ABSTRACT
Approaching the queue – which is made up of those here for the performance by word of mouth or through fringe theatre listings and those here for the ride who have simply passed it in the street – the faded Victoriana arched entrance looms above us. Gold embossed portraits of showgirls and sideshow Carneys are enigmatically smiling down at us from these dark arches. We are met by powder-scented, white-faced, heavily lashed and rouged artistes – instantly otherworldly – redolent of 1930s Berlin underground cabaret. We are ordered by the sexiest, longest-lashed of them all, our Station/Border Guard, armed, threateningly flirty, keeping us in line. Seated in pairs on the faux leather seat of this fairground train, the safety handle is brought down over our knees, which my co-passenger and I instinctively grip. Suddenly, the ruched silk curtain falls heavily alongside us and we’re plunged into darkness. A siren deafens with its mandrake wail, head and neck pulled back as the ride pulls away and we rumble through a series of circuits, visceral images, women entrapped, ghoulish sideshows, fairy-tale tableaux, horror vignettes, women in twisted contortions, wrapped in chains. Sometimes we slow down almost to standstill for ghostly apparitions – a gipsy girl, beautiful, dancing with translucent, fluttering doves, she smiles at us, then her chest is sharply thrust out–in and they disappear – later above us a floating woman with burnished hair that coils around her body, she is telling us her story, which echoes, distorts and she is gone – other women appear in the flesh, smile, cry, reach out, scream, vanish, diaphanous women, fleshly women, silk kimonos, ugly faces, corsets and nightgowns and dusty tutus, clawed hands desperately reaching towards us through broken windows. Our guard rotates above us in a strangely slowed-down aerial display, her threatening smile owning us, other mirages, floating above and around, real women gazing at us then they too vanish into red velvet hotel walls. Repeated images and objects in each tableaux vivant – playing cards, crystal balls, fairy-tale tresses – the ride pulls away again with that wailing siren and as we lurch around the space I am aware of the shriek of my friend, who had to be cajoled to join the rest of us, who was only “there for the ride”, who screamed at the first point that his knee was touched then continued to giggle and cry out in trepidation and disbelief for the rest of the event. Yet it lasts for such little time as we watch the curtain-call line up of each fleshly woman we have seen along the ride, smiling inscrutably, they bow and then vanish in front of us, gone, the smiles seared on the retina in the space as the curtain rises and we are forced out of our seats … and if I close my eyes now the sensations that remain are those nightmare images framed in red velvet, a series of touches, gentle hands across the face, upon the knee, on my shoulder, my shiver from being touched unexpectedly by another human, the lurching mechanics of the ride, the clacketing sound of the wheels on the tracks, racketing against the rumbling ominous soundscore, those ghostly faces, those damaged bodies, the beautifully luminous apparitions, those searing smiles and the waxy paperiness of a playing card that was given to me in a clandestine beat as the ride slowed around a corner, that held a request? a promise? a code to break ….
