[2015035] Pale Face Cold Blood
Mina Mokhtarani @ Tuxedo Cat – Mayall Room
6:00pm, Tue 17 Feb 2015
As I entered the Mayall Room, I was surprised and disappointed: surprised that the now-familiar rows of seats had been removed, leaving just a ring of seats around the edge of the room facing a punching bag in their centre; disappointed by the fact that I was the last of six audience members in the room. Next to the punching bag, with a look of bloody-minded focus on her face, was Mina Mokhtarani: clad in gym gear, she was skipping, the rope clipping the roofing beams.
With the door shut behind me, Mokhtarani launches into her monologue mid-skip: she is Zara, a translator working in an immigration detention centre. Her work has placed her in situations where she has witnessed detainees being mentally, verbally, and physically abused, and when she attempts to report the violence – and the poor living and medical conditions available to the detainees – she is ostracised from her cohort.
Mokhtrani delivers Zara’s tale whilst continually exercising: she’s always moving, always exerting, and her sweat is dripping onto the floor before the end of the show. Her script wraps around the exertion, and whilst the high-impact exercise early in the performance works well with her descriptions of violence, the later parts of her routine seem a bit dissonant as Zara returns to Australia, suffering from post-traumatic stress and professional isolation.
Pale Face Cold Blood is a curious creation: the weighty content was delivered quite deliberately, as necessitated by Moktarani’s constant physical activity. But the regular pace of her skipping, boxing, and weightlifting created an almost metronomic delivery, impeding my ability to engage. Maybe the decision to keep a relentless pace was meant to parallel the constant moral abuse that Zara was privy to; a brave decision, then, but one which perhaps impacted my ability to connect with the performance. And that’s a real shame, because Pale Face Cold Blood is a potent text, especially in our current political climate.
(35) Pale Face Cold Blood: Physically punishing for the performer, confronting for the audience. #ff2015 #ADLfringe
— Pete Muller (@festivalfreakAU) February 17, 2015