Yes, But Is It Performance?

Having just about got to grips with the difference between Live Art and Theatre - yes, I know there are grey areas, but I can live with those as long as I don't get too obsessive - Cryptic Nights and Tramway throw me something fresh to worry about. It is lucky that I changed the name of the section to performance.

For Inducer, part of Cryptic Nights, Robbie Thompson, Jack Wrigley and Sarah Milne from 85a put together a room full of mechanical sculptures. Describing the work as an opera, they allow the sculptures - eerily beautiful in repose, sinister in movement - to sing and play their own tunes, scrambled together from fixed instruments, glasses of water and distressed recordings. The lack of human presence is awesome and harrowing: sometimes like the broken down remains of a destroyed civilisations, other times the soulless demiurges of a godless universe, the cast of Inducer throw up all those questions about the machine replacing humans as artists, breaching the line between sculpture and music and haunting the audience.

Shoplifters, Shopgirls is the latest act of cross-fertilisation, led by Tramway, to present visual artists on the stage. Both Sophie Macpherson and Clare Stephenson have a reputation as visual artists, and as Tramway redefines itself as a space, this sort of piece is a perfect fusion of its two audiences. Although it shares a great deal with Live Art - the focus on repetition, the lack of "theatrical" structure - it occupies a space closer to visual art, as the emphasis is on developing a series of images. While the theme of fashion is explored through voice-overs, music and mime, it is the presentation of figures in space that is all important, not a narrative. The "choroegraphy" builds a scenario.

Questions of genre aside, Shoplifters chronicles the obsession with fashion: not in the abstract, but as choices of clothing. Red socks against white socks become emblematic of almost tribal loyalties to a certain look, and the detached cool of the performers, and their sometimes awkward presence and singing, portrays a world of surface appearance trumping any deeper connections. Like Inducer, its universe is soulless, but while that opera hints at predetermined entities playing out endless repetitions and stories, Shoplifters evokes a world of shallow appearance.

These are two extremes of the universe after God: humans mistaking appearance for depth, or a metaphysics bereft of agency. Neither work is a cheerful analysis of the world but, in different ways, meditate on the underlying disorientation of the contemporary world.