Review: In Many Hands

Kate McIntosh reminds us of the value of caring for one another

(This review contains moderate spoilers for the experience.)

BAM’s Next Wave Festival in 2019, under its new artistic director David Binder, was arguably the most successful one in recent years, in no small measure thanks to a number of shows in experimental and immersive formats such as User Not Found. Another piece in the Next Wave festival, In Many Hands, had a way-too-brief run but demonstrated to me the value of play and curiosity; it is an intimate communal theatrical experience focusing on how we interact with objects and each other. Merging performance, interactivity and art installation, the creator of the piece, Kate McIntosh, a New Zealand-born, Brussels-based artist works in the areas of physical engagement of the audience using objects and creating social spaces for exploring one’s agency and engaging in experimentation collectively.

In Many Hands. Photo by Ed Lefkowicz.

The artist herself, with a serene and quiet demeanor, greets the audience of 51 people gathered in the lower lobby of BAM’s Fisher building. Prior to the beginning of the show, we are asked to remove all the objects and jewelry from our hands. Divided into three groups, we are led to one of three tin basins located throughout the theater filled with warm soapy water to wash our hands. The instructions (roll up your sleeves, refrain from speaking during the show, try to sit next to somebody you don’t know) are delivered by one of the facilitators in the same friendly, placative manner. A tin basin with a black towel tied to it is a mundane domestic object, but a spotlight above it and the anticipation of the unknown elevate the experience of simply washing my hands. This meditative, nearly ritualistic onboarding sets the mood of the experience. After the “ceremony of purification” backstage, I enter the theater and it feels like a temple.

The seats and the stage normally found here are gone. Instead, there are three long tables set in a triangle shape, covered in stark white cloth, in the middle of the darkened black box theater. There is a line of stools facing outwards. I take my seat towards one of the ends of the table, between two strangers. Mimicking the action of others, I put my elbows and arms on the white cloth lit with a spotlight. Soon, I notice that there is a long paper ribbon traveling towards me, passing through all the hands of the people at the table, kind of like a comically-long telegram strip. When it comes to me, it reads something like “Notice the hands of the person next to you. Are they trembling, are they calm? Are they hot or cold”?

I look around and then something else starts traveling down the line of hands, a series of gestures. Imagine the game “telephone” but instead of whispering a phrase down the line of players, the facilitator does something with the hand of a person next to them and the action cascades down to the end of the table. It is intimidating at first to hold or to tickle the hand of a stranger, but a certain level of anonymity during In Many Hands helps. We end up forming an unbroken chain, where my right hand is resting face up in the left hand of the person to the right of me, and my left hand is holding the right hand of a person on my left. My right palm can’t lie flat because of a previously existing injury and my neighbor’s hand is trembling, so it takes a moment to adjust to each other’s physicality and overcome the initial awkwardness. But by the end of act one, I feel a strong personal connection to my two neighbors without sharing a single word and very few gazes. (But I am getting ahead of myself.)

Once all the hands are linked, objects are passed down from the beginning of the line by the facilitator (and a second facilitator is discarding the objects by putting them into a box at the end). First, there is a parade of rocks passing through our hands, all without a single instruction. Rocks of different shapes and sizes, I feel each of them with my right hand and study closely the most interesting ones, handing them to my neighbor on the left afterward. At some point, the facilitator at the end stops discarding rocks, leaving each person holding one. Somebody gets to hold a miniature nugget the size of a baby’s pinky nail, somebody else gets a broad and flat rock, a pumice stone, or a nearly perfectly spherical pebble.

When a massive cobblestone travels my way, I hold my breath knowing that that one is going to end in my not-so-functional hand. My right-hand neighbor catches me looking and silently offers to switch my load with his, but I smile and shake my head no. Before putting the beast onto my fragile palm, he flexes his palm underneath mine, and, after waiting for my nod, slowly releases it, while continuing to provide steady support. It feels like somebody is willing to take on some of the weight I carry, metaphorically speaking, because physically, of course, the cobblestone wasn’t that big of a challenge. And after this simple act of consideration and care from a stranger, I am already sold on In Many Hands.

In a nutshell, this is the performance: objects are being passed down by the strangers in silence. After we complete the rocks, various botanical, zoological, anatomical specimens and various tools and substances of different natures travel down the chain of hands. But don’t let the simplicity of the structure deter you. Puzzling at first, In Many Hands’ unexpectedly turns rewarding in a lot of ways.

As In Many Hands progresses, the mood gets increasingly playful and giddy. Bursts of laughter and gasps of surprise are heard throughout the room. Participants invent new, creative ways of handing the objects over, experimenting with presentation and facilitating the experience for each other. Although you see the object that you are about to receive, once you touch it, it often feels like handling something for the first time. Suddenly, its weight, its temperature, and its smell reveal themselves with an unexpected newness.

When a handful of large cold seaweed leaves plops down on my hand, much like a dead fish, I giggle in surprise. Thinking that it might be fun to provide my neighbor on the left with a more relaxing, spa-like experience, I pick up each cold seaweed leaf individually from my hand and carefully assemble them on his hand and his arm. He chuckles at first and after the leaves are in place, sits still for a while, taking it all in. During the onboarding, we were told that it will take different people different amounts of time to complete the tasks. Some of the experiences, the seaweed in particular, call for relishing and I am glad we are given time not to rush.

In Many Hands proves an opportunity to meditatively study various objects with multiple senses (except for taste). The objects are the same for everybody for the most part, except for some finer substances that transform as they travel down the line of many hands. When a scoop of soap-like liquid appears in my palm, I am not quite sure what to make of it: much of it was spilled in transition, and the color is mudded with other solids and liquids that everybody held prior to this. A magnifying glass appears in my hand and I study the hand of a person next to me: covered in brown goo, smelling of soap and coffee. My hands smell the same even after I wash them. For part two, I am instructed to take a seat at a different table, facing inwards this time.

Part two starts in a similar manner, but soon the lights dim down and the objects travel through the hands of the audience in complete darkness. Through my hands pass various objects of peculiar texture, some produce sounds (such as when we rustle and tear out pages from a telephone book). Suddenly, the crescendo of the show begins. As much as I would like to share it, I don’t want to spoil the surprise. The joyful chaos of play takes over, with laughter and screams of surprise filling the room. It gets loud and we momentarily become one with the environment and with each other. And then it suddenly stops. The monumental yet quite finale keeps us in our seats, absolutely mesmerized for several minutes. There is no curtain call. People look at each other from across the room, smiling. Nobody wants to leave just yet, but one of the stagehands opening the door and thanking everybody for coming is a clear sign that we need to vacate the room. I feel a childish disappointment that our “playtime” is over.

In Many Hands made me think about how the participants can “serve” each other during an immersive experience. This intimate, interactive show requires the audience members to pay constant attention to their partners, to be able to read them without speaking or seeing them, a skill that is certainly much needed today if we want to maintain our humanity and survive as a species in the long run. In Many Hands explicitly doesn’t reveal an overarching theme nor does it make any moralistic conclusions. But, to me, it is a history of our planet and human civilization told through objects, closed on a haunting and poetic note. We are all responsible for our collective future; it is, after all, in many hands.

(This review was published on noproscenium.com on January 10)