Mechanical ingenuity, delightful music (Eslàstica) and an evocative title are not enough to rescue the children’s theatre piece Bajau from running aground in shallow waters. Not a chortle from the toddler (and adult) audience, there was something distressing about the 35-minute show that was surely unintentional.
This piece for 3 to 5 year-olds is a pandemic creation (a genre of its own) of troupe Ponten Pie, the founder of which, Sergi Ots, previously worked with Comediants and Cirque du Soleil. As in other productions, such as Loo named after a hot dry wind that blows through parts of India and Pakistan, and that tells a story of desert emigration; and Ârtica in which a narrative unfolds in an winter cabin through human interactions, Bajau finds inspiration overseas in our relationship with the wilderness.
The Bajau are a stateless community who live in traditional houseboats off the coasts of Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Famed for their free-diving skills, they use the same traditional hunting techniques they have for centuries. Their number rapidly-shrinking, the community trade fish, lobster and the coveted sea cucumber with citizens on the mainland.
From that promising outlook, Bajau the theatre piece drifts off course: less a visual poem than a circus sideshow, offering an array of mixed messages and visual metaphors. In these drought-anxious days, what proposed to be ode to water and underwater living has acquired a didactic tone that threatens (unfairly!) to take the fun out of bath time. As I’m informed, theatre for small children should move fast and break things: be challenging, and emotionally and intellectually stimulating. It should never be patronising.
Two protagonists (Natàlia Méndez and Borja Nieto) appear in embroidered, orientalist costumes. They stage a series of aqua tricks, water squirting from sleeves and mouths, and communicate through slow exaggerated gestures as if they were underwater. This serves to make everything resonate with the presumption of meaning; a meaning it is beyond us to understand. Emotional turnarounds are particularly disturbing: sadness turns to astonishment and joy as a blood-red bundle of scarf reveals a beating heart.
A clever conveyor belt (scenographers were Jordi Dorado, Carles Piera and NAFKA) circles from backstage, delivering, not sushi, but a selection of random objects: a red apple, a bonsai and a variety of water receptacles; jug, glass, pots and pans, are all marvelled at and/or utilised in the same deliberate manner. Through the belt the water drains away to be recycled (hopefully via a filter) for the next show, without short circuiting anything or electrocuting anyone.
Then, a large fish tank becomes central to the action. The white and red scarves are submerged and perform their eelish dance – though given the scarf’s previous life, I can’t help but think too of intestines. The bonsai is revived through total immersion, its crispy crimson foliage has turned vivid green – although even the smallest child can see that this is a different bonsai.
Pots and pans are dumped in the water. Is this a comment on water pollution? Or a warning to fill up your receptacles as the taps run dry… Soon, both of the protagonists are in the tank too: grinning through the glass. Less the water-babies than Harry Houdini’s infamous water torture cell. Less the open ocean, on which the Bajau are emblems of self-sufficiency, than crustaceans in a tank in a seafood restaurant, their pincers taped shut.
