Angela Woodhouse and Caroline Broadhead

Angela Woodhouse and Caroline Broadhead, Court
Founder's Studio, The Place, 23 Jun
Reviewed by Catherine Hale

Ever dreamed of having a guardian angel that exists just for you? Who hovers discreetly by your side, or enfolds you with radiance, and sometimes reaches a hand out to beckon across the threshold from your world into theirs?

If so, go and catch Court, Angela Woodhouse's bliss-inducing performance installation at the Place before it finishes on Saturday (26 June). So intimate is this experience that only three people can enter it at a time. It begins with your journey round a perimeter of gauze columns, designed by Caroline Broadhead, which leads you to a gateway. There, your designated heavenly creature - Henrietta Hale or River Carmalt - statuesque yet weightless in their crisp white costumes - awaits your encounter.

The rest depends on you. Your angel may seem asleep at first, but slowly they direct your gaze to a whisper of life that coils through their finger, up their arm, and illuminates their face till their eyes meet yours for a moment that seems like a bottomless ocean.

And if you survive this blazing union and pass through to the inner sanctum of gauze, performance is yours to create. Your angel could become your playmate. You might engage them in some improvisatory duet, if you dared, that comes dangerously close to touch. Or, like me, you could just stay gauchely immobile and drink in your twenty minutes of pleasure: the scary thrill of their proximity, the giddy freedom that their totally impassive, wide open presence grants you, and the visual delight of their slow motion duet, which is like two mythological gods tumbling though a Botticelli heaven.

Art historical references are probably no accident. With Woodhouse's training in both dance and visual art Court's concerns lie on the cusp between both worlds. In some ways it recalls Bill Viola's quasi-religious slow motion films. Only Hale and Carmalt's dancerly composure and grace realise in the here and now of the body what Viola achieves on screen.

Court's twenty minutes feel like a taste of eternity that leaves you feeling warm and fuzzy and deeply at peace.