Forget Me ***

Pamela Banchetti's solo show is an intriguing homage to storytelling with some wonderfully playful passages. It has clear love and care put into it on linguistic and theatrical levels. The play is a series of variations on the same story – about a grandmother who bakes a cake using eggs, flour, milk and so on pulled from orifices of her body. She bakes the cake in order to get closer to the sun. On paper it sounds grotesque. In Banchetti's hands, it is tender. Her performance is a delicate one which is as vulnerable as it is firm. 

This show does, however, suffer from a habit of being elliptical that it struggles to shake off. It is clearly a work influenced by poetic feeling – but it might do better to remember the construction of a poem is the construction of a semantic field. What is the correlation, for example, between a frog with an eye in its mouth and a grandmother with an egg in her vulva? Here for example, could an interesting line be drawn, but the show decides to scatterbrain countless new images rather than draw relationships from those it sets up so beautifully. 

Symptomatic of this is the show's subtly political prologue in which a storyteller tells us we have lost the right to stories from her, as we have constructed them into narratives. Other than being a useful way to enter and exit, her presence in the story is never quite revealed. There are sublime pieces of art that thrive on opaqueness, but the sentiment of sincerity and Unai Urkola Etxabe's luscious score suggest the company was searching for more comprehension. 

Still, for the passages this works – it’s charming. The frog with eyes in its mouth is enchanting, Banchetti moves with feeling and conviction, and the play obviously has its heart in the right place. Shadows and light are conceived and used with care too. Drawing lines in between the images and focusing the work as a whole would take this up a level into a beautifully poetic piece of dance theatre.