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“Did you know he was going to sing that?”

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I swear that title was a major coincidence. It gave me a little frisson, if yknowwhaddamean, when Neil started singing it. Okay, now I know where “David” and “Neumann” come from. Duh. The title is beyond me this morning though, “feedforward.” Okay. It felt a little like old home week with the guest performers and [...]

I swear that title was a major coincidence. It gave me a little frisson, if yknowwhaddamean, when Neil started singing it.

Okay, now I know where “David” and “Neumann” come from. Duh. The title is beyond me this morning though, “feedforward.” Okay.

It felt a little like old home week with the guest performers and the many connections to ABG. I’ve even seen Neil Medlyn on YouTube. Which makes him familiar.

And sports were more like an excuse or justification than a tool or subject, I thought.

I have a little headache that has been sitting behind my eyes for about 24 hours so I realize that my experience last night was probably not the most generous. Even so, I didn’t look at my watch until about an hour in, just before the guests and the squirrel-suit with pink penis.

All right. Sure. Fine. Whatever. You know what I’m saying?

I was sort taking it all in for the first 20 minutes or so, more engaged by the text than the movement — I think that there was a connection between sports commentary and dance criticism (or at least trying to talk about dance) which is an interesting subject to me (how do you talk about something that is fundamentally nonverbal — and I think this is true of most if not all disciplines: if we could say what the pieces we make were about we wouldn’t have to make them…).

Sorry, not up to par here in the brains department.

But I did get a little tired of the cleverness. Until Neil’s solo. Not his monolog or the video or the whole baseball thing, but that thing he did that took it away from the pitchers mound and into a very frenetic thing with his hands and arms. For me that was worth the price of admission, had I paid it.

So I’m going to take a little break here, get some pain killers and come back to try and be more articulate.

  • Jeff Turner says:
    February 1, 2008 at 9:27 pm

    Some observations: I think I eavesdropped on at least four conversations before FEEDFORWARD began in which the merits (or lackthereof) of Claude Wampler’s piece were still being unpacked, debated and disentangled. That show certainly touched a nerve, and I must admit I’ve grown to appreciate its power to incite strong reactions a bit more over the last week (but not by much). One interesting conversation seemed to suggest that Wampler was extremely rude to the Walker crew and the “plants” (who, I assume, were local hires) during the tech process. In that same conversation an argument was forwarded that her “bitchy, put-upon” persona is all performance, part of the act of interrogating the way institutions (like the Walker or, even, the Kitchen) subvert the artist’s work at every turn. Poor thing, she can always give back her corporate dollars and government grants if she so desires.

    As for Neumann’s piece, I must admit I was hoping for more. It demanded nothing from me as a spectator and while there were many delights (Neal Medlyn channeling Crispin Glover, Andrew Danwiddle’s Wilde-worthy dance of desire, the band, Medlyn’s spot on, satiric jabs at the absurd inanities of sports commentation), I still couldn’t figure out how to reconcile the piece’s striking inconsistencies. Some bodies were obviously classically trained dancers; others didn’t seem to measure up. The chroegraphy lacked clarity and rigor yet the performance itself didn’t seem too concerned about that. And the telephone call with its reference to the “war” felt like a cheat as the piece never cogently interrogated the connections between sports culture and violence in America or in general. And while Medlyn’s character was truly inspired; his primary co-hort (Matt Citron) didn’t seem to be working from the same “script”. And then there was the obligatory “psychic rupture” (my term for that moment in these experimental performance texts where chaos reigns supreme and anything and most everything can happen). Last night’s melee of chunky cheerleaders, anatomically correct mascots, and boisterous audience participation felt de rigueur and did not grow organically out of the the piece’s internal, perhaps even dada-esque, logic (The TEAM managed to integrate their “psychic rupture” sequences with greater aplomb). Mostly, I felt the piece to be scattered and out of focus; it was the least engaging and least effective contribution to this year’s Out There series and that’s too bad. Sometimes ludic play for the sake of ludic play just ain’t enough. More and more I return to EVERYONE, Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People’s exemplary performance. It was the best of the lot: focused, intelligent, fiercely unconventional, and emotionally moving.

  • Charles Campbell says:
    February 2, 2008 at 1:06 am

    See, I thought all those inconsistencies were intentional and meant to disarm the formulation of consistency in the work. Although I felt the “psychic rupture” was about when my boredom level kicked up a bunch, I also think that it was not just ludic play for the sake of ludic play. Wasn’t there a connection to be made in the disjunctions between the sporadic movements and the sporadic commentary that was not just commentary on sports but on language and experience?

    My impression was that the idea of organic growth was pretty much anathema to the piece, at least in terms of development. But it did have a clear structure, a style and a vocabulary that seemed to me to have a lot to do with internet culture (or at least the interruptive dislocation and association that passes for organization online). This isn’t the only thing I’ve seen that has this aggressively (absurdly) disjointed mode so I am looking at it as an emerging language.

    But maybe I’m just weird.

    I hadn’t heard that about Ms Wampler. I agree that if it walks and talks like a jerk, it’s probably a jerk (even if its ironic). But that being a jerk has little to no relevance to the work itself.

  • Jeff Turner says:
    February 2, 2008 at 10:52 am

    No, you’re not weird. I guess didn’t entirely know what to make of the relationship between the commentary and the movements (the piece did not encourage me to ponder the grander disjunctions between language and experience), and I didn’t pick up the internet culture references (though to say the culture in which we now live is fragmentary, disruptive and dislocating is on target as far as my experience goes). But where Medlyn reduces language to nonsensical, non sequiturs and extravagant flights of fancy, Citron was mostly coherent; his language made sense. I don’t know . . . perhaps I watch too much sports on television and find the commentators infuriating in their need to fill the empty space less I lose interest and tune out. The striking, often ludicrous contradictions that pass for “intelligent” play-by-play analysis on ESPN and elsewhere can be humorously annoying (sometimes I just want to watch the bodies in action, in silence, sans mediation and a diverse array of factoids). So, I guess I didn’t know how to integrate my experience watching Tiger putt on the 14th green (while simultaneously having someone describe what I’m seeing) with the work Neumann and company were accomplishing on the McGuire stage. I feel as if they were trying to score some larger points (sports culture does appear to be their subject). I imagine they would have liked it if I walked away with some deeper thoughts, but I couldn’t assemble the parts into anything that spoke passionately to me. Furthermore, the piece wasn’t entertaining enough to keep me glued to the stage (here is another instance where The TEAM managed to keep me engaged even when I knew their work could have benefited from some serious editing; their ambition and their desire to both please and provoke kept me locked in). Perhaps I’m simply being narcissistic in my desire to construct a “narrative” that gives me some kind of ownership over the work.

  • Charles Campbell says:
    February 2, 2008 at 10:09 pm

    I don’t know.

    I thought the internet thing was not referenced but sort of inherent in the style — a disjointed art for a disjointed world.

    I found both Mr Citron’s and Mr Medlyn’s language to be absurd — making sense only in a bizarre way. I don’t watch much sports, but in what I’ve seen commentary has a relationship to the performance (of the sport) that may as well be as arbitrary as in feedforward(or as you suggest motivated by concerns –keeping viewers — not born out of the performance). Although I could see a sort of parody of sports culture, I felt that it went beyond parody and into its own world of performance and commentary-that-was-its-own-performance. And so I didn’t take “sports culture” as a subject but more like a shape or structural element to give the piece a form. Maybe it helped that my sports knowledge was limited — I didn’t make those associations as easily.

    I walk away from things I’ve seen around here with deeper thoughts, and I felt that Mr Neumann’s piece was related to these works — but my main reaction to it was to admire these practices rather than be inspired by them.

    Then as far as being engaged, I think that’s more of an individual call. Not that you’re narcissistic, but I do think that the piece was resistant to construction of a narrative. I feel that narratives often overwhelm other things, so if you want to make something that functions other than as device for transmitting narrative things get complicated quickly.