The Regretrospective

Written by Caroline Whitham | 27 August 2010

It’s a tale as old as time. Horse meets tiger. Horse considers stabbing tiger to death. Horse realises she’s in love with tiger and embarks on torrid love affair. We’ve all heard it a thousand times before. But somehow Juliet Aster manages to make it seem completely fresh.

OK, so I might be exaggerating a bit. Entirely, in fact. I’m not sure that anyone other than Aster has ever imagined a half-horse, half-human, all-couch-potato falling in love with a stuffed tiger, but hey, this is why we have performance artists: to come up with odd stuff so we don’t have to.

The Regretrospective is a very layered work, combining elements of contemporary and flamenco dance with projected animation and a pumping trip-hop soundtrack. While in the real world Ned (Aster) attempts to interact with the tiger while wearing a beautifully-designed horse head mask, in the animations (all also created by Aster) the tiger brings her flowers, chases her around lovingly and seems to father dozens of baby tigers and horses with her. It is left to the audience’s discretion to decide what any of this means.

Certain elements of the piece are really quite unsettling. A few minutes in Aster pours a bowl of milk for the tiger, which she deliberately spills on the stage. It slowly flows down into the pile of rubbish around her armchair, and she dances around in it. The tiger even ends up getting dragged through it a couple of times. It’s a very unpleasant image and I found myself staring at it, worrying about the clean up afterwards, which really took me out of the moment.

Aster also comes to the front of the stage at one point wielding a very large, very real kitchen knife, which she proceeds to point at certain members of the audience. It left me pondering the nature of the trust an audience and performer share, and with Aster standing mere feet from me, sharp metal pointed at my chest, that trust was stretched to breaking point. Perhaps this is a good thing.

The Regretrospective certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste. It’s very complex and perhaps too personal to Aster to be widely comprehensible. Personally, I found it too lacking in those moments of exceptional clarity and beauty that make a performance piece come alive. Overall, very strange.

Zoo Roxy, 6-30 Aug (not 16), 9pm