Tonight is the first performance of Permanence Collection, a short play written by Ed Bok Lee and Kira Obolensky that meanders through the Walker’s Permanent Collection installation. Yes, I know we have a state of the art theater for performance work, but the galleries have always been the intended stage for this collaboration between the Walker and the Playwrights’ Center.
The project started over a year ago at a brainstorming lunch between myself and Todd Boss, Director of External Affairs at the Playwrights’ Center. I was interested in a project the center did with the Minnesota History Center where playwrights penned monologues inspired by objects in the MHS collection. We thought that model could translate well to contemporary art and that actors in the galleries could create a new, if not surprising, kind of interpretation for visitors.
A year later, we have Permanence Collection. Performed by actors Annie Enneking, Stephen Cartmell, Kurt Kwan, and Ariel Dumas, with sound design by Craig Harris and direction by Playwrights’ Center Artistic Associate Hayley Finn, this site-specific play muses on the very experience of museum-going. There is a lot packed into the 30 minute piece: ideas about the passage of time, permanence, and nostalgia wrapped up in a meditation on the practice of both looking at art and writing plays.
To provide insight into the artistic process of the folks who put this together, I’ve asked the writers and director a few questions about the project. I’ll be posting their answers over the next several days, but to entice readers for now, here is Ed Bok Lee’s take on the project:
“Many of the Walker's permanent collection pieces have been around longer than the viewers who come to see them, and all, unless destroyed, will probably outlive everyone alive now. But eventually even those will move on...
The passage of time and eras was an especially interesting challenge in this play. At one point, I tried to see the project through one giant imaginary Walker security camera--a century's worth of footage--time-lapsed over one hyper hour, with all the different artworks, shows, gallery visitors, and renovations that have taken place since the museum was founded. And I began to see the whole place and human endeavor to preserve art as a kind of giant metaphysical clock whereby a museum's visitors are like the ever-moving seconds hand; the actual walls, rooms, and structures containing the art in sum make up the less transient minute hand; and the art on its eternal journey comprises the slowest-moving hour hand.
From the first gallery to the last in the permanent collection, you can wander through a century or so of Western aesthetic consciousness in a matter of minutes. And then you step out of the lobby doors and it's gone. How to articulate this abstract, rather bemusing sense of history and time-passing, dramatically, on the most human levels possible, (and very succinctly, in non-subtle ways due to the conditions of the venue), was a particular challenge for me.”
The performances take place TONIGHT and next week, Thursday, May 15 at 7 and 8 pm here at the Walker. Come see it!