NoTears - Nightingale Theatre/Brighton Festival Fringe
The Argus Lofts/Brighton Festival Fringe
"NoTears" is a three-part movement piece based around the theme of cultural displacement, each part created by a different choreographer of a different nationality. The first piece, by choreographer Kaya Kitani from Japan, presents us with one almost silent-footed perpetual jogger; three other performers in the space, suitcases B eventually music breezes in. Games of dressing and undressing; down to underwear, one man swamped under an avalanche of clothing. The jogger pauses for a moment, and continues, anchoring the space. The second piece, by choreographer Hans Fors of Sweden (whose company Igemon also performed at the Festival) gives us two men, each 'rooted' in a red cube - like two strange plants. Growing and lifting the bottomless cubes, music creeps in and they, with a third counterpart, attempt to find their place in the world.
The final piece, by Italian choreographer Cecilia Bertoni also utilises open cubes. Four characters in white suits live their lives within and around wooden tunnels, exploring each other like lava insects, tender and exploitative. What to do, where to go? Now like lost souls, now open and soft, now strong and focused - a fabulous dance theatre, enhanced by an extraordinary original soundscape.
Miriam King - Total Theatre Magazine, Sept 2005

Vanishing Act (part of "NoTears")
Tue 15 Feb 05
"As performers disappeared inside boxes in a mordantly surreal world, Pack's Vanishing Act initially came on like a conjuring act directed by David Lynch. The strong design - the dancers in translucent white costumes on a stage littered with hollow chests - was matched by the four characters' motifs: one very bird like, one obsessed with his water flask, a priest like figure and a woman who may be dead. Those boxes became tombs, coffins and a pulpit on which to kneel. There was too much business with a leather scroll of quasi religious significance, but Vanishing Act had sufficient theatrical verve to hold above a critical level of intrigue until its strangely compelling still closing moment."
Ben Felsenburg, The Place online reviews Feb 2005

Vanishing Act (part of "NoTears")
Tue 15 Feb 05
"The four performers of Pack's Vanishing Act repeatedly dismantle and rebuild a structure of wooden blocks, by turns entombing or liberating one another. Dressed in see through white body suits, the dancers address their angry and pleading gestures upward towards a soundtrack of ambient noise and eerie, disembodied voices. An inscribed leather mat is seized on like a holy text, at one point listened to and then licked over feverishly. These are souls in need of sustenance, or looking for escape, but nothing else is clear in this enigmatic but well controlled piece."
Tom Lee The Place online reviews Wed 16 Feb 2005