I hope
Meg Stuart and
Performa 09 will not mind my quoting a bit of the promotion for
Auf den Tisch! (At the Table!) which I attended, last night, at the
Baryshnikov Arts Center. It's really the best way to get the concept right:
Picture this: you enter a room and can take a seat at an enormous table, with four microphones at the ready, as if in a conference situation. From your chair you can see how the table becomes a platform for action and reflection. Or something of the kind. You see performers sing, play, dance, and talk about performance issues, fragility, and territories. Or not. Meeting and improvising at an oversized table such as this one, it is no wonder that things get out of proportion. “Auf den Tisch!” (At the Table!) is a curatorial improvisation-project by Meg Stuart. Upon her invitation and initiation, a changing cast of performers, thinkers, writers, musicians, actors, and dancers confer about their pressing issues while presenting a performance of negotiations.
The table--a huge, blond wood beauty with a couple of unimaginatively used trap doors--is a total performer magnet. Who wouldn't look at this spacious, brightly lit thing and want to clamber on and act out? Combining the likes of Stuart, David Thomson, Yvonne Meier, George Emilio Sanchez, Trajal Harrell, Keith Hennessy and others, you certainly have the makings of a major act of acting out. Audience folk sit to table with the performers or occupy a few rows of chairs that ring it. As Stuart settles down in front of her microphone and gazes around the room, there's a sense of something momentous about to happen.
She starts by reading text. It sounds sensitive, fragile and quiet, a kind of table-like base for what will follow, and might represent Stuart's essential nature as the dreamer and generator of the entire project. The performance I saw contained a repeating motif of a heavy body or bodies piling on top of or rolling over a body underneath. Stuart's opening words are followed by other voices around the table that accumulate and spill over one another, swelling, eventually subsiding.
Stuff happens. Lots of it. Anything can happen, since improvisation is in the room. Thomson, dressed in a comic-strip hoodie and jeans, prowled the
space between table and outer chairs. Later, he was the first to bust out dancing, top and center, in loose-limbed, splayed-out movements.
Meier--challenged by Stuart at one point-- retorted, "I'm sorry. I'm not sitting on my mouth." Someone, to clunky effect, alluded to the Fort Hood shooting: "I'm still stuck on the psychiatrist with a machine gun. Was he improvising?"
A parlor game broke out, and the possible fucking of pineapples and righteous politics of pineapples were contemplated. Thomson and Harrell engaged in a cross-table Q&A about forgiveness. A belligerent Janez Jansa somewhat reluctantly performed the history of Richard Schechner's "putting off of clothes." This "getting close to history" made Meier at last "sit on her mouth."
The spectacular "Floral Cat"--the spectacular Hennessy in costume--touched off a segment of leftover Halloween shenanigans. Sanchez--in a kind of Soupy Sales act flipped upside down and turned psychological--encouraged all of us to take a piece of paper money from our own wallets and simply rip it up. Amid more scampering, a few words were carefully added to a flipchart and just left there, meaninglessly, until someone gave the equally meaningless order for the flipchart to be flattened to the floor.
There were dashes of chemistry, untethered patches of the jazz of delicious movement (Thomson, Harrell) and wide-awake humor (Sanchez), and not a little mystification and diminishing returns. The performers seemed unwilling to acknowledge signs that energy and interest had dropped. What I had been told would last "maybe a little over an hour," stretched towards two hours before, having had more than enough, I rose to leave.
You have to know when to push back from the table.
At that point, Stuart, having just asked the audience if it had any questions, was answered by a heavy silence. For an interesting moment, we were left with her standing rather defenselessly before us in all her original sensitivity, fragility and quiet. Okay. Matters could have ended there, and quite reasonably.
But then, Performa founder and director RoseLee Goldberg took the mic and asked something on the order of "Do you think improvisation is still alive?"
I'm not really sure what she was going for with that question but, in light of the overall lack of surprise, challenge or revelation in the performance, I'd rephrase the question, maybe split it into two parts:
"Do you think there's still life in your improvisation?" and "Can improvisation still matter?"
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