Link to L Magazine Archive

Click HERE for full article archive from The L Magazine, Aug 2006- Jan 2009.

Some Writings on Performa09 Events (Produced through Writing Live09)

Complete archive published through Performa09 HERE

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Yeondoo Jung Makes a Movie

I interviewed Yeondoo Jung the other day and he was wearing a cashmere shirt in a deep maroon. His pants were a slightly faded version of the same color. I always like it when people wear all one color. I think it represents a high level of commitment.

Jung’s father threw an ashtray at him when he said he wanted to be an artist. It was a heavy crystal ashtray. I’m pretty sure from the context of the story he told that the ashtray was clean. Regardless, it seems it was really a symbolic gesture because the object didn’t actually hit Jung and probably was never intended to.

Jung Senior was a pharmacist in Korea until he retired because of the changes to medical licensing in the country a few years ago. Although he was trained in Western pharmaceuticals and went to medical school, Yeondoo’s father used his extensive knowledge of Chinese herbs to combine his own medicines to treat the overall cause of an individual’s affliction, rather than just the symptoms. Western medicine tends to ignore the fact that human beings are fully integrated entities. Korea Westernized its healthcare industry five years ago, separating diagnoses and treatment as well as pharmaceutical and herbal medications. There is no longer a legal place for sophisticated, creative approaches to healing that cross these imposed delineations.

Yeondoo Jung might not have followed his father’s wishes that he go to medical school, but his work is inspired by his father’s attitude that it is one’s approach and the way one looks at things that matter, not a loyalty to pure form that is important. This attitude is shared by a lot of artists who work across mediums, but Yeondoo Jung also happens to be quite technically accomplished (in sculpture, video, photography and performance installation). His work, topically, deals with the fantasy and disbelief in film and photography; he is especially inspired by old Hollywood studio musicals with their painted backdrops and obviously constructed sets.

Before I talked to Yeondoo, I heard from a mutual friend that he was really “into” Elvis. I didn’t really know what that meant. Was it some hipster affectation?

Nope. Actually, Jung is quite sincere about his love for Elvis Pressley, having started his extensive record collection at 15. His ultimate fantasy is to get a big red Cadillac and drive down to what he referred to as “Graceland Palace.” When I suggested that he film the journey and make a piece about it, he looked at me a little funny. Art is very important to him of course, but we’re talking about his personal Elvis fantasy here, and it isn’t an issue he seems interested in exploring the non-realities of. In fact, in general Jung has no interest in cold, hard truth. His work is made up of a sparkle-eyed attitude of pure admiration. He looks lovingly at a bygone era before green screen technology and computer animation, where the best fantasies still have their seams showing.

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Pasta Sauna, by Proef (Marije Vogelzang)

Performa Hub: Visited Nov 5^th at noon

My mother is Italian. When I tell her I had a bad day she tells me to eat pasta and go to sleep. I’m worried this process will make me fat. I have a lot of bad days.

Marinetti said pasta makes you fat. And slow. And dull. And lazy.

The Pasta Sauna at the Performa Hub slows me down. I’m rushing between appointments. I have to check my email. Instead, I stand in a steamy room and watch Shelley, who is dressed in a white jump suit, take a ball of dough and work it through a pasta maker that is at the top of a 12-foot ladder. It unrolls slowly into a pot of lightly boiling water waiting below. We try not to talk about Performa logistics. I tell her it’s nice to see her in this atmosphere.

An NYU student with short black hair and bright pink lipstick takes photos with a little red camera. People write on the steamed up glass walls of the sauna as if they were dirty cars parked on the street, only they don’t write “wash me.” That I would have noticed. I don’t notice what they write.

Lillie asks me how to pronounce two words in the Manifesto she is reading outside the Sauna doors, inside the Performa Hub. She reads well. I grate cheese onto the pasta (“fat,” I think), and drizzle olive oil (“more fat,” I think), sprinkle salt and pepper, squeeze lemon, add a little rosemary. I sit with Lyra. We talk a little about the website. We talk a little about how good the fresh pasta is. I watch people walk in off the street and go through the lulling, satisfying process of obtaining fresh, free lunch.

Marije Vogelzang is back in the Netherlands by the time I’m sitting here enjoying her “eating design,” but a journalism student from Columbia interviews people on her team. I think about how this girl looks exactly like I imagine a proper journalism student should look: brown hair, glasses, a young face with a serious expression. She even has one of those little notebooks with the spiral binding at the top of the page.

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Meg Stuart: Auf Den Tisch! / At The Table

Barishnakov Arts Center

Attended: Friday Nov 6^th, 7:30pm

First response written Saturday Nov. 7, 7:40pm; Location of response M14 Bus; location on bus back left section; Entered bus Ave A between 2^nd St. and Houston; Got off bus Ninth Ave; Destination The Kitchen; Mood anxious; Songs played on ipod include Flushed Chest, Joan as Police Woman; Russian Hill, Jellyfish; After the Flood, Talk Talk; Think, Do Make Say Think.

I’d be lying if I said I knew how they got from here to there. All I really know for sure is that I didn’t want to leave when the performance was as over as it was going to be.

“Is improvisation alive and well?” Roselee Goldberg asked.
Yes (in more words) was the answer.

Exposing the physical and psychological makes these performers human, and then very near super human. (I wouldn’t want to watch just anyone in formlessness.) It’s all out here. They’re laying it out: the ugly, the sex, the politics, and blatantly tortured souls. What I know I saw was that they did this because they had to do this.

Suicide attempts called out. Dollar bills torn, and why couldn’t I tear one?

Apple in the mouth; (fake) blood spilling down cheeks. Desperate steps. Eating, kissing, consuming each other.

Second response written Monday Nov. 9, 9:00am; Location of response an apartment in Williamsburg; Mood empty; No music playing.

Yesterday Tan Lin was talking a bit about his Twitter and chalk performance piece. This was in the context of a Writing Live workshop, a deprogramming event that, at best, resists definition. He said he was surprised when so many people stopped to read a long, personal story as it was being written with chalk on the sidewalk. Rebecca Armstrong said this wasn’t surprising, that the personal was the only thing that anyone would stop for in this city. I’m paraphrasing her from memory: the depersonalization of the experience of living and being in New York City (any city?) creates hunger for intimate personal moments. I read this once in a magazine: the spa industry exists to package and sell touch and intimacy to New Yorkers (any city dwellers?) in a non-threatening, consumable way. I’m drawing the obvious conclusion: Meg Stuart’s Auf Den Tisch! is a question, not a filling station.

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William Kentridge

Mon Nov 8^th, 8pm at Cedar Lake Ballet

1. Regarding Ideas:

About halfway through his lecture performance with video, William Kentridge tells a story that involves himself, the early morning/late night minutes lying between four and five a.m., a garden, a studio, an alarm system, his wife, a bed, and a video camera. In the story he wakes up with thoughts of an impending (now happening) performance project running through his head. He has an idea on many levels. First, he realizes that he’s awake because the ideas are coming to him now and he must record them somehow; second, he realizes that this process of having the idea is really a part of the idea itself; third, he decides to document the idea via an external visual of the idea process, which is really the same thing as the idea in this case.

He said it: “My job is to make drawings, not to make sense.”

He gets out of bed and walks through his garden. Just the word garden alone, when it comes out of his mouth, evokes a kind of manicured loveliness: something magical and precise and softly colorful in the pre-dawn glow. There must be dew and roses present. He walks across the garden and reaches his studio. Again, though he refers to it as just “my studio,” the image is clearly illuminated. It must have many windows; it must be wood, painted white, perhaps with a wall clinging vine along one or more of the outer walls. He turns off the alarm and walks in the door. The alarm is less visible: is it a little keypad to the right of the door? Does it beep when he punches in the code? Let’s say yes to both, only the beeps must be somewhat faint, more elegant than beeps should be allowed to be.

He gets the video camera from the studio and walks back to his bedroom. He sets up his video camera at the foot of the bed where he and his wife sleep. He tells his wife the camera is not for domestic pornography. And then suddenly, or rather, a few minutes after he’s moved on from the initial story description and into another segment, we get to see footage of the bed, the wife, and the idea process via the artist sitting up sleepless in bed between four and five a.m. Then all sorts of questions, or rather, one specific question arises. Are we watching real-time footage of a man having an idea about having an idea or are watching a writer/actor who planned this pre-recorded performance ingredient (which is really just one idea) precisely because of its charmingly accidental, diary-like quality?

2. Regarding movement:

Roberta Smith said of Kentridge in the New York Times in 2007: “Perhaps because he began as an actor, writer and set designer, he doesn’t exhibit great feeling for the immediacy of the art object. As a result his work is almost always best when presented at a remove, in translation or in motion.”

Claudia La Rocco said of Tere O’Connor in the New York Times in 2009: “At a time when many choreographers are distancing themselves from dance as the central focus of their work and instead placing themselves in a broader context of conceptually driven art and multimedia projects, Mr. O’Connor’s work remains rigorously movement focused.”

Seen in the context of a larger arts-world of colliding pure forms, movement ceases to become something outside the “art object.” Adding elements of motion and choreographed live action does not take Kentridge’s work away from itself or create distance and remove that adds value to some higher level tangible object-based aspect of itself. It is not some way of presenting itself, but rather, just is itself.

Staging the Image: Video in Contemporary Performance (PAJ: Journal of Art and Performance, Fall 2009)

At a post-show Talkback at P.S. 122 in New York City’s East Village in February 2009,director Peter Born addressed the short video sequence that was

used in Pent Up:A Revenge Dance, a show written and performed by his

wife, Okwui Okpokwasili. He said, “A lot of theatre uses it, but I think, if you can

express it another way, then why use video?” It’s a simple rhetorical question, one

that betrays Born’s minimalist theory in terms of the medium. But the answers,

exposed through a survey of video’s wider use in contemporary live performance, are

actually quite deep and varied. In our technology-saturated visual environment, the

question is not whether video will be used in performance (it will), or whether this

is a trend that may pass (like ever-expanding online culture, it won’t), but rather,

how savvy performers and directors can use moving images to create powerful, visu-

ally interesting, critical, or otherwise fresh and authentic works on stage. Several

recent New York City performances shed light on the positively exploited potential

of video in performance, while others serve to reveal common missteps and abuses

of the ubiquitous medium.

Pent Up is a rich example of a performance that successfully incorporates technical

image projection. The artists’ well-designed and powerfully involved use of video

in the opening scene is informed by the qualities they bring to the rest of the show,

especially Okpokwasili’s attention to full yet terse movement phrasing and Born’s

knack for arranging visual spaces. As the audience enters the small black box theatre

from its Ninth Street entrance, two performers and a limited set are frozen in a

stunning tableau. A dancefloor-like white rectangle with jagged, intentionally torn

ends sets a frame on the ground for the scene in the otherwise all black room. A

young woman, fair-skinned but clearly of mixed ethnic background, lays on her back,

eyes closed, with her left knee bent out to the side. Her head rests in the remnants

of a cracked television screen; exposed red, yellow, and blue wires create a colorful,

broken, technology-inspired pillow or headdress. She wears the plaid skirt and white

collared shirt of a school uniform; her hair is braided in neat, tight cornrows. Stand-

ing behind this, Okpokwasili hangs her head, her back to the audience. Her dress

is untied and pulled down to her waist so that her entire broad, dark and muscular

back is exposed. On it, video images that she and Born shot while visiting Nigeria

are projected: elusive scenes that recall Africa: young children’s faces, adorned women,

and bare feet dancing in the dust.

Immediately, before people are finished being seated and before any real movement

occurs on stage, the audience is transported into an exotic, ethereal, otherworldly

space. Because the images are being literally written on the performer’s skin, there

becomes, even without movement, a real sense of the black female body as receiver,

one that even mirrors the black box of the theatre itself. Content that is later revealed

through spoken text and movement is already literalized on the stage through this

simple, finely crafted first visual sentence. Even if the audience doesn’t quite under-

stand in the beginning what they are seeing, the dream feeling created through the

strange but lovely tableau—including, necessarily in this case, the video—holds

great promise.

The story behind the movements that subsequently unfolds was initially inspired by

the myth of Medea and its various versions that explore a woman alternately mad or

distressed and vengeful. Many of the movements themselves are evocative of Maya

Deren’s videos of trance dances in Haiti, or Nina Simone’s hypnotic live perfor-

mances. But at its core Pent Up is about emotional and psychological inheritance,

the immigrant experience, and intergenerational conflict. It is also highly charged

with still taboo notions of overactive female sexuality and how it relates to race

and to religion, yet none of these issues are presented in a straightforward narrative

form. The feeling of place and the sense of loss and change is made clear precisely

through the moving images of Africa presented on the back of the mother (played

by Okpokwasili) and through the implications of the broken television screen placed

under the head of the daughter (played by Gloria Huwiler) in the opening scene.

From this acknowledgement about the two women’s different worlds (and different

skin colors, ideas about religion and love, and feelings about sexuality and money), we

can see the old world alive inside the mother. But the old world, as shown through

video imagery, exists in memory rather than in reality or with clarity. The images

seem to remind us that once an immigrant leaves their homeland, memory mingles

with dream and loses (like a video clip itself does) the ability to change (the way

a performance can and does from night to night). As Okpokwasili moves through

the physical actions of the next fifty minutes, the video never returns to remind

us of her past, but it never leaves the mind either. We see a body being pushed to

extremes, dripping in sweat, breathing hard, suffering, remembering suffering, and

causing suffering. This is a body, as we know from the opening scene, which has

already been written on.

If all live performance is, at least in part, about the experience of witnessing at

least one body moving in space, then the basic assumption in terms of any addi-

tion of video would be that it is distancing and distracting from the basic strength

of performance as a medium. In many cases, this has proven true. But as Pent Up

makes clear, if the video relates intimately and metaphorically with the content of

the show, and if it is creative or highly stylized by an artist with good visual sense,

there are new dimensions—those that link the body with the workings of the mind

or of society—that can be beautifully exposed. Another example of a well-executed

metaphor created through the combination of stage performance and video works is

Kalup Linzy’s recent Comedy, Tragedy, Sketches of Me, which the video/performance

artist performed at The Kitchen, in Chelsea, February 2009.

Linzy incorporates androgynous drag performance into almost all of his video

works, which he creates with intentionally poor quality and puts up on YouTube.

Although Internet videos would seem to be the antithesis of live performance, since

they can be downloaded and viewed by anyone at anytime, they mimic visual art

performance in the sense that they cannot ever really be owned by anyone but the

performer him/herself. Linzy rarely sells his videos; he makes his living as an artist by

selling, through his gallery Taxter & Spengemann, paintings inspired by the videos.

However, the videos and performances remain the most interesting of his works.

Because the YouTube videos resist easy commodification and Linzy incorporates

them with his live performances, his energy on stage is multi-layered. The diverse

constructive methodology—body, voice, and video—leads, in this case, to a smooth

transmission of real emotion from performer to audience.

Mirroring the stripped-down production quality of his videos, Linzy uses a bare-

bones version of drag to re-examine gender identity. During Comedy, Tragedy he

wears black shorts, a black T-shirt and no make-up. He changes wigs three or four

times and plays drag live through mannerisms and raunchy songs alone. This style

questions the construction of gender in the same way that the grittiness, what he

calls “off-ness,”1 of his videos questions the construction of art when it is made

with a technical medium. Linzy’s reference to the idea of something being “off” is

also a nod to the beginning of gallery showings of fine art video and performance

in the late 1960s and 1970s. In her essay “Performance, Video, and Trouble in the

Home,” Kathy O’Dell says,

Something would inevitably seem “off” whenever performance, performance-

based videos, or performance-and-video pieces were presented within com-

mercial gallery spaces. Joan Jonas, for example, presented Vertical Roll at the

Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1973 but subsequently did not find

such contexts, in general, ideal for the type of work she was doing at the

time—partly because it had been the roughness of the loft spaces that had

inspired her work in the first place . . . this “off-ness” was indicative of the

transgressive, avant-garde quality of these new forms . . . .2

Jonas’s insistence on the physical space of the less elite loft as opposed to the gal-

lery for the presentation of her works is updated into Linzy’s new “loft,” his (and

other video artists such as Ryan Trecartin’s and Cory Arcangel’s) democratic space

of inspiration: YouTube.

Though media criticism is an important component, the real emotion-based gender

issues that are explored in Comedy, Tragedy are essential to the success of this work.

Melodramatic, seemingly unfiltered human emotion gives the technical, space-based

criticism a hook into the consciousness of the audience. In one video clip shown

between live songs, Linzy sings Erykah Badu’s Didn’t Cha Know in front of a shower

curtain and bathroom mirror. His hair is up in a towel (referencing her famous

head wraps) and throughout the song he looks back and forth from the mirror to

the camera, lip-synching the neo-soul diva’s words with conviction and longing.

Here, Linzy succeeds in not only incorporating video works that complement the

live version of himself he presents in performance, but also in bringing up critical

questions about how we construct and see reality, art, and performance in the age

of Internet video.

Performing before Linzy on that same evening at The Kitchen—a pairing curated

by Rashida Blumbary—was Rashaad Newsome, who presented a less successful

examination of identity construction and popular culture through a video-and-

performance work entitled Shade Compositions. Although the work lacks cohesion

and could stand to be refined in order to produce more attention-sustaining combi-

nations of sounds and images, Newsome’s performance is still extremely interesting

in terms of the implications of his use of live technology as it captures, plays back,

and combines with live bodies and live voices. Using both a handheld Nintendo Wii

game controller that he hacked into and reprogrammed and a Mac laptop, New-

some records, loops, and remixes sounds and video projections in order to create a

multi-layered, symbolic construction of black American female identity as it relates

to popular culture, counter culture, and drag. It is a performance that is based, first

and foremost, like Linzy’s, on the ideas of how race and gender—especially the verbal

ticks and physical mannerisms of both—are constructed and reconstructed through

technological filters, making the live video performance aspect of the show both a

sleek fetishization of technology and a critical look at its implications.

Before any performers enter the stage, the show starts with a recorded projection

that plays on a large video screen. On the screen flashes glimpses of a black woman’s

body: a little bit of leg, an arm, the hem of a short skirt, the curve of a neck, a col-

larbone. At the end of the short sequence the sexy woman is shown in full; we see

from this angle that she is a man in drag. After that preface, Newsome enters the

room in a black suit and takes his place at a podium, which overlooks twenty-one

freestanding microphones that are set up to face the audience. With his laptop in

front of him, his Wii controller in hand, and the back of his bald head turned to

the audience, Newsome assumes the classic position of the orchestra conductor.

Although his entrance is colored by the ideas brought up by the video, only when

twenty-one polished, fashionable black women file in to take their places at each of

the twenty-one microphones, does the true necessity of the introductory video in

this work become apparent. Newsome walks a tightrope between identity politics

and abstraction, and the explicit reference to gender construction in the context

of drag performance shapes the way the women’s over-the-top performance (and

Newsome’s total control of their actions) is understood.

The women are grouped into different sections, each of which specializes in making

one particular sound over and over again into the microphone, at Newsome’s direction.

The sounds are those particular non-language indications of annoyance or boredom

that have become, ubiquitously due to media portrayals, associated primarily with

black women (and secondarily, perhaps, with gay black men). The sounds are not

exactly pleasant, and when Newsome records and layers them to create even more

heavily layered patterns of sound, they don’t get better. Pre-recorded video clips of

less glamorously dressed women than those on stage, each shot against a plain white

background, are mixed in with the live performers and their looping clicks and hisses.

Newsome uses his Wii as a baton and manages to pull off a coherent symphony

of unpleasant, angry, or indignant sounds that never really settles into a pace with

which the audience can feel comfortable or connected. Surely, this discomfort and

disconnection is at least partly his point.

Newsome’s live video mixing is a central component of his role as conductor and

his comment on the interplay between real and mediated images—how they play

off one another to construct what we digest and accept. He experiments with tech-

nology, but only insofar as it relates to the content of his piece, which is concerned

with the images themselves. Shade Compositions could have been shorter and more

precisely constructed, but it has potential to improve in future development because

although it isn’t perfect, Newsome’s show certainly did not fall into the same trap

that dooms many multimedia performances: the dangerous seduction of unchecked

technological experimentation. Many directors and choreographers seem so enamored

by the equipment at their disposal that they end up adding things in order to create

their idea of some “new” visual effect.

One such disappointing piece was Brian Roger’s redevelop (death valley) that played

at the Chocolate Factory Theatre in Long Island City, Queens in February 2009.

Like Shade Compositions, redevelop (death valley) takes video-and-performance a step

further by using visible computers and a Veejay/conductor, Rogers, who mixes the

projections live. Unlike Shade Compositions (or Comedy, Tragedy) however, redevelop

(death valley)’s message is not intimately linked with the way in which it is enacted.

The use of video projections is altogether unnecessary as far as the content of the

show. Born and Okpokwasili’s use of video also had nothing to do with media or

technology; however, they only use as much video footage as is necessary to portray

a character’s inside memory on her body, saying so much more than could be said

without the dreamy images. Their work is lovely and spare. In contrast, Rogers and

his company’s show, ostensibly based around the gentrification of their neighborhood,

is, in reality, just a showcase of their ability to incorporate too many unnecessary

layers of things, such as dance, sculpture, food, video, poetry, live electric guitar,

lighting, and so on.

The popular video-as-preface-to-the-show appears in redevelop (death valley), only

this time it is much longer, obscured by its projection onto a few translucent plastic

panels that hang from hooks in the ceiling, and much less compelling. It consists of

Frank Carrado, a long-time resident of Long Island City, talking about how things

used to be in the neighborhood, and how things are changing. The script is specific

to his experience, but anyone who has ever lived in a big city in America knows it by

heart. The next video sequence shows desolate landscapes and abandoned buildings

in Death Valley. After this introduction to the concept, the video switches to a live

feed, which projects an image of a girl who has entered the loft space where this is

taking place. She is doing a gestural dance choreographed by Rogers, which is not

very interesting, and the audience can’t see much of her anyway, since our view is

still obstructed by the hanging plastic on which the video is being projected.

As the show progresses, the dancers continue to move and to be videotaped and

projected. One by one, they slowly move the hanging plastic screens out of the way

(the screens are hung throughout the loft and attached by wires that allow them to

easily slide to the side) to reveal a less obstructed space. It is certainly a relief when

the obstructions are removed, not least because it means not having to watch any

more pointless video projections. Once the space is opened, at the back of the loft,

at the end farthest away from the audience, four performers (Jennifer Lee Dudek,

Sheila Lewandowski, Yoko Myoi, and Mark Sitko) sit down for a real meal of spa-

ghetti and red wine, while up front near the computers, Rogers plays electric guitar

while they eat.

This comment on the value of family and keeping a neighborhood “the way it is”

seems somewhat strange in the context of a new enough, hip enough, experimental

theatre that brings more people into the neighborhood from outside to eat at new

restaurants, check out galleries and, well, gentrify the place. As far as finding meta-

phorical justification for the technology used in redevelop (death valley), there is an

interesting connection between the de-evolution of old family and neighborhood

values as far as it relates to the devaluing of good old-fashioned live theatre and

performance works. But this idea works too well as a criticism of the show to have

been an intention of the creators, since it is based on the failure of their performance

due to an excessive application of multimedia and technology.

Failure as success does have precedent in multimedia (especially video art) perfor-

mance, however, and brings to mind one “happening” in particular that is a direct

ancestor in terms of experiments with media of its time in consort with actions that

are private and timeless. The incorporation of real food and the meal enjoyed by the

actors in front of the audience in redevelop (death valley) evokes the 1960s group

E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology, Inc.), led by electronic engineer Billy

Klüver. Roger Horrocks, in his book Len Lye: A Biography, describes the performance

tour that this group took to college campuses around New York State during January

to February of 1967, a tour that Grace Glueck of The New York Times called “ the

most exotic intellectual road show ever to hit the college belt.”3 Horrocks’s descrip-

tion of the final performance of E.A.T. makes it sound like an exciting, authentic,

rowdy version of the kind of environment that Rogers tried so unsuccessfully to

create in redevelop (death valley):

The tour ended in Manhattan on 25 February with a gala public performance

at the 92nd Street YMHA. The event was called ‘TV Dinner: Homage to

EAT (Food for Thought)’. The artists sat around a well-stocked dinner table,

some with their backs to the audience, getting up in turn to talk or perform.

They wore microphones and were supposed to answer questions from the

audience. Cups, glasses, and other objects were also wired for sound thanks

to an intricate system engineered by Billy Klüver and Robbie Robinson (an

engineer from Bell). There were television cameras and a number of film

and slide projectors. Merce Cunningham danced behind a swinging strobe

light. VanDerBeek projected images on the walls. Lye, wearing a strange

pair of dark glasses with a cross-shaped opening for each eye, attempted

to screen three films at once but only two projectors would start and one

dropped out before the end. He then demonstrated his model for ‘Jump

Fish’, and Cage improvised beautiful bell-like sounds by rubbing a contact

mike along the suspended sculpture.

To the audience these activities added up to chaos. No one could make

out what the panelists were saying. The audience threw paper aeroplanes

and coins, and tried to grab the microphones. Erik Shiozaki (whom Lye

had invited along with other students from his class) recalls: ‘People were

screaming out “We want our money back!” and “What is this?” They didn’t

understand any of it. Len called it a happening, and the audience became

part of it.’ The audience seemed to find the food especially provocative.

Ann Lye remembers her friend Ruth Richards walking over to the table and

saying to the artists, ‘I’m hungry and I’m not going to just stand here and

watch all you people eating.’ In Creeley’s account: ‘At one point apparently

the Y’s stage manager came up to Robinson and said, “You’ve got to do

something, the crowd is very restless.” Robinson continued with his own

preoccupations. They were literally more interesting.’ Ann summed up the

evening with the phrase, ‘It was such a fiasco, it was a great success.’4

Chaos, excitement, and an unbelievable cast of characters were enough to make

history at the E.A.T. event, and at the time, video technology was new and even

its misuse was interesting. The poet Robert Creeley said that the multiplicity being

presented was “a whole new order for us to move in—we’re used to apprehending

only one thing at a time. Our environment is multiple now—we can’t any longer

escape it. We can’t be single channeled any more.” Today, multiplicity, as defined by

technology, is inescapable and the foundation on which we build everything. Video

is nothing new, and since its incorporation into performance is by now status quo,

categories of good use are important to consider in a discussion of new works.

So far, I have been focused on the metaphorical visual relationship between the

medium and the content as well as the critical application of video insofar as it is

used to address the uses and abuses of technological media. All of the shows that I

have considered have been new creations with content designed precisely (though

not always successfully) with the medium of video and the freedoms of modern

performance in mind. But do the same rules apply when video is used in order to

re-imagine a classic play?

Robert Brustein, in his essay in PAJ 90 (2008) entitled “More Masterpieces,” does

not call for the abolition of new tactics such as postmodern technical updates to

classics, but rather, for well-considered “alternative approaches that maintain the

integrity of a classic, neither by freezing nor misreading it, but by reviving its origi-

nal energies.”5 The postmodern auteur director is the target of Brustein’s concern

here, insofar as the individual, taking liberties with an old text, no longer “helps to

illuminate classic plays, [but] . . . is often obscuring and obfuscating them.” The

Belgian-born director Ivo van Hove and his techno-production of The Misanthrope

was scrutinized by Brustein who concluded that:

The issues of The Misanthrope—how a man of honest and uncompromis-

ing, if rigid, principles could live in a society dominated by flattery and

insecurity—were completely buried under technological distractions, screech-

ing dustups, frenzied behavior, and hysterical shit-fits.

This reading of van Hove’s The Misanthrope is useful in comparing the use of video

technology in two productions: van Hove’s Opening Night, which played at the

Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival in fall 2008, and Ripe Time’s Fire

Throws, an updated version of Antigone, shown in February 2009 at 3LD Art and

Technology Center in Tribeca.

Unlike his version of The Misanthrope, van Hove’s Opening Night, an adaptation of

John Cassavetes’s 1977 film (or rather, his screenplay; van Hove never saw the film),

gains an extra layer of depth through the use of live video feeds that film and project

the action on stage as it happens. In part, this is simply because the update is being

made to a film script rather than to a classic play, and the video cameras seem to

belong comfortably in the historical context of the adaptation. Likewise, the story

of Opening Night—an aging actress on the brink, considering the line between her

stage self and her real self—seems born for van Hove’s interpretation since we can see

both the real Myrtle (the wonderful Elise de Brauw in Gena Rowlands’s role from the

film) and her filmed self, thus signifying her public and private self and the barely

existent line in between. The fact that Cassavetes’s Opening Night is a film about

the backstage and onstage dramas of the theatre only makes it all the more perfect

when van Hove has cameras follow his actors off the BAM Harvey Theatre stage

(the Harvey is set up as both a backstage and stage-within-the-play set), projecting

images until off-backstage action meets backstage and then the stage itself.

It is not the use of video in and of itself that can ruin a van Hove production (as

Brustein considers his Misanthrope ruined), but rather, it’s the choice of subjects—

successfully interpreted subjects tend to already have a relationship to the medium.

But the essential question of Brustein’s, and the type of theatre he is referring to when

he exclaims in his essay, “let us mourn the day when theatre first discovered video!”

are specifically those new imaginings that are based on classic texts. Fire Throws,

written and directed by Rachel Dickstein and based on Sophocles’ Antigone—it was

performed by Ripe Time Ensemble in February 2009—is a very straightforward

example of the kind of ill-conceived re-interpretation that makes for not only a

messy visual display, but also a sad loss of the power held in the original text. The

intention of this technological update may be to allow modern audiences a new

point of entry into the classic play, but the result falls way short in this particular

example, and keeps the audience, in fact, out.

Dickstein’s Antigone is broken up into two women: Lara Butler plays the “Antigone

who was” and Erica Berg, the new “Antigone who is.” The current Antigone, meant

to exist in our modern times, explains her place in an opening monologue, “I have

existed for 2,400 years / the residue of a story, traces of action and inaction / some

idea of strength— / a shell penetrated by meaning.” In short, she is back to visit her

self of Sophocles’ tragedy in order to probe into the deeper psychological meanings

that come up in the actions of the characters in the play. The story is told through

the Balinese warrior dance known as Baris Tunggal, a pretty (though disconnected)

sequence of aerialist ribbon climbing, an original score by Jewlia Eisenberg, which

is performed live by her group Charming Hostess, and plenty of video projections

meant not only as set decoration (flowers, forests, thunder, and so on) but also as

exaggerated prerecorded versions of the characters on stage.

Although the dancing doesn’t add to the interpretation of the text in the least, it

is less visually unpleasant than the video projections, which are an exercise in pure

pointlessness. During certain crucial moments in the play, Dickstein has projected

large prerecorded images of the face of a character on stage so that the audience may

see him or her in double. If this is just for style, it not only fails, but it violently

distracts from the scene on stage. From her (draft) script:

Music ends as chorus enacts the final slaying of Polyneices and Eteocles. The chorus

members roll away from one another slowly while CREON’s speech begins. His

speech is live and projected on live feed and prerecorded video.

CREON (live and on video): Eteocles, who died as a man should die,

fighting for his country, is to be buried with full military honors . . . but

his brother, Polyneices, who broke his exile to come back with fire and

sword against his native city and the shrines of his fathers’ gods . . . is to

have no burial.

Why should this speech be both live and on video? It creates nothing but a distrac-

tion from the text, doing nothing to illuminate a single deeper meaning within

the spoken words. Like another recent failure of a dance/technology performance

at 3LD, Roland Gebhardt’s The Only Tribe, Fire Throws serves as a case against the

need for a place that aids experimentation with technology in performance (as 3LD

does). Born’s essential question, “If you can express it another way, then why use

video?” must have an answer more relevant than “because we can” if there is going

to be any success in the production at all. What we need is not more experimenta-

tion with technology, but rather, more thoughtful, relevant, and essentially pointed

uses of it.

Of course, video technology can no more be banned from the stage than it can be

removed from our daily lives, and to the medium’s credit, in the right hands, the

use of video in performance is illuminating on many levels, probing meaning within

texts or revealing the ways in which the human body and mind process or compete

with moving digital imagery. A critical approach to the creation of stage works

needs to move in the direction of discretion, however, and abandon altogether the

perceived romance of technological chaos and unbound experimentation. The time

for shock and awe has long passed. Now that we are truly inundated by video, real

experimentation becomes that which pulls back a bit through precise editing, or that

which is used in recognizably fresh, well-designed, and meaningful ways. If only by

prevalence, the bar for video-and-performance has been irrevocably raised.

NOTES

1. Nick Stillman, “Kalup Linzy,” BOMB Magazine, Summer 2008, no. 4, 51.

2. Kathy O’Dell, “Performance, Video, and Trouble in the Home,” in Illuminating Video:

An Essential Guide to Video Art, ed. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, New York: Aperture, in

association with Bay Area Video Coalition, 1990, 142.

3. Grace Glueck, “Single-Channeled You Mustn’t Be,” New York Times, February 5, 1967,

Arts & Leisure Section, D29.

4. Roger Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, New Zealand: Auckland University Press,

2001, 321–23.

5. Robert Brustein, “More Masterpieces,” PAJ 90 (September 2008): 6–7.