The Cows Come Home from Zeb Fontaine is a complex, sensuous fusion of myth and space and bodies and sounds. Someone’s looking for truth, a crime has been committed, a devastating plague grips people and cows, and the gods, perhaps, are watching. Half-muffled voices grope after miracles, and forgiveness, and the air is thick with the poetry of human perplexity.
The chorus have been grazing on Beckett and Sophocles. Ruminantly, feverishly, raptly and wide-eyed they engage in rituals of pollution, cleansing and expiation. There’s birthing, and breeding, and inexplicable infection, and a herd bound together by solitary terror. Hip-swaying and intent, they spin what might be sought-for answers, and might be whole new questions out of their sinuous, spasming bodies.
Some of the symbolic threads are strung pretty tight, even to the point of having snapped. The man with the limp might be the farmer and might be Oedipus, but neither his herds nor his chorus seem to recognise his gait. At times the text(s) and the physical score feel like unfamiliar dance partners, awkwardly uncertain who’s leading. They tread on each other’s toes, bump foreheads and occasionally jerk the atmospheric rhythms of the show off-balance. But despite clumsy moments, the effect of the whole is oddly, hypnotically beautiful.
This is densely imagined and experienced dance-drama, evocative and tantalising and paradoxically satisfying. Perhaps the only Oedipus who matters is the one behind our eyes, challenged to find a personal meaning in this riddling ritual. The Cows Come Home is an enigmatic experience that resonates in some place deeper and stranger than the intellect, transcending narrative obscurity to achieve a beguiling synthesis of music and image and motion.
