I PAID $20 TO BE AN EXTRA IN AN EXPERIMENTAL VIDEO

Sounds like a rip off? The Performa program stated "Audiences are invited to embark on a bus tour around Red Hook harbor in Brooklyn led by Philippe Quesne, who uses his position as tour guide to encourage the group to shift their attention to the poetic or strange elements in the landscape ... the group is invited to take part in a series of tableaux vivants orchestrated by the artist". Quite an intriguing program for which I was happy to fork out $20.

There is always an unspoken deal struck between the people responsible for the show and the audience. The audience expects to marvel, to feel, to be entertained, amused, intrigued by what goes on on stage, and in exchange they pay a ticket price and give their attention and some amount of praise usually in the form of hand clapping.

At Performa, we as an audience come ready to experience a different deal, as promised by Philippe Quesne's promoted "tableaux vivants". We were ready to be asked to do more than clap our hands: interact with the landscape or with the other spectators of with the performers.

We embarked on a coach bus that drove to Red Hook in the sunset. A
video of a mole constructing a wall with a narrow entrance was playing on the bus monitor. A good start. The bus was full, everyone was excited. It was downhill from there. Philipe Quesne made clear once we had signed a release form that we were to act as extras in his production.  The bus stopped near the water. The director gave us instructions: walk to the fence at a regular pace then back to the bus. You can take pictures. We did. We were filmed.

At the second and final stop an alluring mole, or a performer in an alluring mole costume crossed the road in front of the bus, which then followed the performer, in spite of the fact that the driver, probably from NJ, looked deeply aggravated by the whole thing. A large door to an old industrial loft opened slowly. Lots of  carbon dioxide smoke came through an opening in a wall which seemed narrow, but was large enough, just about, to let the bus through. Intriguing. Then we got off the bus and the director gave us more instructions: we were to form a group between the bus and the car, which was parked with its lights on. He said we would later move toward the back where we would discover the "concept".

I thought maybe the concept was that we were offered the chance to disobey his directives, which I did, but that didn't seem to be the intention. A beautiful blond woman dressed in fetching clothes played the thimerin. It was striking, but I couldn't enjoy it because I wasn't listening to the music, I was playing someone listening to music.


A whisper got around: t"hey're offering whiskey at the front near the bus". I rushed back hoping to get some return on my $20, which I did, whiskey in a glass made out of glass. About half of the audience of 60 was also enjoying drinks around me. We couldn't see the other half of the audience, still listening to music, because of the fog. A cry was heard above our heads: 'Action!". Everyone went quiet. Then out of the smoke emerged the other group, marching toward us with the musician and the mole at the front. What were they going to do to us? The moment carried a lot of potential for drama. But nothing happened, they joined us and the whole thing was over. Some people clapped, before we were driven back to the original spot. At a nearby pizza place, a number of spectators went for nourishment. When I asked, most of them thought the experience had been cool. But a group of four people, who looked different from the rest of the hipsters in their 30s, echoed my complaint: "Not only did we pay to be extras, but it wasn't even a good film".

Published by  - -  Arabella Hutter

Modern doomed

It seems absurd to call the period we live in "modern", not just modern times, but modern literature, modern art. In 50 years or a 100, our descendants will laugh not only at our outmoded fashions and tastes, but at our presumption. Unless we have no descendants. Only if the name was chosen in a premonition of upcoming doom will it be perfectly adequate. If the human race comes to an end within one or two generations, then "modern times" will have been the last historical period. It does not seem out of the question. Atomic bomb in hands of terrorists or insane dictator. Atmospheric conditions leading to general famine. Lack of clean drinking water. Combination of above.

Doomsday by Andree Wallin

Painful to think that our children or our grandchildren might know an apocalyptic scenario of fear and pain. The conditions making doom feasible are present, the question is, can humanity collectively rein in its crazy course and steer it towards reason? Not sure. Can't look to history for a similarly global situation. But in times of crisis, humanity has not shone in the past by its concerted solution taking.

Published by  - -  Arabella Hutter

El Anatsui at the Brooklyn Museum of Art: transcendence

I wish I had had a better camera. Profoundly touching that out of the most mundane material, liquor bottles' caps, El Anatsui creates such riches. If we all got down to doing that, transform poverty into wealth, what a world we could live in.

Transforming the space of the museum into a sumptuous organism, alive, vulnerable. Transcendental. We saw the earth's skin, or maybe it was the stars'.

The atmosphere amongst the viewers was electric. Passion is communicative.

Nietzsche & Freud & Bed & Breakfasts

Artist Federico Solmi

Nietzsche and Freud both talked about Trieb.* They define humans as having egoistische (selfish) Trieb (urge) which society forces us to control, turning us into neurotic (Freud) or weak (Nietzsche) beings. But this is looking at this dynamic system from an individual's point of view. We can look instead at the bridges that are established between individuals, social constructions.  

A couple of weeks ago I went to stay in a Bed and Breakfast in Montreal. My host left in the morning to go to work before I arrived. She left her keys in the letterbox. I could have made out with all her possessions, or trashed her place or nosed around her belongings. It felt good to be trusted as I had trusted her place would be agreeable and that she would make a good host. We had taken the risk of meeting the primitive Trieb of the other person and of being taken advantage of. But the gamble paid off. 

She was generous. I did my best to respect her space, and I befriended the cat. We didn't interact as neurotic individuals who had repressed their pulsions through morals. We were enjoying that we had proved trust can still exist in our world of electronic badges and identity checks.

And we're seeing more and more of that happening, as a countering action against our culture of security and profit. Airbnb, couchsurfing, rideshares. Our neighbors now range the globe.

*German for urges, or pulsions in French. 

Jamaica standing tall in Manhattan

Went to the opening reading of the PEN Festival.  First batch of writers reading was great, one Cambodian American woman read about a father saying goodbye to his daughter as he knows he's going to be killed by the Khmers.  A Russian writer spoke about a woman school principal who would tell off the kids for begging chewing gum from visiting foreigners, saying they were debasing themselves.  The principal was later fired for allowing the reading of an unauthorized writer.  The authors were good at reading, but was their writing as good as their reading?

 

I was really there to hear Jamaica Kincaid.  Her prose awes me.  So powerful and fluid.  Not a trace of sentimentality.  How does she do it?  From the moment she made her way up the stairs on the side of the stage, her whole person exuded pain.  That grand old dame, bend over by pain.  That interior pain that flows in her texts.  Is it the price paid to escape sentimentality?  She takes the microphone and tells of creating havoc when she was in school and always getting punished.  At the age of 7, she had to copy down books 1 and 2 of Milton's Paridise Lost.  "It ended up not being a punishment at all, I fell in love with its character, Lucy.  And later named a novel after her.  I'm going to read from book 2."

In the exchange of love between the reading performer and the audience, that's all she was prepared to give.  She came fully prepared to disappoint her lovers' expectations.  If she had given us a reading of her work, we would have loved her all the more for it.  Her reading had a deep, beautiful stance to it.  But it's a hard text to listen to, and the audience was fretting.  She left, standing straighter in her brave loneliness.

Contributed by  - -  Arabella Hutter

Sinners

A friend of ours lent us his condo in St-George, Utah. Right at the corner with Arizona and Nevada, the latter state offering some serious temptation to the Mormon population of St-George - could this geography have something do to with the rapid expansion of this vacation town? The condos were filled with affluent Mormons on vacation from Salt Lake City. This sect mostly comprises people of wasps origins and must be quite wealthy, with its 10% tax on its followers' income.

We saw them from our balcony, met them in the staircase, shared the jacuzzi. They looked and behaved like regular Americans, which made it weird, as I kind of expect sect followers to be socially unadapted. They were blond and tall and handsome. Only, the women didn't wear bikinis. Escorting large number of children (forbidding contraception is a well proven strategy to expand a church's following). We knew that they don't drink alcohol or tea or coffee or colas. They don't smoke. We were sinners from their point of view.
I caught myself planning to burglar their condos. It would be easy to climb on the balconies, maybe when they're in church on Sunday morning. Take the cash and their bicycles, I missed having a bicycle which I could ride in this beautiful landscape.

I was intrigued. I usually don't set up burglaries, honestly, it's not my line of work. How come I was considering, though not seriously, a crime? Well, I was a sinner for them anyway. My behaviors and habits barred me from righteousness. I found myself in the shoes of people who are marginalized in our society, such as ethnic minorities in the US or gypsies in Europe.

Minorities are criminalized before they commit a crime, because they don't fit the norm of the typical respectable citizen. Additionally, in the US, the legal system has been skewed against them, the media portray them typically as criminal.  If they're labeled as criminals in the first place, what's the point in trying to be a responsible citizen?

Published by  - -  Arabella Hutter

From Physical to Mechanical - Sans objet by Aurélien Bory at BAM

In the 80s physical theater was triumphant. The stage was bare except for a piece of fabric or a triangular piece of set which would play the role in turns of a ship, or a hill, or a balcony. Costumes tended to be subdued or minimalist too. The actors moved on stage nearly as dancers, they were the characters, the set, the stage, all the the same time, as in ancient Greek theater. Direct, unimpeded connection between the actors and the audience. I loved it.

Theater has been moving away from this trend. Lepage's 10 hr pageant at BAM 2 years ago celebrated the return of the mechanical in theater: an airplane! On stage! With lights to indicate the aisle. It opened, turned around, flew! A subway train crossed the stage too. A car, or half a car, and think of it, it was also half a plane and half a train wagon. Deus ex machina, except there was no deus. As audience, we are allowed again to enjoy being mystified, fooled, awed. I love it.

This transition might have some due to the explosion of the circus theater such as James Thierrée's which necessarily uses props and machines and tricks. And in Aurélien Bory's Sans Objet playing at BAM Brooklyn, the machine has the main role. Reasserting all its rights, off stage and on stage. The show was magical in the most elementary meaning of the word: the humans on stage escaped the laws of gravity. Is this beneficial or nefast to humanity? Probably both, just as technology helps and hurts our humanity. The lighting and sound and robot performance were beautiful, poetic while controlled with utter precision. 

Another aspect I enjoyed about the show, and about Bory's work in general, is that I often don't understand why I laughed. I couldn't describe it afterwards with words. Once I was babysitting a 10 months old boy, and I was walking a puppet in front of him, and would make the puppet do an abrupt about face, with its limbs and hair flying all over. The little boy laughed and laughed every time. Why? How did he know it was funny, with what references? In the same primitive way the little boy laughed, some of the absurd movements of the robot and of the comedians on stage made me laugh. And obviously the rest of the audience too, from the ovation they gave the company at the end of the show.

Not a review

Published by  - -  Arabella Hutter

Paul Thomas Anderson should be dead or very old

Paul Thomas Anderson should be dead or very old. The others are: Altman, Huston, Hawks, Kubrick, Welles, ....  How does he get his films funded anyway? Does he sleep with the Weinstein brothers? Does he have recourse to blackmail? Someone -Anderson- should make a film about how Anderson got The Master funded. Because he's the only master director alive who commands this kind of budget for films as original and uncompromising as The Master.

In no particular order:

Speaking of masterly. The opening shot: the water backwash shot straight down from the deck. But we're watching it on the glorious East Village main theater's screen, and our perspective is that the water is going straight up. Next shot: a very low angle of a man on a palm tree ripping off coconuts. Our perspective: we're looking horizontally at him. 

Lancaster Dodd, like the older man in Hard Eight, takes a liking to Freddy Quell for no good reason. And vice versa. The mystery of their relationship has to be accepted by us, as we accept the water shooting up the screen. A mystical quality. After the prison scene where they are separated both physically and emotionally, they roll on the ground in a dyonisiac (how the hell is that word spelled?) embrace. One unit, as the prehuman creatures in Greek mythology with 4 arms and 4 legs which were later split in the middle, and here we are, humans, with this primal wound never to be healed.

Lancaster heals his patients or followers by having them go back billions of years, trillions of years, seeking the trauma in their souls. He tries the process on Freddy, unsuccessfully. Maybe he should have tried to go back just 10 years to look for trauma to the soul, when Freddy was fighting World War II in Asia. 

Treat: Paul Thomas Anderson Q&A with Jonathan Demme. About as good as it gets. Except Jonathan spent half the Q&A asking Anderson how he got started, was it his Dad? (Answer: not really) Did he tell stories to his friends in high school? (Answer: no) Was he inspired by the current plight of returning veterans? (Politely: no) He did say yes, sometimes, and discussed how, for him, Lancaster Dodd is a good guy which I was wondering about. The film is not an indictment of cults. If Lancaster has the manner of a sergeant major as well as the charisma of a cult leader, he believes in what he preaches. And Dodd loves him because he hasn't been able to adapt after the war where he was told what to do and established strong bonds with his friends, says Anderson (all that is not in the movie however, we the audience have to figure it out). With Lancaster, it's easy: he does what he tells him to do, he fights for him against what he perceives as his aggressors. 

There I was, in this gorgeous theater, having just watched a film by a great director of our times, the light went up, and there he was, so pleasant and without an ounce of conceit, discussing his film. I'll tell my grandchildren.

When period films so often rub me the wrong way, here, the 40s/50s are delicious. Maybe because Anderson was trying to reproduce images of the 40s rather than the actual period itself. The secondary actors even had faces from films, calendars, posters from these years. I couldn't help counting the period cars, the costumes (20 school uniforms for just one short scene!), did anyone really think this film is going to return its costs? 

Is there a point in talking of the acting that's all round stupefying? OK. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is just amazing. Incredible. The fluidity, jumping from one expression to the next, is a perfect characterization of Lancaster.

And to top it all, the film has a happy end: Freddy is able to separate from Lancaster, Lancaster is able to let him go. 

Not a review.

Published by  - -  Arabella Hutter

Rhinoceroses course through BAM

Went to watch the stampede of rhinoceroses at BAM . The play written by Ionesco can be interpreted as an allegory about fascism, in the vein of Animal Farms. It was written in 1957, following years where humanity in Europe forgot about its humanity and was moved by primal instinct. But was it? In the years since Ionesco, our conception of humanity and animality has changed. Hannah Arendt argued that being human is what makes us potential sadists, not our animality. Denying its humanity to other humans is a human trait.

Meanwhile our conception of animals has changed drastically. We now deny animals a capacity for moral judgement, no more pig judgments, no more good goats and bad wolves - though I can still see a clear difference between a mean dog and a nice dog, - we might want to reconsider the capacity for ethics of certain animals such as chimps and whales.. Animals are not terrible, ferocious, dangerous, threatening beings anymore, we believe these adjectives describe us better. The director of this version of the Rhinoceros does not make his intentions clear. The Rhinos have a lot to say for themselves, even if they tramp on  a cat ("the cat only lacked speech to be human") from time to time. They run. They dance, and sing. Clearly, they have sex. Meanwhile humanity is pretty dull. There's a a range of characters some clearly symbolic of various philosophical schools, Cartesians, Sartrians,  But the play is not an allegory for good vs bad in the hands of this director, which makes it a more interesting exercise for our times. The animals are instinctive, loud, unpredictable. This has become desirable. Humanity in "Rhinoceros" works in an office, and throws balls of paper to each other. I would have joined the rhinos without hesitation. Who could resist that big horn on their forehead. Or two horns. One by one humans are attracted by the realm of the rhino and leave humanity, more or less willingly. It should be read as fascism gaining members over, but it is directed as wild natural sensuality gaining over modest self control. However the last man standing is a drunkard. In a scene that was maybe originally intended to be repulsive, a woman recognises her husband in the rhino charging the office and is delighted at being reunited with him, she has love in the eye. And when the last woman joins the rhinoceros, she sashays to them, readying herself for some more interesting romps then the one she just experienced with the last human.

I wondered, can a director really distort an author's work in this way? Interpretations of a work can vary, but here, the director gives a different reading than the author originally intended. It's a bit shocking to me. Or does the director really think his staging of the play would deter us from wanting to become a rhino? They were a bit noisy, true, the whole play was a bit noisy. Some silence would have been good. Maybe then we would have resented the rhinos breaking it.

Not a review.

Published by  - -  Arabella Hutter