Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It
★★★★★
Five Star Pick
★★★★★ Five Star Pick
As both a huge fan of Xhloe and Natasha’s previous Fringe shows and someone who has voluntarily listened to a fourteen-hour podcast deep-dive on the Patterson–Gimlin film, I think it’s fair to say that this was my ‘must see’ for the festival - and I’m glad to report it did not disappoint.
Xhloe and Natasha have never been interested in telling you the facts in a straight line, and although this show has a stronger narrative thread than some of their work; it is no exception to their deliciously unreliable narration. This time, however, even the starting point of Bigfoot itself is a myth wrapped in a tangle of lies, truths and unexplained oddities. Adding another slice of absurdist Americana to their canon, Bigfoot has a definite Twin Peaks/Northern Exposure feel: a small, isolated, deeply weird community where everyone has a story to tell and everyone’s a little afraid. Indeed the fear itself becomes the villain of the piece as conspiracy, rumour and gossip snowball out of control until pretty quickly "did you hear" grows arms, legs and huge hairy feet.
Production-wise, this is a bigger space than I've seen them in before, and they use the huge backdrop to great, and darkly humorous effect, telegraphing certain story beats in polemically witty text. The staging remains minimalist however, with props used sparingly but effectively, and the focus still almost entirely on them, their movement, and their dialogue. Unlike some of their previous shows it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when Bigfoot is set, but the wonderfully jarring collection of late nineties pop music spliced between the action might be a clue. Or it might not.
Somewhere around the moment that the stop sign gets turned upside down (was there even a stop sign? was there a Dairy Queen? should we be drinking the water?), the whole piece starts to unravel in what is for me their signature style: something like the visual equivalent of listening to a song get chopped up and stitched back together in the wrong order, covered by someone else and then mixed with five other songs. They alternate playing the various roles (it’s great fun to see them tackle a more extended cast of characters) switching here and there, adding to the sense of deliberate confusion. The physical and mental agility required in making something so specifically and minutely timed feel like complete breakdown and disarray is mind-boggling.
Tonally it dips into some of the darker territory of What If They Ate The Baby, but in a lot of ways it also reminded me of the incendiary camaraderie of And Then The Rodeo Burned Down, the first show of theirs I saw. One of my favourite moments comes when Xhloe announces mid-scene "this is a misdirection" both as an onstage sight gag, and an almost fourth-wall-breaking underscore to the whole show. Because everything really is a misdirection with these two. Or is it? I still don't know if they killed the dog, if they ate the baby, if they burned down the rodeo - in fact the only thing I do know for sure is that I really need to see this again. Sadly (for me) this run is already sold out, so if you haven't bagged a ticket this time do try and catch them some other time, some other place.
★★★★★
