Let me just say this - tonight is a night of stripping, tonight is a night of peeling away, layer by layer by layer by layer - What will be left? What will we know at the end of it all? Much less! That's what!
Let's begin....
Dark Matter a performance from Kate McIntosh hosted by a woman in a spotlight, dressed in a sparkling dress and a long grey beard. With the help of two assistants, some small strange dances and a few materials you might or might not have at home, Dark Matter approaches the big scientific-philosophical questions in a full-on show-biz late-night theatre style, illustrating these knotty conundrums - time and gravity, being and not being, thought and the body - through what look suspiciously like a series of improvised home-science experiments.
“With the charm and glamour of a music hall star, Kate McIntosh leads through the program entitled „Dark Matter“. She dances, she sings, she resists the trickery of the object, and she asks the big questions of life. The show, which Kate McIntosh calls a „full-on show-biz glam-cabaret style”… is entertainment at its best, and it is intelligent.” (Weblog tanz-de-ca)
“She stands there in a sparkly dress explaining the world. Two gentlemen in suits, who symbolise her rational and irrational sides, support her. Both are important, as Kate McIntosh quickly loses her thread. The potentially embarrassing gaps in the programme are quickly filled with adventurously simple, wonderfully amateurish tricks - a bunch of balloons and a microphone are whirled in the air to circus music, vinegar is poured into glasses, a man is covered with a mound of salt, and planks are brandished dangerously or transformed into seesaws. Then in the haze from a smoke-machine, Kate McIntosh disappears to another dimension, leaving the two men alone for a while. A starry sky glitters on the backdrop, and one of the men presents the 'absolute darkness' he has created in a paper bag.
This succession of wonderfully hyped-up absurdities is a humorous investigation of how far the theatre can go in its attempt to explain reality from the stage. In her demonstrative way, Kate McIntosh puts an infinite distance between herself and any reality. All attempts to make a definitive statement end up in hollow affectation. Beautiful and true.” (nachtkritik.de)
“…Kate McIntosh, the lady in green, negotiates the great questions of earthly existence and universal reality in a grotesque-comic manner: she has a go at being a stand-up comedian, creates musical interludes and small, apparently improvised dances in a colourful programme, through which she acts as moderator. The artist’s dry humour, and in particular her work with texts, movement and materials, is reminiscent of Wendy Houstoun, the grande dame of experimental dance theatre.” (tanznetz.de)
