Photo by Paula Court
Don’t be shy. If you haven’t seen Accidental Nostalgia or Must Don’t Whip ‘Um, the first two parts of Cynthia Hopkin’s Accidental Trilogy, you can catch up in a giffy!
First there was the earthy, Southern-gothic road tale Accidental Nostalgia in 2005, whose narrator steals an identity and revisits her small-town past in an attempt to unravel a childhood murder mystery. Two years later its prequel, Must Don’t Whip ’Um, featured a 1970s American rocker (the one whose identity is later stolen) who renounces her career to join a Sufi brotherhood in Morocco, thus making a leap both geographically and thematically from Western pop culture to Eastern spiritual mysticism . . . even as it turned out to be a daughter’s story about her search for a mother she never knew.
The first two productions were, in Cynthia’s words “tapestries of fiction woven from strands of truth… With this new work, I’m attempting to extract the fiction from the truth and to create two Acts which are polar opposites from each other. I conceive of the trilogy as concentric circles: Part I (nostalgia) being a little circle of neurology and personal memory loss; Part II being the next circle outward from oneself, oneself in relation to father and mother and society; and Part III is the biggest circle, oneself in relation to the universe at large. Part I is the brain, Part II the heart, and Part III the spirit of the Trilogy.”
See Part III this weekend to find out what happens!
+++++++++SPOILERS – If you haven’t seen the show yet, you ought not read this comment+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I am, to put it plainly, a huge fan of what I’ve seen from Cynthia Hopkins. And what I’ve seen in _Success/Failure_ risks being trite, pat, self-indulgent trauma pornography but is not that at all. Hopkins demonstrates in this performance that the difference between great and poor autoperformance is craft and vision, which she and her fellows have in abundance. I do want to comment on the end of this trilogy in four parts.
Nearly every fiber of my being wants to resist the end of the performance. I want to condemn it as a cop out, as exemplifying the worst of the “autonarrative as therapy” move, and offering little to the audience except for blind faith in, well, faith. Part of this has to do with my narrative, part of it to do with my biases and taste in performance. I can’t bring myself to do it. This performance has the undeniable and in some sense ineffable ring of truth to it. If I take in this performance as a stand-alone entity, I would be much more inclined to see the last act as an unwelcome intrusion on the technical triumph, eerie beauty, and deep symbolism of the first. But reading across the whole trilogy, the last act unsettles and shakes loose all sorts of meaning. It’s as if someone took the first two and a half performances, put them in a box, and shook hard; then placed the pieces on a table. I feel like I’m looking at these pieces in new ways. The image where she breaks from song for a moment to point out that the view from a microscope is the same as the view of space is exactly what the best autoperformance does – it moves from the macro to the micro, connects the story of the performer to grander narratives, and also permits the audience to understand their own story in relationship to both the performer and these grander narratives. Hopkins does all of this, all the while risking devolution into another sad, f—-d up story about a traumatic life.
At the end of _Accidental Nostalgia_, Hopkins’ nakedness was supposedly an act of vulnerability; but in this performance we can see that performative choice in a whole new light. The unflinching nature of the second act is a much more vulnerable act. But there are so many things left for me to ponder – is this really the end of this enterprise? Is the point to reach a new personal relationship to the past through performance and then to be done with it? Is there anywhere else to go if the answer is to forgive others and ones’ self?
In a sense, it is these questions and others that make me like the end of this performance more than I believe I should. Or maybe it is just my admiration for Hopkins’ work and the amazing talent of Findlay, Sugg, et. al. that blind me. I dunno, but I love trying to figure it out.
Comment by Aaron Klemz — April 16, 2009 @ 11:02 pm
First, to anyone reading this, you MUST see this show, especially if you’ve been privileged to see the first two performance works from these amazing artists. Run, don’t walk.
Further SPOILER discussion below:
I agree wholeheartedly with Aaron’s comments. As always, I was deeply moved and unable to think about anything else but this show. But I will admit to being worried about 2 different things: first, that the fictions of Accidental Nostalgia, Must Don’t Whip ‘Um, and the beginning of Success of Failure could potentially be viewed as less truthful/less valuable than the autoperformance section at the end of this show; second, that Cynthia Hopkins is leaving the stage. I don’t want either of these things to be true because as an audience member, I have found so many excruciatingly beautiful moments of truth throughout this trilogy. So I hope I am wrong on both counts.
Comment by Jen Tuder — April 17, 2009 @ 3:00 pm
I couldn’t disagree more with you guys – what a disappointment after her previous shows. No question in my mind that she is a great artist, there are brilliant moments in the first part of the performance, but overall it felt unfinished. I was frankly bored to no end with the second part, I didn’t need to see any of this “performed”, but I guess if you accept a commission and spend the money on Southern Comfort you have to deliver something, anything.
Comment by John Minn — April 18, 2009 @ 11:02 pm
As a great achievement… that has been in my head since I saw the first piece at the Souther… I will remember this trilogy forever. Cynthia Hopkins really expanded my reference for performance authorship and the narrative event. I am rarely up for confessional performance. I enjoyed the final act because suddenly her skills as a storyteller were popping as they did in the first two parts of the trilogy.
I was not as invested in the rather cautious first half of the evening, without Cameron Seymore’s narration, I was not as hooked.
Comment by Scotty Reynolds — April 19, 2009 @ 3:19 pm