Don't Wake Me Up

Once every three years I'll go check out what Richard Foreman is doing. Just for kicks. Over the last decade I think I've seen three or four pieces; they could have been Permanent Brain Damage, Bad Boy Nietzsche, Cowboy Rufus something or other, and Now That Communism is Dead, My Life Feels Empty. I cannot tell you with any certainty which of these I actually saw, and which of these I just imagined I saw, because frankly, I could never tell any of his plays apart from each other (except occasionally by cast - he always had the downtown greats like my favorites James Urbaniak & T Ryder Smith) -- until now. I think Sophia Skiles worked with him for a while and she just loved it. I found this shocking because I'd assumed that an actor with her level of talent would feel humiliated by being reduced to a pawn of Foreman's theatro-masturbatory-subconscious universe. Don't get me wrong, I'd always found Mr. Foreman's pieces nerve-wracking, visually/aurally fascinating (to the point of excruciating pain), and the whole synergy of his work mysterious, beautiful, ugly, frustrating, funny and not fun. I'd fallen into the habit of describing his plays like what I would imagine it would be like to peer into the mind of an insane person. That's worth a visit every couple of years, don't you think? It's like choosing to sniff your dirty socks juuuust to remind yourself how bad your feet can smell. (metaphorically speaking, of course.)

Last night I went with Yoko and Ryo, who were both Foreman virgins, to WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD! At first glance, the theater appeared as I expected. White and black-and-white-striped string running across the plane between stage and audience; indecipherable texts scrawled on newspapered walls, stage full of clutter and chairs, white-faced mannequins fixing their blank stare on the house, secret compartments, and a large airplane model suspended from the ceiling, full of plastic baby dolls -- your typical gothic-flavored Foreman set. But what happened once the show began was not the typical Foreman nightmare I'd come to see; it was more of an unpleasant but innocuous lite nap.

I'd heard that he was using video now -- images of the same video projected on two walls, filmed with Portuguese actors (repeating lines in English). Five live actors, scuffling about on stage, gesturing and executing movements to the droning sound/lightscape of recorded repeated text, blind-the-audience lights, more gesturing.... on page this seems pretty standard. But the way in which everything was executed, with an utter blandness on top of blandness, proved how long 65 minutes can be. I'd come expecting to cringe and be repulsed by the focused intensity towards blandness that created such a disturbing and nauseating effect by precise performance. Instead, compositions were sloppy, performers were mediocre to the point of invisibility, video footage equally pedantic -- in the end 65 minutes without any tension. The most compelling performances came from the aforementioned blinding lights -- which, towards the end of the show were what were disturbing my slumber. I think I made eye contact with some actors a few times I forced myself to wake up and pay attention to the stage. The first time I was mildly embarrassed to be caught sleeping by the performer. After the second time, I just didn't care.

Where is The Other Here, if there is no there there?

What is a human's life worth, in the end? What do we work for? Who do we work for? Do our achievements, our wealth, our accomplishments accumulate in any truly quantifiable, or rather, truly meaningful way? Or is there really only silence, nothing within nothing, nothing to hold in our cupped hands, nothing to show for after we pass? Is there something in the negative space? Are our sentiments communicated to another -- or do they outgrow their tiny containers and become unwieldy, or reticent? What if our gifts to each other only reveal themselves to be burdens? What do we owe each other in life, in death?


These are the questions that strike me thinking about the show I saw last night (and will see another 4 times) The Other Here is an intriguing piece from Big Dance Theater, and surprisingly (almost to a fault) linear and easy to follow in terms of a narrative, I found myself craving more of a sense of mystery and the painful hollowness that Ibuse's writings suggest. The company wove together (rather too comfortably for my taste) two Ibuse short stories (The Carp and Life at Mr. Tange's) and found texts from a life insurance convention. The resulting tale about an aging insurance salesman, his servant, and a carp given to him by a now-deceased friend really begins nowhere and ends nowhere -- and i don't mean that in a bad way at all. Scenes from an insurance conference (complete with sporadic questions from the convention audience) and terse, often-incomplete dialogue between characters are interspersed with heartfelt Okinawan pop songs in quotes and dances that emerge and dissipate like the wind.


The ensemble of actor-dancers held the audience with sure, playful and trustworthy hands. Though there were many people in the audience who were perplexed by the piece's seeming to never land here or there, or anywhere at all -- I thought that that was where I could find magic and resonance the most: in the liminal spaces between between form and content, story and dance.

El Laberinto del Fauno

Finally saw Pan's Labyrinth last night. I was very intrigued by what my friends were saying about the movie. Two friends said it was excessively (and unnecessarily?) violent, that the parallel stories of the Spanish Civil War & fairytale did not work, and that there was one decision the protagonist makes in the film that is unjustified and unbelievable. Two other friends said it was their favorite film of 2006.

I feel I ought to say outright before I go any further that I am a total sucker for stories that feature young female protagonists (like my favorite, Spirited Away) and the fact that the heroine's name was Ofelia worked not so unconsciously to rack up points in the film's favor. But even compared to Guillermo's previous films (Mimic -- [which I saw in Thailand in one of those moments of desperate need for a dose of American culture] a pretty visually stunning portrayal of a world trying to contain disease; The Devil's Backbone -- the ghost of a boy drowned in an underground pool under an orphanage seeks revenge, set, here too, during the Spanish Civil War; and Hellboy -- based on the beautiful comic book, a mutated demon born of scientific/occult experiments of the Nazis fights now for the good guys (i.e. American bureau) while seeking the roots of his own diabolic heritage) Labyrinth seemed to realize all of del Toro's obsessions clearly. The horrific violence of war epitomized by the pathologically twisted & fascistic capitan, juxtaposed with the wonderfully mysterious grotesqueness of the fairytale world worked to demonstrate the inextricable link - no, the absolute dependent relationships of light and dark, the real and the imagined. And the world of the imagined/dark lies only a chalk's length away from the world of the real/light.

I know fuck-all about Spanish history, but del Toro's themes resonate beyond specifics: there is no justice in life, but there is beauty. How are the horrors of humanity (war, violence, sickness, injustice) digested, represented, perpetuated (in order to make digestable) by the imagination and collective mythology of our cultures? Or rather, how can innocence survive (does it survive?) in such a sickened world? I didn't mind the violence, I have to say -- simply because my horror at the violence was as potent as my fascination for the mystical -- in fact I would argue that both are necessary to get the point across. Yeah, I pretty much bought it all the way, now makes my top 3 of 2006 for sure.

p.s. When I first began seeing posters for this movie, I thought it was for The Golden Compass (Pan referring to the protagonist's daemon-avatar-soulmate-doppelganger Pantalaimon), from the His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman -- a mind-blowing read, and incidentally the film adaptation will be coming out in theaters later this year, starring the frigid Nicole Kidman.