DECIMAL POINTS [INFINITY] by CAKE Theatrical Productions

“Decimal Points [Infinity]”

Reviewer: Jemima Yong
Performance: 22 May 2015

We walk into the playing space, drinks in hand. The space has informal floor seating around a three-dimensional set. A large red machine, reminiscent of a lighthouse, towers in center of the performance space. There are bodies on stage , two robed, at rest on mutual desks, and one playing the electric guitar whilst hanging upside down from a skeletal cube.

The amplified noise vibrates and courses through my body. I can smell turpentine and paint. The audience immerses into this visceral environment and this sets the tone of how the following ritual is experienced: through the senses first. From on the onset, CAKE challenges the conventional expectation of accessing and reading theatre.

Decimal Points [infinity] feels like a fable about the industrial revolution. It examines linear progression, the human machine and the chaos, mindless conventions and its inevitable destruction. There are some fierce performances, urgent sequences, a mirror, a portal, a god with a shopping cart, progress through repetition. This performance is cut from a complex fabric, there is always more than one focal point, activating the agency of the audience: choose where you look. It is easy to suspend one’s senses as the sound pulses through our lungs. It is interesting how much can be said without the use of conventional speech and text: the work exists in a language fluently non-verbal.

Decimal Points [infinity] is comfortingly experimental, plural and open to interpretation. It demands we engage with its phenomenology through a baser intellect (way of knowing). It stays with me in the days that follow; arguably what the best performances do.