Bird

A fragile creature has alighted on the stage, wrapped in tattered knitwear. She rustles through invisible leaves, lifts twigs, and devours food with primal hunger. And surrounded by darkness, her tiniest movement is utterly compelling. Sita Pieraccini's tender mime performance feels somewhere between a dance, an installation and a torch beam shone into the depths of forest undergrowth. 

She claims a small patch of earth as her territory and defends it from unseen predators with a kind of pathetic fierceness. Pieraccini's movements are carefully observed, and she embeds each action with a weight of loneliness and yearning. This is a richly imaginative, gentle kind of clowning, expressing a need for connection that's never quite met by the invisible, desolate landscape that surrounds her. But although we can't see her habitat, it's given a cinematic richness and scope by the work of onstage Foley artist David Pollock. He breaks twigs and crunches soft drink cans to mimic the soft fierceness of her steps, making her tiny frenzies feel like powerful earthquakes.

Her vulnerability feels like an unspoken invitation to look at the world differently: to crouch down at ground level, like a child, and see the huge animal battles taking place a few inches off the ground. The performance's 40 minutes stretch out across days and nights and weeks of this creature's short lifespan. But even this rapid flickering through time feels meditative, a chance to slow down and see moments so small that they're almost, but not quite, invisible.