For 60 minutes in the morning, afternoon and evening of last Sunday, Strait Street played host to the Rubberbodies Collective’s performance installation in honour of the 50th anniversary of Malta’s national poet Dun Karm Psaila.
Chris Galea effortlessly transitioned between an Oedipally motivated ‘Dun Karm’ character and his ‘mother’- Peter Farrugia
Directed by Jimmy Grima, four performers come together to inhabit the Splendid Hotel, a rehabilitated property currently being repurposed for cultural projects.
Although the hotel has no direct connection with Dun Karm, he is known to have spent much of his time in Valletta writing the religious, patriotic and nature-inspired works for which he is well remembered.
The collective’s promotional material describes “bodies and spaces” revisiting Maltese identity, “at a time when religion and politics deeply shaped our culture”.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Four of the Splendid’s rooms contained personalities at once influenced by, and influencing, these concerns.
Ninette Micallef occupied the first room. Her characterisation involved a teacher-student dynamic that most of us will remember as our introduction to Dun Karm’s poetry.
Seated in a darkened room with a television set behind her and a canary suspended above her head, Micallef recollected Dun Karm as a bulwark of Maltese romanticism, the poet laureate of an island eager to plant literary roots. With stories within stories, tall tales, letters and recitations, she provided the basic groundwork on which the other performers could build their strange and fragmented worlds.
Mavin Khoo’s dance in a red-lit room objectified the erotic body, embracing its potential to reconcile masculine and feminine. With hypnotic eyes and rhythmical distension, he appeared both grotesque and mysterious. Khoo’s collaboration was a definite asset that brought something special to the rubberbodies installation, although it’s a shame he wasn’t more successfully integrated within the overarching context.
Across the hall from Khoo, Jacob Piccinino’s performance was saturated in the numinous sensibility behind much of Dun Karm’s poetry. Taken to a logical extreme, Piccinino genuflected before an empty hearth in a bare room with a loose garment hung, veil-like, over his head.
His gestures were frenetic and finally, flung onto the tips of his toes, the performer revealed a mirrored mask that obscured his face entirely.
Khoo and Piccinino each manipulated the very visceral experience of their movement to achieve a sense of emotional release. Accepting this cleared space in one’s mind became a necessary key before progressing through all the areas the house had to offer.
Eerie, involving and provoking, Chris Galea inhabited the final room where he effortlessly transitioned between an Oedipally motivated ‘Dun Karm’ character, and his ‘mother’.
Dressed in a cassock as Dun Karm, the actor lifted the hem over his shoulders to reveal a lacy nighty and form a faldetta with the black cloth. In a rambling sing-song voice, almost senile jabbering, peering through a cardboard theatre with eyes wandering around the room like an inmate, Galea contributed a claustrophobic and persuasive performance.
It was the mixture between uncomfortable strangeness and reassuring familiarity that made the vignette quite unique.
As part of a long-term regeneration plan for the area, the proposed transformation of lower Strait Street into an arts centre will encourage more events like this.
Such initiatives bode well for the growth of Valletta’s cultural life, comparable to the sort of artistic activities encountered in other European capitals.
By providing a space in which artists can explore, and offer their work to the public, Valletta’s privileged position as a first stop for local creative expression will go from strength to strength.
We may be witnessing a Strait Street renaissance of clear importance, nurturing Malta’s burgeoning arts scene and securing a valuable locus for future projects.