Timothy and the Things: Your Mother at My Door

An unfinished symphony of a piece where dance dithers while music swells and swoons


Your Mother at My Door by Timothy and the Things (aka László Fülöp and Emese Cuhorka) feels like an unfinished symphony. Not only because of the romantic orchestral music surging through the piece, swollen with restless, unresolved tonalities, but also because it looks incomplete. The title and programme notes bear no relation to the piece, and the performance itself has a stop-start, seams-showing style. Between an electric piano and a computer keyboard, the duo generate a sonic environment of fulsome melodrama that is obstinately at odds with the jerky physicality of their flat-footed swizzles and try-out posturing. There are bumpy mismatches, archly artificial poses, some happenstance synchronised swimming, gestures of eyebrow-raised irony. It’s sort of funny, kind of interesting, but whether or not its rebuttal of coherence is an intention as well as an effect, I think its raw appeal would work better cooked.