Vicky Sparrow reviews Shabnam Shabazi's visually compelling piece at Sacred Festival
I find myself worrying about the logistics of on-stage nudity, a concern which writer and performer Shabnam Shabazi obviously doesn’t share. She opens Body House naked, her skin oily and glistening golden, as she stages a protracted, meditative dressing. We watch as her entire body is painstakingly covered from the feet up with small strips of bandage infused with plaster (the kind used for broken-bone plaster casts) by two assistants.
She recites verse meditating on the nature of the body as house, home, self-containment and incarceration. It’s a ‘habitation investigation’ and the slowly calcifying piece plumbs the depths of embodiment and its contradictions.
Throughout her piece Shabazi remains as static as an idol; her unblinking stare ranging from grim to godlike as tears, saliva and snot begin to slide down her face, onto her torso. This gooey visceral image makes a disturbing juxtaposition with the creeping paralysis of the hardening plaster, as this part live-art, part drama drives in a claustrophobic way, towards its own death.
Sometimes the writing is a little hackneyed and the use of projection gets a bit dull, but with the lamentable lack of experimental drama in London’s commercial theatres, SACRED is doing a great job staging such interesting work borne of great ideas ripe for discussion. 
by Vicky Sparrow
Sacred runs until 1st December this year and returns in February 2013
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