Dance-Theatre / The Fool by Chenoeh Miller and Landed by Frumpus. At The Courtyard Studio until October 16. Reviewed by GRACE CASSIDY

A spotlight lands on three women, out for an evening jog. Every now and then, one of them throws an anxious glance over her shoulder. Something is moving in the dark.

The second week of The Independents has kicked off with an intense, visceral experience in the form of Little Dove Theatre Art’s dance theatre work The Fool (or Francesca Giselle).

Created and directed by Chenoeh Miller, The Fool stars a cast of three women: Alicia Melonie Jones and Noa Rotem (both performers and choreographers), and Monica Engel (both a performer and on music arrangement).

For 50 tension-filled minutes, they deliver a powerful, boundary-pushing work of jarring movements and contorted facial expressions. This drifts into uncanny valley territory at several points throughout the show, where their physicality seems almost human, but not quite. It turns out that all a performer needs is a mask and some grotesque distortions of the mouth to quickly resemble a snake, about to unhinge its jaw.

With the show confined to an intimate theatre space, pumped with fog and blanketed in darkness that’s only disrupted by occasional spotlights (courtesy of Theo Carroll’s sophisticated lighting design), audience members are positioned to feel claustrophobic. Soon, they feel anxious and borderline unsafe, in large part due to the exceptionally talented Reuben Ingall’s deeply (and I mean deeply) disturbing sound design. This is intentional.

The Fool is a story of abuse and how it can impact the mind and body in the years after it takes place. This could be a persistent feeling of being followed or an unexplained fatigue. Miller’s ambitious, powerfully realised work is an exceptional examination of trauma, the pervasive violence against women and First Nations peoples, and how that sits in modern day Australia.

Following this visceral performance, the second part to this week’s double billing provides audiences with a change of scenery that verges on tonal whiplash.

Sydney-based theatre group Frumpus has been around since the 90s and their new show Landed is pure, anarchic comedy. Like The Fool, Landed sports an all-female cast, but that’s where the similarities end. Cheryle Moore, Stephanie Hart and Lenny Ann Low take to the stage as three utterly absurd, hilarious women.

Experts at clowning and satire, the trio transforms into an array of ridiculous characters, from graffiti artists that parade about in tracksuits and sunglasses, to embroiderers that keep receiving alarming phone calls, to sock puppets with erections. All things considered, Landed is an off-beat, horrendously funny and (let’s be honest) completely deranged work of theatre.

In short: it’s not one to be missed.

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