The Sensemaker, Woman’s Move
State Theatre Centre, 31 January 2023

You’ll be hard pressed to find a more ravishing 60 minutes at Fringe World than The Sensemaker. It’s a one-woman show about the impotency and frustrations felt waiting on the phone, listening to repetitive music.

Yet Swiss performer Elsa Couvreur, who created the piece before the pandemic, turns the torment into an ironic, humorous and subversive hour of dance and physical theatre. She’s a performer who just looks into the auditorium and holds an audience spellbound. Mind you, she’s pretty spectacular to look at – as you’ll see if you go – and do go or you’ll be sorry. The Sensemaker has won countless awards in eight European countries in five different languages and it’s easy to see why.

With the gait and posture of a top model, dressed, perhaps, for an interview in a short black skirt, a soft blue shirt, black panty-hose and stilettos, Couvreur walks onto a stage occupied only by a chair, a desk and an old-fashioned cream telephone. She sits and waits interminably until a robotic voice starts giving her rather inane instructions, interspersed by Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”.

What makes this piece so enjoyable is its combination of dystopian, disparate and seemingly incompatible elements. I mean, what would Beethoven make of his “Ode to Joy” being used as the wallpaper music played to placate waiting customers?

Actually, I think he’d be delighted – firstly on a commercial front, secondly because Couvreur dances so ecstatically to its refrain, and thirdly because the work is so thoroughly engaging. There’s the anomaly of her role in which she never speaks but lip-syncs to the demands delivered in German, French, Dutch Spanish Italian and English. And though The Sensemaker is billed as physical theatre there are many moments of silence and inactivity, where you are still, inconceivably, totally mesmerised.

To top it all off, there’s the robotic voice, cultured and pleasant but relentlessly demanding and at the end, inappropriate. To quote Couvreur afterwards, “The people behind the machine are evil but the machine isn’t.” What’s frustrating is that you have no way of getting to those people, evil or not.

The Sensemaker hits a nerve and does it with wit, polish, and cerebral aplomb. If there’s a lesson in The Sensemaker, it might be that there’s rapture to be found even in our worst moments. Especially if you could have Couvreur around – she’s brilliant.

The Sensemaker continues at the State Theatre Centre of WA until 5 February 2023.

Pictured top: Elsa Couvreur turns the torment of being on hold into an ironic, humorous and subversive hour of dance. Photo: Lux Pragensis