‘Sorcerer is the emphatic magic of lived-time actions. Those innocuous motions, felt and repeated, held in the muscular memory of our bodies and eyes and viscerally present. That we cannot see, but here, for a slowed minute, might feel in the familiarity of an action so often performed as to be invisible as an action at all. This is a dialogue between the object body and other objects, so distended and loud as to be near silent. Where each action held might also begin to corrupt, or stain, pulling too hard, tuning in and tearing out. A politics of who we are in how we are, learnt, programmed, actioned, and acted, felt and not always forlorn.’ – Ghislaine Leung

‘In this ingenious work, Zultanski and Atkins innovatively deploy both material and human gesture to paint a sad yet almost comic scenario of contemporaneity. While a group of friends conduct inane conversation about subjects like how to take off your pants, the material objects in the apartment bump and grind as if Satie’s Musique d’ameublement has come to life. The interminable redundancy of radios, kettles, radiators, squeaking, hissing, etc., finally dominate the set in a way that is as flat and nondescript as the friends’ conversation. Yet these people raise serious compassion in us, for they are us. Atkins and Zultanski’s brand of drolly underwrought utterance shows us once more that innovative device is the sine qua non of really good art.’ – Gail Scott

‘Vivid on the page, Sorcerer is a surprising and compelling hallucinatory theatre text for a cast of three. In it a set of hyper-naturalistic micro-conversations are laid out in an unblinking deadpan; crisp dialogues that focus in on the body, mapping the detail of daily actions and experiences from the removal of clothing, to the acquisition of new skills, and the precise interior feeling of headaches. Meanwhile, in a dynamic counterpoint to all the talk, a series of playful and increasingly strange physical transformations of the performers and the space they inhabit are proposed. Atkins and Zultanski have made the score for a complex, haunting event.’ – Tim Etchells

‘With Sorcerer, Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski invite us ’round for an evening of conversational bricolage, word games, and mild social debarment (with grapes). As guests, we are welcomed to an inanimate space, every bit as active as the gathering held within it, and duly reminded of the potential infallibility of a mixed company setting. We are privy to the trivial crosscut with the vital; we submit to compression fetish and sulphuric mythology; we ruminate on the merits of facial deconstruction, and most crucially of all, we are reminded once again about the awful sad joy of humanness and what it means to be alone.’ – Graham Lambkin

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