Blogs The Green Room

Bunny-Hopping on Ice with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

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The Art Shanty Projects — the Minnesota ritual that for eight winters has had artists reimagining ice-fishing shacks as tiny community art centers — is, for me, one of the most amazing features of the creative landscape here. Instead of merely enduring Minnesota’s inarguably harsh winters, participating ASP artists embrace it through wildly creative interventions [...]

The Art Shanty Projects — the Minnesota ritual that for eight winters has had artists reimagining ice-fishing shacks as tiny community art centers — is, for me, one of the most amazing features of the creative landscape here. Instead of merely enduring Minnesota’s inarguably harsh winters, participating ASP artists embrace it through wildly creative interventions on ice. Given its uniqueness — which attracted the attention of NPR yesterday — it’s no surprise that we bring artists out to Medicine Lake whenever we can. Here’s one example: When Belgian dancer/choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker was in town for the Walker’s 2008 performance of FASE: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, she found herself out on the ice with assistant Performing Arts curator Michèle Steinwald and the dance company’s director, Kees Eijrond. Why they were there, in Steinwald’s words: “so we could participate in trying to break the world record for the longest bunny hop on a frozen lake (formerly held by Minnesota before Wisconsin took it away). That is why Anne is making bunny ears with her hands. We were so cold!”

The 2012 edition of the Art Shanty Projects closes February 5.

Backstage Haiku: Mariano Pensotti

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1:32am Sunday Jan 29, 2012- End of the Mariano Pensotti strike

1:32am Sunday Jan 29, 2012- End of the Mariano Pensotti strike

Rearranging Scattered Fragments: A SpeakEasy for Mariano Pensotti

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“The past is a grotesque animal   And in its eyes you see   How completely wrong you can be”    —   Of Montreal “The Past is a Grotesque Animal” In memory, life and fiction overlap. Moments once experienced from an already embedded and imperfect vantage point are subject to further manipulation; key details [...]

“The past is a grotesque animal
  And in its eyes you see
  How completely wrong you can be”
   —   Of Montreal “The Past is a Grotesque Animal”

In memory, life and fiction overlap. Moments once experienced from an already embedded and imperfect vantage point are subject to further manipulation; key details are sharpened while others are forgotten. One’s past, although completed in time, evolves through these reinterpretations and recallings, ever newly infused with the emotions and interests of the present. Mariano Pensotti draws on this concept and Of Montreal’s song “The Past is a Grotesque Animal,” for his play of the same name, explaining that the “past arises in this play as an animal glimpsed in our dream jungle. An animal that changes shape each time we remember it. A grotesque animal.”

Following the final performance of this show and the Walker’s Out There series, a group of audience members gathered in the McGuire Theatre’s balcony bar for a SpeakEasy, an informal conversation about the evening’s performance. This week’s discussion was facilitated by Erin Search-Wells of SuperGroup and Walker Art Center tour guide Florence Brammer. Themes and comments from that conversation are highlighted through this blog and continued commentary in this online forum is encouraged.

“I author my own disaster” — Of Montreal
Pablo steps out of his front door to find a package containing a severed hand. As we follow his life through Pensotti’s play, we witness Pablo’s increasing unbalance and demise, all initiated by a seemingly random event. For many of Pensotti’s characters, singular moments or actions spur narratives that take years to unfold. We visit each person on significant and mundane dates over a decade. Hopes arise, disappointments are accepted, and what resonates is perhaps not the grandness of life or the simple beauty of the banal, but rather a bitter critique, life presented as a pathetic series of mishaps and responses strung together through time. Beyond a dramatic tool, the severed hand comes to represent disconnect, frustration, and incompleteness.

Yet what emphasis ought to be placed on the “accidental” nature of life’s events? Can hope be found in this play through the agency of individuals to determine outcomes or meanings? While unexpected events can turn the course of a life, perhaps Pablo’s tragedy is not in having found the hand, but in his Hamlet-like indecision over how to cope with his situation. The characters we follow struggle with taking ownership over their lives, yet the unforeseen nature of events does not overpower the impact of each choice. At times they make bold decisions, at other times they seem to flounder, uncertain of what to do and desiring only to maintain a veneer of normality despite internal turmoil.

Pensotti does not present us with a “beginning” or “end,” we are instead offered a series of snapshots between 1999 and 2009, during a time when his characters range in age from 25-35. This phase in life provides an added significance, described by Pensotti as the period during which “one stops being who one thinks one is to become the person one is.” Through this process, we see the push and pull of influences; lives driven by a combination of events and responses, wherein characters never fully arrive, but rather navigate a constantly altering terrain.

We want our film to be beautiful, not realistic – Of Montreal
Though the stories told abruptly shift location, characters, and date, “The Past is a Grotesque Animal,” offers a series of throughlines for the audience to follow. A rotating stage divided into quadrants allows a broad array of locations as a stage crew quickly alters the sets out of view of the spectators. This movement not only creates the illusion that the action for any one group of characters never stops, it also provides a visual representation of the continual and constant march of time. As we follow stories and minor moments through a decade, we are nevertheless reminded of the larger trajectory of time, mortality resting as a final endpoint for characters that would ultimately disappear from a stage continuing to spin like the earth on its axis, ad infinitum.

As actors shift characters from scene to scene, they take turns embodying the role of a narrator who summarizes and contextualizes the action. Pensotti likens this element to a “voice-over that could give sense to the scattered fragments of a film that is lost forever.” In the present, the past takes on a clear progression invisible to those engulfed by the flow of on-going events. Diverging from the standard, removed narrator, commentary occasionally comes from within a scene, by a character spewing a tense internal monologue for the audience while engaging in pleasantries within the vignette. Beyond memory itself as an amalgamation of reality and fiction, we are herein presented with another nuance – the division between internal and external realities. The common ground of polite social discourse through which the characters interact is itself shown to be fiction, with a very different “real drama” taking place within the mind of the character.

Things could be different but they’re not  -  Of Montreal
Pensotti’s comment that “we are what we narrate” has manifold implications – the fiction of who one tells oneself one is, the reality that is the outcome of one’s action, or the stories one tells oneself through memory about both. As the stage makes its final rotation, each quadrant is shown to be empty – a set of place-holders waiting to be created, populated, and transformed as well as a reminder that conditions, norms, and practices could “always be otherwise,” and yet they are not, leaving the open-ended question “why?”

MORE:

Read the opening night blog written by Jeffrey Wells of SuperGroup

Of Montreal – Recording of “The Past is a Grotesque Animal”
Of Montreal – Lyrics for “The Past is a Grotesque Animal”

Lightsey Darst’s article on the Walker’s Out There Series

SAVE THE DATE:

The next SpeakEasy will be held on February 18 to discuss Bill T. Jones’ Story/Time.

Grotesque Animals: I’ll Tell You Yours If You Tell Me Mine

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To spark discussion, the Walker invites local artists and critics to write overnight reviews of our performances. The ongoing Re:View series shares a diverse array of independent voices and opinions; it doesn’t reflect the views or opinions of the Walker or its curators. Today, Jeffrey Wells from SuperGroup shares his perspective on Thursday night’s Out [...]

To spark discussion, the Walker invites local artists and critics to write overnight reviews of our performances. The ongoing Re:View series shares a diverse array of independent voices and opinions; it doesn’t reflect the views or opinions of the Walker or its curators. Today, Jeffrey Wells from SuperGroup shares his perspective on Thursday night’s Out There performance of El Pasado es un Animal Grotesco (The Past Is a Grotesque Animal) by Mariano Pensotti. Agree or disagree? Feel free to share your thoughts in comments!

In Lightsey Darst’s recent article about the Out There series, she brings up the question of the demystification of a performance after one has experienced it.  She mentions fleeing a talkback “before the production utterly disappeared for me under the weight of explanation.” That somehow in our effort to understand a performance better by asking questions, reading program notes, learning how/when/why/where/by whom it was made, that an audience member’s actual experience gets clouded over. That being said, read this at your own risk.

Tending to agree with Lightsey (though I’ve really been enjoying the SpeakEasy events this year!), I also like to enter a performance as context-less as possible, especially when it’s someone’s work I’ve never experienced before, as was the case with Mariano Pensotti’s El Pasado es un Animal Grotesco (The Past Is a Grotesque Animal). I did not read the program notes, which maybe outs me as a novice performance writer (that’s a lie, I’m not even a performance writer at all, except that I’m writing about this performance). I did not google Mariano Pensotti. I did not watch any videos or read any articles, interviews, or transcripts (ack! so much information!) about the show in full.  I did read the opening sentences of something that described someone’s association with the set as being dollhouse-like (I think — don’t quote me on that), which now probably explains why from the moment the show started I was flooded with memories of my sister’s room, our toy house with the removable cardboard roof exposing the small cubicled rooms of my imaginary doll family. And from there to my sister’s spinning ballerina jewelry box. And from there to the Lazy Susan my mom purchased from a wood-worker in the upper peninsula of Michigan. And from there to the countless family dinners with “Susan” holding court (and condiments) right there in the center of the table. I now wonder how my experience would have been altered had I never had the dollhouse association. I certainly was engulfed in personal nostalgia from the get-go.

I imagine if you’ve made it this far, I may have already somehow crushed your experience with the weight of my explanation.  But maybe that’s not so bad after all? Maybe you had a Lazy Susan too? Or a mom?

This is a play that tells the stories of Pablo, Dana, Mario, Vicky, and Laura. Sometimes things happen to them that are interesting, and sometimes the things that happen to them feel normal. Sometimes those things are the same. Some of the things that happen to them you might relate to, and some maybe not.  They are people living in the decade between the late nineties and the late aughts, and so are/were we.

As I write this it is sounding trite, and I’m not quite sure that is the tone I’m shooting for. But there is something about this performance, maybe the realistic performance styles, maybe the use of narration, or maybe just the monotony of the rotating set, that made me feel everything was very normal.  Sometimes that normality got a little tiresome, but more often than not, it left me feeling curious and moved.

It may have been the influence of the “Global Visionaries” subtitle for this year’s Out There, but I couldn’t escape the human connectivity I felt. It feels silly to say but everything happening felt totally within the realm of my possibility. Even the most obscene moments, punctuated by the vocalizations of audience members around me, held an easy inevitability for me, which I liked. Dramatic, kinky, harrowing events happen right there with everything else, it only depends on which way they’re/we’re facing.

All these events were narrated, as if they had already happened, or as if they might happen someday. Come to think of it, I can’t actually recall the verb tenses used. (I wished I spoke Spanish — I’m a slow reader). These were stories of the lives people have, the lives they want, the lives they plan for, the lives they’ll never get, the lives they end up with. Which in the end left me with a nonplussed feeling that somewhere someone is thinking of a life that looks like mine and the life that I am thinking of is already being lived. Fiction is fact is fiction is fact.

What did you think, feel, see, do? And what about that attractive guy that kept coming out with the file boxes? What was he all about?

Comments welcome!

Quit Your Day Job: SuperGroup on Chelfitsch

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To spark discussion, the Walker invites local artists and critics to write overnight reviews of our performances. The ongoing Re:View series shares a diverse array of independent voices and opinions; it doesn’t reflect the views or opinions of the Walker or its curators. Today, Erin Search-Wells from SuperGroup shares her perspective on Thursday night’s Out There performance of Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech by chelfitsch/Toshiki Okada. Agree or disagree? Feel free to share your thoughts in comments!

All I have to say are good things. So for the purpose of making this interesting at all, instead of just a list of why I like, and what I like, and how the sum of the parts became a whole that was transcendent, I will try to write it, in the fashion of the translated surtitles.

To spark discussion, the Walker invites local artists and critics to write overnight reviews of our performances. The ongoing Re:View series shares a diverse array of independent voices and opinions; it doesn’t reflect the views or opinions of the Walker or its curators. Today, Erin Search-Wells from SuperGroup shares her perspective on Thursday night’s Out There performance of Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech by chelfitsch/Toshiki Okada. Agree or disagree? Feel free to share your thoughts in comments!

All I have to say are good things. So for the purpose of making this interesting at all, instead of just a list of why I like, and what I like, and how the sum of the parts became a whole that was transcendent, I will try to write it, in the fashion of the translated surtitles.

I went to a performance last night. First of all, I settled in to the comfort of mundane cycles. I realized they would pause, reset, and the music and lights would change, and then another would speak. And then there was a change of pace. (I don’t know if the chelfitsch company would approve of me bringing this up but I could not help but remember learning about Jo-ha-kyu in theater school. You should actually click the link because its interesting stuff. It isn’t the same thing as a beginning, middle, and end, which is like, for kindergartners.)

Have you noticed that if you go to the theater, sometimes you like it, or it’s really terrible, and then other times, you are dancing after it, or you can’t stop smiling, or perhaps you want to get back into the practice of writing?

That is a really fantastic feeling to leave a show with: I have seen something that is truly different and works. It seems like contemporary performance has a recurring challenge in “talking and moving/dancing at the same time.” It should be totally easy for us humans, but somehow it is still a “problem” to solve. This is one solution.

You could look at this as a “quit your day job” kind of play. Which it is. I mean really, we should all just quit our day jobs. But that’s unrealistic, that’s not what I mean. So what if, instead, we could live like a free body: where no bodily movement would be ridiculous or silly or embarrassing? Our movements would be taken as equal to the words we were saying. So if my foot was out when I said that I wanted to be “taken on a ride,” you would look at my foot, and you would say, “Now I understand, more deeply, more fully, what “taken for a ride” means.”

Wouldn’t it be great if all human bodies went to workplaces and expressed themselves equally physically and verbally? It would be freedom. There would be no wrong answers. We will see. Maybe on Saturday when I take the class at the Walker, where Toshiki Okada will teach us how to physicalize our unconscious, and repeat, and subvert, then we will see. Maybe I will have it all wrong. Maybe. But I have a feeling that the answer won’t be, “NO! You are doing this wrong! Your body should be moving UP and OUT, and you shouldn’t follow EVERY impulse, only the RIGHT ones, the ones that make SENSE.” I’m pretty sure those voices have no room in this practice.

Do we think there has to be a right and wrong way of doing something, for someone to become a master of it? Or can we all do this? I hope I can.

I know it will look weird if I start to run around a lunchroom table with my arms wrapped around me, and my knees together, in the real world. So maybe I’ll find secret ways to do it every now and then. I could have watched that part forever, by the way.

Also there was a very alarming metaphor about a cicada that will stir you.

Well, I wasn’t very successful at writing like chelfitsch surtitles. You should go. You could just watch the movement, you could just marvel/laugh at the writing, or you could flutter between the two.

Presenting History – A SpeakEasy for Rabih Mroué

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___________________________________________________________________________________ SpeakEasy: An informal audience discussion following Saturday evening performances. Throughout the Out There Series, conversations will be facilitated by members of SuperGroup paired with with Walker Art Center Tour Guides. This blog incorporates participants’ comments and questions, offering an opportunity to continue the discussion in an online forum. ___________________________________________________________________________________   BREATH. On a central [...]

___________________________________________________________________________________
SpeakEasy: An informal audience discussion following Saturday evening performances. Throughout the Out There Series, conversations will be facilitated by members of SuperGroup paired with with Walker Art Center Tour Guides. This blog incorporates participants’ comments and questions, offering an opportunity to continue the discussion in an online forum.
___________________________________________________________________________________

 

BREATH.

On a central television, a face fades in and out, barely discernible, barely there.
Neither absent nor present.
Introduce the narrator, a new face, clear on the screen.
To our upper right, we see his hands and the notebooks that cover his desk.
To our upper left, another pair of hands follow the story, creating a visual map of data.

The narrator begins sharing newspaper clippings of disappearances, but this weighty subject soon turns to humor and a story starts to unfold. The initial facts and visuals seem straightforward, but as the contradictory accounts mount, the screen becomes filled with overlapping lists, names, connections, financial reports, and dates. From a clear timeline, our reference points devolve into a mystery, telling a history to be deciphered, sorted, reinterpreted, and never fully known.

 

“Are you my friend Horatio?”
- Heiner Mueller, The Hamletmachine

As he lays dying, Hamlet asks Horatio to tell his story. But what story could he or would he tell? Lost to him are so many musings and monologues, personal confessions, motivations, and internal struggles. The historian is left to create order out of remnants – to establish a beginning, follow a progression, and explain the resolution. What Mroué reveals is the messiness of lived history, the scattered and unfinished nature of human experiences, and the absurdity that can occur when this confusion bumps up against official attempts at explanation.

In Looking for a Missing Employee, Mroué highlights the mediated nature of the consumption of history. Our charismatic narrator tells us of his work following newspaper articles; he has compiled the information for us, and kindly serves as our translator. Never looking directly into his eyes, but at his face on a screen, the gap between the audience and the person creating this story is brought to the fore. Questions arise – why these newspapers and not others, what is or is not translated, where is the line between occurrence and artistic fabrication? This is a theatre piece based on “true” events, yet throughout the evening, the veracity of the documentation presented is called into question. Was it foolish to place faith in these newspapers, to believe our historian-narrator?

As Mroué emphasized in an interview with Walker Senior Performing Arts Curator Philip Bither, he is “choosing and…editing all this material.” He states that “to edit – to cut and remove, to keep, or to use my voice in this way and not in the other way – all of this makes this pretension for being neutral impossible.” And yet as one audience member noted, there is perhaps a desire to empathize, to place trust in our narrator. “Truth” may be relative, a creation by accepted authorities drawing on established forms of evidence, yet the knowledge of the contingency of truth does not entirely efface the desire to seek the sense of stability or security that accompanies a resolved narrative. Mroué departs, yet his face lingers on the screen. Eventually, we clap, layering a clean ending onto an open-ended story.

This blog, too, falls prey to this tendency to organize disorder. The free associations, tangents, digressions, ponderous pauses, inconclusive phrasing, self-assessments, restatements, and verbal energy of animated discussions are herein ordered, themes are established, and paragraphs are formed. Assumptions of what a reader may want are intertwined with the author’s own interests, inclinations, and imperfect memories. What other form might the record of such a conversation take? What form would be most accurate? What form would be most useful?

 

“He cries and laughs, not from sadness or joy, like a lover who draws a line in air and then erases it”
– Al Akhtal Assaghir, quoted in Looking for a Missing Employee

Mroué differentiates art and activism, bringing forth questions of self-identification and the relative safety involved in deeming oneself artist, intellectual, or activist. While the reflective nature of art is distinct from active revolution, there are fluid borders between these roles and the selection of subject matter and the posing of questions bear a relationship to the political environment into which art is introduced. During the discussion that followed his afternoon presentation The Pixelated Revolution, Mroué spoke of being drawn to art that provokes, that shares questions rather than answers, that presents ideas that lead to conversations. This theme seems fitting for the Out There Series, for art that perhaps does not fit neatly into disciplines, art that perturbs, pushes boundaries, and ignites questioning that extends beyond an evening-length performance.

 

MORE:

SuperGroup – Erin Search-Wells’ opening night blog.

Walker Performing Arts – Jesse Leaneagh’s blog about Mroue’s work.

Pages Magazine – review of Looking for a Missing Employee.

In Focus  - interview with Mroué.

 

FURTHER AFIELD – VISUALLY MAPPING HISTORY:

Mémoires by Guy Debord & Asger Jorn - essays on the book  via wordpress and Vector.

Not About the Stamps: Truth and Justice in Looking

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To spark discussion, the Walker invites local artists and critics to write overnight reviews of our performances. The ongoing Re:View series shares a diverse array of independent voices and opinions; it doesn’t reflect the views or opinions of the Walker or its curators. Today, Erin Search-Wells from SuperGroup shares her perspective on Thursday night’s Out [...]

To spark discussion, the Walker invites local artists and critics to write overnight reviews of our performances. The ongoing Re:View series shares a diverse array of independent voices and opinions; it doesn’t reflect the views or opinions of the Walker or its curators. Today, Erin Search-Wells from SuperGroup shares her perspective on Thursday night’s Out There performance of Looking for a Missing Employee by Rabih Mroué.  Agree or disagree? Feel free to share your thoughts in comments!

Ah yes! A crime! A play! This looks like a job for me! Not only did I wikipedia Lebanon, I even considered renting Waltz with Bashir before I saw this play. Not to mention my experience with Forensic Anthropology (Bones) and Criminal Law (Special Victims Unit, Damages); these things combined I have decided I can help Mr. Rabih Mroué solve the case of the missing employee. There is even somebody taking notes for me! I am lucky. I’m merely four seats away from the performer who is telling the story, and yet I feel like I am also watching a YouTube video from far far away. In between myself and the live performer sit a few incredulous folks. One says, “Am I going to like this? Its been a long time since I’ve seen a play.” Halfway through, after hearing them leave several times, I hear the same doubtful voice behind me say, “I don’t get it. So there’s some money missing. And?” At another point, as Rabih Mroué promises to break into song: “Oh, you have got to be kidding.”

Let me be clear. These voices were not my inner voice. They were the people sitting behind me. And that, as they say, is the Magic of Theater. We have to sit in a live room with a bunch of squirming misfits who have a lot of opinions and want to be smart, and also hate smart people at the same time. We want to be smarter than other people and also, simultaneously, harbor distaste for faux intellectuals. I think it feels good to watch other people fidgeting, not knowing where to look, wondering if they should keep clapping, wondering where the performer(s) is/are. But now I have to ask myself a harder, tougher question that gets at the meat of this show. What does this form of messy co-existence have to do with solving a mystery? In this casual blog post, I will attempt to say “EVERYTHING.”

First of all, I’m trying not to give away too many details of the crime because some of you haven’t seen the show yet. How am I doing? It is pretty tough to share only a few things, winnowing out some of the things that were shared by someone who had to winnow out some things for a show, pulled together from highly unreliable news sources. Mr. Mroué is extremely successful at withholding information and I like it. (I was reminded of Kafka immediately and then told to stop thinking of Kafka.) I like when he leaves us with a mysterious musical interlude. I like it when he refuses to show us articles for purposes of privacy, decency, bad photocopying, and simply time.

At first I think if I can figure something out: what really happened, the steps of the cover-up, who spent the money, then I will feel satisfaction. But burying ourselves in a story, even if it is “solved” or if we “get it” will only lead us to an ending. And then what do we have? I realized pretty quickly that “Detective Stabler” wouldn’t be predictably losing his cool, “Olivia Benson” wouldn’t be walking in on a victim taking revenge into her own hands, and “Dr. Temperance Brennan’s” heart wouldn’t be melting bit by bit.

Let me say something about boredom. I insist that the experience of boredom is an indicator that something else is going on inside. Let boredom exist without being impatient with it. It’s really just a door to the next experience.

Here on this blog I am supposed to share my reaction, but I can’t deny how other peoples opinions affect me. My judgments are ever-changing. So when somebody I talked to after the show said, “I didn’t care about the story,” I thought, “What story? The story for me, was a lot bigger than what happened to a man and his wife and the prime minister and some stamp forgers. It was the story of people (us) who deserve our organizations to be better. We are the main character. And yes, we can have empathy for our collective selves. Truth is not a guarantee. It’s not a right. Anything can be published. There’s no justice.”

At the beginning of Searching for a Missing Employee, we receive a message, loosely rephrased, in my memory: “I am not interested in finding the guilty and the innocent.” At the end the artist makes the statement again, only at the end he speaks it in his own language. Even though it had been written in English at the beginning of the show, a deep voice from the audience called out, at the end of the show, “Translation?” So for me, and everybody else in the theater, that was the last line we heard of the play. The last word was spoken by an audience member who hadn’t put two and two together. I liked the night because it reminded me that we are people and people made these institutions, these organizations. We deserve better but blaming is futile. As Mr. Mroué is doing, we can ask questions about the institutions that are meant to support and serve the people. But we all made/accepted/live with/those institutions of state, treasury, law, police, press, etc.. Sound serious? Thanks to Mroué’s innocent presence, I also found myself laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.

Me and the other members of SuperGroup have been talking about how to spark dialogue about Out There. I think we (audience, performance community, etc.) all need to practice saying what we like and don’t like with respect and careful thought, and not be afraid to disagree and/or learn something new. How do we spark debate? I’ve decided its by saying decidedly that we liked or didn’t like something. So here goes. Overall, I liked Looking for a Missing Employee. A lot. Let the dogs come.

Untitled Blog Post: Lost in These Bodies

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To spark discussion, the Walker invites local artists and critics to write overnight reviews of our performances. The ongoing Re:View series shares a diverse array of independent voices and opinions; it doesn’t reflect the views or opinions of the Walker or its curators. Today, Sam Johnson from SuperGroup shares his perspective on Thursday night’s performance [...]

To spark discussion, the Walker invites local artists and critics to write overnight reviews of our performances. The ongoing Re:View series shares a diverse array of independent voices and opinions; it doesn’t reflect the views or opinions of the Walker or its curators. Today, Sam Johnson from SuperGroup shares his perspective on Thursday night’s performance of  Untitled Feminist Show by Young Jean Lee.  Agree or disagree? Feel free to share your thoughts in comments!

I’m a performing artist. I don’t think I have ever shared my thoughts about a show in writing in a public forum. Definitely not a blog post. Maybe a college paper, which is kind of pseudo-public. It scares me. I can’t speak with authority about any of this.

Going into the show last night I knew there would be nudity. Lots of it. The promotional material made that clear. Sitting there before it started I thought about the main image I had seen to promote the show. With the censor bars. I wondered if those bars would work retroactively to the show. That a show that (I was hoping) would revel in nudity had a public image making it clear that nudity should be covered.

This is not a critique, I understand why it was necessary. I decided to allow it to start off my mind in complexity/ambiguity/contradiction. And all those people in the audience, sold out, abuzz. I wondered why? Young Jean Lee’s recognition and deserved (I think, though I am no expert; I said that already, right?) accolades? The promise of nudity? The word “feminist” in the title? The energizing spring in January? I’ll assume it was all of that.

As the lights went down to start the show I felt a great amount of anticipation: How will I be introduced to these naked bodies? If this show has no text, as I’d heard, what will it have? Why is it still billed as theater? Uh-oh, stay focused.

I objectified the performers almost immediately upon their entrance. This kind of objectify: “to represent concretely; present as an object,” not the kind where bodies are turned mentally into only sexual objects. As their naked bodies walked past I marveled at them. The structures and presence and physicalness. The bones and sinew and flesh and skin and hair.

And as the piece went on I found myself lost in the bodies. When I checked in I wondered if I wasn’t that interested in what was actually happening on stage – the narratives and commentary. The fairytale-like story happened. I saw a lot of different representations of women. Mother/caretaker/sex/fighter/witch/innocent/dancer/fire/bitch/waif/man/pop star/child/burlesque performer, etc.

But none of it drew me away from the bodies.

I felt the presentation of things. This white square far away from me where these naked people danced. And it felt like they danced for the audience as much as for themselves. I noticed that I kept wondering if I would at some point feel like I was watching a community develop apart from me, but I mostly felt pretty continually addressed, included, explicitly, one way or another.

And I wondered what it would be like to have breasts. In a way that I hadn’t thought about in awhile, or ever. The physical weight and presence of them. And I wondered if I would be turned on in a different way if the whole cast was attractive, naked men. And how that would change my experience.

And I kept noticing the music. How I kept feeling like it drove the movement and set the tone. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like how much it felt like an outside force: prearranged, set. Maybe that was the point. During the shaking section–which led into a thrashing/bouncing/angry/joyful/powerful/confrontational/inclusive solo–I wanted the heavy guitar music to stop. I wanted to feel like the energy was more mysterious. I didn’t want to draw lines back to the music, but I did.

As I left the theater I had a lot of questions. Why this why that. Why was the vocalizing almost exclusively when only one person was on stage? Why text in that one song, in a language I couldn’t understand? What do all of these archetypes of femaleness tell me? Why did so much of the big movement seem so general to me? Why could I feel the segments so strongly? Did I like that? What did that last image mean? Why don’t I find the same things funny so many people in the rest of the audience find funny? Etc… etc… etc…

But I also had all that time with all those bodies. That intimate knowledge. The celebration and reverence and messiness and joy and voyeurism and complications.

What did you think? Feel? Know? Question? Respond to? Respond to?! Respond to this! Please!

Young Jean Lee Interview Part Two

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    The interview with Young Jean Lee currently featured on the Walker website is only part of the conversation I had with her late December. Here’s the rest of it, with topics ranging from Ms. Lee’s potential film project, her take on archiving live theater work, and her favorite experimental theater shows she saw [...]