Grief Is The Thing With Feathers: An Ode to Woman

I wrote a blog entry a couple of weeks ago entitled it 'The Lehman Trilogy: An Ode to Patriarchy, Judaism, and Capitalism.'
That play was written by a man, based on a book by a man, directed by a man, and played by three male actors.

Grief is the Thing with Feathers, playing at the beautiful St Ann's Warehouse in Dumbo, shares these features: based on the best seller written by Max Porter, it is staged by the inventive Enda Walsh, and stars a man and two boys. But where the creators of the Lehman trilogy didn’t think the play needed women to tell the story of a family, ‘Grief’ tells of the disappearance of one woman as defining the whole story of that masculine family at that point in their life.   

Cillian Murphy plays a father who loses his wife abruptly. He, and his two young sons, are visited by Crow, which is also played by Murphy. Crow is evil and elegant. Crow is witty and articulate, cruel and detached. A black, hooded bathrobe turns Murphy into the mythical bird, and any evil creature associated with fear, with loss, with death: demons, ogres, henchman even. He is the one who imposes pain. As Crow, Murphy speaks with the literary English accented voice of fairy tales turned wrong, of horror films. The powerful male voice is further amplified, distorted until the beautiful text becomes incomprehensible. The book, and the play, are based in part on a body of poems, The Crow, that Ted Hughes wrote after the suicide of Sylvia Plath. 

Murphy is the fascinating actor of the Internet series ‘PeakyBlinders’. With his square jaw and stunning blue eyes, glamor is in his range. He leaves all that backstage as he turns into an Irish father, with an unflattering hair style, unfashionable moustache, drab clothes. H portrays the fallibility of a man, as a lover, as a husband, as a father. That requires modesty.

When the actor switches to being Crow, he recovers his potential for glamor, all brilliance, all aloofness from anything that ties humans down: emotions, fears, needs. His bird dance, trancelike, dazzles with its lightness, his delivery of the text seduces with its perfect articulation. He won the Irish Times award for this near one-man show in which streams of sweat literally jets out of his body from the physicality of the performance.

How can grief, that utterly internal experience, so huge, so overwhelming,  liquefying of the insides, be represented on stage which by definition shows only the exterior of a human body? In part, in this case, by projecting the pain onto the walls. They are scratched with the words, with scribbled words, that turn to pure scribble, that paint the walls black. The whole stage is plunged in darkness. Suddenly Crow is perched on the 2^nd floor, light strobes, throbs like sobs in the throat, like blood in the head. It’s terrifying as it looks like Crow might try to fly, and he would crash, being only human.

The moment of terror, the father’s madness passes thanks to the cathartic experience. Back to the mundane London apartment. The stage is mostly empty but for the bare necessities. A kitchen for food. Bunk beds for the boys to sleep. The father does not have a bed. A home movies is projected on the wall. Day trip to the beach. The mother’s face. She’s just a woman. One woman. But we know that every trait of her face, every expression is beloved by the three males in her life, who, dwarfed by her image and her presence, watch her. Her projection becomes huge, encompasses all three walls, the floor of the stage until it diffuses into the whole theater and can’t be read anymore.

The power of women. And isn’t that what they are forever being punished for by men? Girls as sisters, women as mothers, as life partners to men, loom huge over the male emotional landscape with their psychological powers, the power of their beauty, of their bodies, and at the same time, the power of their frailty, the innocence of not knowing their own power. However much material submission men impose on women, as they have done on other groups of human beings, whether they lock them indoor, deny them education, property, respect, whether they are beaten, the dependence of men’s happiness on women can never be reversed. In this play, the boys and their father's world turns to chaos and violence without the presence of the woman in their life.

The lights, the projections, the distorted voice turn the major part of the play into a noisy experience that could have done with a bit more modulation. In the end, the father recovers his sanity, is able to care for his young, and Grief might turn back into "Hope that thing with feathers". In an effective staging trick, the pantry that was empty because of the father’s incapacitation, has miraculously refilled with cans and jars of food: sustenance has been recovered.

written and published by    Arabella von Arx

L'Amour de Loin at the Metropolitan Opera, NYC - not a review

A show is the sum of its parts. Here are a few:

Lepage brings the ocean made out of colored lights on the stage, for our ecstatic experience. He lifts Deus on a Machina: a prince, who is a troubadour from France (Eric Owens). His love, a distant countess from Tripoli (Susanna Phillips). Lepage fakes the distant horizon on stage with lines that are smaller and closer together. A small pilgrim (it’s a puppet really, we’re not asked to be fooled!) rows his boat in the far distance. Goes off stage. Back on stage, he’s closer (a larger puppet on a larger boat, clever Robert). Off stage again. This time he comes back as a real person, a young pilgrim cum go-between (Tamara Mumford, who must get bored - and aren't we all - with mezzo-soprano roles crossdressing as young boys) singing like a nightingale on his frail skiff. The chorus pop their heads like mermaids out of the waves, or their hands like the tails of some marine creatures. Moonlit water. Huge waves in a storm. Lepage celebrates unabashedly the secret magic of the stagecraft.

It’s too easy being sarcastic, I shall not dwell on how hard it is to believe a very bulky man is dying on stage of deprivation. I shall neither qualify nor quantify the acting skills of the soprano. On the other hand, every one could sing, while the mezzo-soprano could both sing and act.

The orchestral and choral music might not have broken boundaries but the singing by most apt artists - it's the Met - was thoroughly enjoyable. An opera written by a woman composer (Kajji Sarriaho) conducted by a talented woman conductor (Susanna Mällki) on the same night at the Met?! Quite the femme celebration! Pour the Pro Secco out!

Best part? Libretto by esteemed Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf. What a treat it must have been for him to write poetry that people are actually going to listen to. In the 21^st century. It’s obvious Maalouf immersed himself enthusiastically in this work. The lyrics, funny at times, are more often simple and poetic. A beautiful tale of longing for the Other, of crossings, of cultures coming together with a tragic end. In real life, what love encounter ever ends well? Unless both partners die at the very same time in their sleep, unaware of impeding death, their bodies entangled, while dreaming of love?

The sum of the parts was most positive. But not in the black. In the blue, and the pink, and the gold, and the silvery moonlight, all reflected by a Countess’s shiny dress.

Contributed by  - Arabella Hutter  -

Performa 2015 - free drinks, expensive books, The Lament of the Financial District, that kind of general rant

Exchange went something like this:
Artist Rainer Ganahl:
I decided to get rid of my books to express how we don't live forever, we need to let go of our material goods, we need to realize we're not going to read that book again.
Young man:
How much are you selling this one for?
The books are lying on the floor, as for a stoop sale. Good books. Art books, philosophy.

Rainer:
How much would you like to buy it for?
The young man turns it around in his hands. He's embarrassed. Haggling with the artist?
Young man:
$10?
Rainer:
I couldn't let it go for that. It's worth much more. What I do is I check on the Internet how much they go for. I think it should not go for less than $20, more like $30.
Older man:
So you are linking this to the existing market?
Rainer:
The books I don't sell, I will keep. I don't need to sell. You see, on the wall, that's the packaging.
Older man:
How about this one, how much?
Rainer:
Maybe $35? Let me check on the Internet. Some of these books are widely available, but others like this one are very hard to find, it took me a long time to unearth them in libraries. By the way, before I was able to buy art books, I used to buy postcards of art. They're $3 each. Look here. Ah, I found the book online. Let's see. $12.75! Well well. OK, how about $20?

As opposed to my poetic Eric the Hawker selling me his lovely keyring last week (read here), I could not perceive any artistic dimension to this sale by Rainer Ganahl beyond the initial concept. He could have chosen to put arbitrary prices on the books: white ones $10, green ones $25, black ones $1000. Or, as Ed Schmidt did in one of his shows, give them away for nothing. After this unpleasant experience, I was getting truly discouraged by Performa 2015. The abundance of free drinks this year is appreciable, and attracts a younger crowd, but that's the only improvement I could see in this edition of the festival.

On Friday night, went to the Erica Vogt event at Roulette, Artist Theater Program.
I did not understand. I felt like someone from mainstream American culture, fed on Hollywood movies, mass paperbacks, who would go to an avant-garde event and would think it's all nonsense: they would not have the tools to understand it, the references, the context. I don't know whether the show was nonsense or not. But if it has a sense, I didn't have the tools to understand it. I did enjoy aspects of it, such as the sounds, some of the readings, some of the projections. Hated the props. Loved the last scene, witty, where the artist came on stage, and all the performers sat at her feet. She asked:
What did you think of the imagery in the show?
The twelve of them all answered at the same time, with much earnestness and expressivity. Obviously the mangled chaos of words could not be grasped by the audience. Then the lights went out, and the scene was repeated by people in the audience discussing amongst themselves after the show. I turned to my friend, artist Ana Bilankov who know a thing of two about avant-garde work:
'What did you think'
She opened her eyes big, raised her eyebrows:
'Bewildered.'

But. At last. Jesper Just. Saturday November 14. The exhilaration of seeing a brilliantly conceived show. Occupies the whole top floor of a skyscraper near the World Trade Center. We're inside the building, can't see outside apart for tiny shapes scraped out of  painted windows. And the show offers us interpretations of what we would see outside the windows. We watch from high up, on a video, the people who should be working in this space, but instead of sitting at desks are roaming the wilderness, in anguish.

The same live projection of the exterior of the building punctuate our route as we make our way in a labyrinth around the place. It takes a while before we realize that the beautiful bass sound track is being played live and we can see the player on the projected live stream, tiny, sitting lonely on the floor of our large office building. But what floor? Fleeting people get projected over a photo of the World Trade Center. In the next room, we realize these people are in front of a camera, and their image, or now ours, and is  projected onto the World Trade Center photo for the audience in the previous room. Then a woman takes her place in front of the camera and sings to the accompaniment of the bass player who is still going, who we know is there somewhere, but where? Her song is a poignant lament.

The poignancy in her song, and in the bass playing, the loneliness of the images, the anguish of the employees looking for something in the wild, all expressed so aptly what the architectural environment, and the work conditions in these financial districts do: kill the human soul.

Contributed by  - -  Arabella Hutter