Three semi-nude performers writhing around the stage in a tomato fight. It certainly sounds like the Edinburgh fringe. Chou Kuan-Jou’s Tomato has some qualities ripe for a festival: it’s short (30 minutes), creates a distinctive world, has some potent ideas in a rough form and is novel enough to stand out among a packed programme.
Taiwanese choreographer Chou explores sexuality while sharing the stage with a tank full of tomatoes. “How to choose tomatoes …” starts the voiceover, as a man examines them for plumpness, firm flesh, the right number of leaves. On the other side of the stage, Chou in a silk robe, squeezing her own buttock. There’s some fleshy, messy sucking of juices. The metaphors aren’t far away.
There are revelations of pleasure, the scratching of intense itches (while doing very little that’s actually explicit) and an edge of violence: a woman laid on the floor, face down, dress pulled up over her head, a man lurching towards her. Chou veers towards danger, pressing the blade of a sharp tomato knife flat against her thigh. She slides it along skin, holding her breath, a literal knife-edge of pain and pleasure. Then she comically puts the water spray between her legs, spritzing in short climatic bursts.
There’s something very clever about the sudden shifts of mood. Is this woman’s experience enjoyable, exploitative, funny, sinister? As in real life, it depends on an ultra-fine tuning of sensation and context. This detail Chou does really well. The use of video, the broader attempt to turn all this round on the audience, is less well developed. Not yet the finished product but the beginning of something; slight, with bite.
At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 28 August.
