choose what to buy, whilst simultaneously manifesting the desire for certain ways of living over others, of certain bodies, of certain relationships, of certain clothes; putting so much shit in front of us that we are incapable of calling any of these choices truly free.
Also, I have to mention this even though I know it’s been commented on a lot, but I cannot actually believe that they started making this show before Barbie and Oppenheimer were announced - Thompson and Ello could not have been more on the (nuclear) button if they had a working crystal ball in their hands. Despite the allusions to what is the most zeitgeist moment in the history of zeitgeist, this show has a reach that goes far beyond the right-here-right-now, it is equal parts of the future, of the present and of the past and teases much from each ones impact on the other.
Excuse the wankiness, but I’m going to quote the late, great David Graeber who wrote: “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” This show emphasises how important it is that we do that, and we do it fast. Get a ticket before they all go.
Frankie Thompson and Live Ello: Body Show is on at Pleasance Courtyard Beneath on Aug 7-13, 15-27 - tickets available here.
FOUR STARS
Photo by Soho Theatre.
