“One day, an image popped into my head,” explains Rachel Hynes. “A girl goes down to the river to feed the tigers. ‘What does she feed them?’ I asked myself.” Tonight’s the last night you can can find that out for this short run of Tale of a Tiger; curtain is 7 p.m. at the Jewelbox Theater at the Rendezvous. Tickets are $10.
If you know Hynes from her work as co-artistic director of avant-garde Helskinki Syndrome, you might be surprised by the fable she tells in Tale of a Tiger, though the little story leaves claw marks in its unfolding. It’s suffused with brief illuminations that, in this fantastic context, recall childhood more clearly than trying to recall a particular day.
Hynes puts it like this: “In the magical world of the fairytale, we can accept odd things happening, we can feel basic instincts. Together, just by listening, the teller and the audience make sense of story. And together, we find the parts of ourselves that peek out to call, ‘Hello? Is anybody out there?'”
It’s preceded by Call on Me, with a character born from Jacques Lecoq’s Buffon who “stomps on the border between Mystery and Grotesque.” This is why reasonable people are scared of clowns, and it proves that laughter, where clowns are concerned, is more like protection money for keeping your dignity intact.
Tale of a Tiger is as much about Hynes’ physical narrative skills as her speaking voice. Her movement vocabulary isn’t necessarily naturalistic, though it can be visceral. Tall and willowy, she’s more graceful than you might expect, after seeing her stump around in Call on Me.
She’s an austere mime when called for, creating a rocking chair (and floorboard squeaks) for the town gossip, who’s perturbed by the way a little girl is being brought up out there in the forest, all alone except for her father, and he isn’t…well, anyway. Hynes is also a prowling great cat, the little girl in question, and a gang of maladroit suitors. If you are a solo performance fan, you’ll be fascinated by her transitions between characters, the quickness and cleanness between signature postures.
After she had her initial idea, of a girl who feeds tigers, Hynes developed the story by telling bits of it to other people, and gained an appreciation for “the act of storytelling, the nature of two live bodies in a room together, sharing something.”
“I didn’t try to tell a story about anger, about how childhood coping mechanisms no longer serve us in adulthood, about savage self-sufficiency,” she says, which is all to the good. All the ad hoc analysis in the world can’t create a compelling story. Tale of a Tiger asks for something more participatory than that, it wants you to come with it into a claustrophobic place, when a child takes certain steps for survival that can’t be untraced.
