Deeply Fascinating

Much of the conversation at this year’s festival has centered around geographical context. Questions have come up repeatedly about the balance between presenting local and non-local work, how to engage community audiences and the pros and cons of touring work that was created in a vastly different context than the one at a given festival. Personally, I have been struggling with the relationship between this year’s festival and a tragic Austin event that coincided with the kickoff of the Festival.

Jeremy and I stayed up late sipping beers and discussing Manwatching at the festival hub Friday night. We had vastly different experiences of the performance. He saw it Thursday alone, I saw it Friday with colleagues from UT. The premise is that an anonymous British woman (of some stature in her field) casts a local white male stand up to cold read a script which is full of details about the woman’s coming of age through sexual fantasies and mastrubation. The fellow reading for the Friday afternoon performance was witty, self aware and charming.

Jeremy remarked that it seemed like an easy pill to swallow, watching this white dude read the intimate details of some woman’s private sexual thoughts and experiences. Maybe that was the point, that it is an easy pill to swallow, but for the woman who wrote the piece it wasn’t. This information, when read by a white man isn’t really that jarring. It points to a more insidious danger, one that white straight men won’t ever experience. It was about a structure of feeling that I know in my bones, a type of fear so internalized that was brought to the surface in Austin this week. The piece is about the patriarchy in a funny way, making it possible for me to consider a critique of the system without breaking down sobbing.

Here are the first reactions that I shared with theater director and dramaturg, Gabby Randle.

It’s day number four of the Fusebox Festival, and I’m feeling that festival exhaustion start to set in a bit. The run-around intensity of seeing shows, chatting quickly with people, making way between venues, then drinking at the hub at night…it takes it out of you!

The same thing happens to me every January in New York, when a host of festivals simultaneously take place. And the funny thing is, I love it when that happens. As a critic one of the things I get asked a lot is, “You see so much, aren’t you just jaded?” Or variously other comments to that effect, meaning in general that the critical perspective gets skewed by the exhaustion, leading to unfairly harsh assessments of artists’ hard work.

It’s possibly true to some degree, but at the same time–and I know I’m not alone in this–it actually sort of opens you up to the experience of the work. There’s no better feeling than dragging your exhausted self into a theater, thinking all the while that you should probably just skip this one, take a break or grab a proper dinner, and then all of a sudden the show you didn’t think too much of blows you away.

Timothy Braun was saying something to that effect to me the other day, and I wholeheartedly agree. It’s always the show you didn’t give much thought to going in that sticks with you in the end. Such is the magic of a festival. All of which is to say: Hang in there and keep going!

Tonight, the LA-NYC performance group My Barbarian present the latest iteration of Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT) at the festival hub, in participation with their residency at UT Austin’s Visual Art Center. Straddling theater and visual art performance, the group do provocative work, and I’m excited to get to experience PoLAAT, which was developed in New York in 2008, a couple years before I moved there. I interviewed Alex Segade a couple years ago, which you can check out here, but I was provoked by this quote and wanted to share it:

“This is where I think some of the visual art training comes in very handy, because with performance art, one of the things you notice historically in the conversation is that context has been incredibly important, and visual art has investigated that a lot,” he continued. “Theater has too, but I don’t know that tradition as well, of theater in non-theater contexts. But I know how art works, how to design itself in a new context. So when our work changes context that’s one of the things we try to deal with—what are the parameters, what are some of the things that the audience brings with them to their seats and how do they perform their own position as audience in that context? So in visual art usually you have a viewer who’s moving around and distracted and not even paying that much attention. And that’s the kind of audience we’ve often engaged with, even when we have them sit down. We know we’re designing their expectation. Theater is a different animal that’s about focused attention, and an identification with the performer that’s also very different from visual art.”

Workin' #fieldguide #standup

A photo posted by Rude Mechs (Austin, TX) (@rudemechs) on Mar 15, 2016 at 5:55pm PDT

Last night I caught the opening of the Rude Mechs’ Field Guide, a bizarre, devised, loose adaptation of Doestoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Perhaps most notable about the production design is that fact that scenic design–consisting of abstract set block pieces–was made primarily of cardboard. The guy who designed it is named Eric Dyer, who I’ve known for some years, and I chatted with him briefly about it afterward.

Cardboard isn’t new to Dyer, exactly. Radiohole, the 15-odd-year-old company Dyer co-founded in New York used cardboard in different ways in the last two shows, Myth or Meth and Tarzana, so I was curious about the choice to employ it here in Austin with a different company. As Eric explained over drinks at the festival hub, the choice was mainly his. Eric doesn’t see himself as a designer, really; while design is important to Radiohole’s work, he and the company collectively write, perform, and design their shows. It’s rare, then, that he works in a specifically design role, and when he does, he likes to use the chance to explore his own fascination with materials–to see how far he can push them, and what new things he can do with them. The Rude Mechs were receptive to what he wanted to pull off, so they went along.

Specifically, all the set pieces except one are made entirely of cardboard. Which may not sound like much, but when you see the show it’ll surprise you: People climb on top of, move around in, sit on, stand on, dance on, and knock over these pieces. And all but one are made entirely of cardboard. (The one that uses a wooden frame is the one on casters, for the eagle-eyed.) Apparently the fact that cardboard can support that much weight is well known to some people–plenty of people we were talking with knew it–but it was certainly new to me, and made the entire experience a little richer.

Coincidentally, Eric Dyer did an interview with the Rude Mechs a couple years ago for BOMB magazine, which you can read here. I did an interview with Eric a few years ago, which can be read on Culturebot, and for a great and thorough introduction to Radiohole’s work, I’m publishing a long essay on them in the forthcoming sixth issue of Chance (print only), a serial art book on theater and performance design.

Sitting in Timothy Braun’s truck yesterday–which he affectionately refers to as the Millennium Falcon, if I recall correctly–en route from Salvage Vanguard to the Museum of Human Experience, he commented to the effect that: “It’s always interesting to see what Ron Berry’s thinking about as you go through the shows. This year, it seems like he’s really interested in the idea of meta-theater. With a capital ‘M’.”

We’d just seen Deborah Pearson’s Like You Were Before, and were commenting on its aesthetic synergy with the pieces I’d seen the night before, Manwatching and Every Song I’ve Ever Written. I understood what Tim was getting at, even if I don’t quite think “meta” is exactly the right way to express it, if for no other reason than the term has become so broadly used. If meta-theater refers to a heightened sense of self-awareness about the performance, then you’d be hard-pressed to find a show at Fusebox that isn’t somehow meta. But for me, there was definitely an interesting through-line linking the three shows that yesterday I vaguely referred to as a fascination on the artists’ parts with “interpretation.”

The quick run-down of Like You Were Before is that it began in 2005 when Pearson was moving from Toronto to London. Shortly before, she purchased a video camera and shot footage of her friends sending her off. Three years later she discovered the footage, and in 2010 produced the first version of Like You Were Before, exploring the distance between the person she was 2005 and the current. Five years on, she’s revisited it, now examining the person who made the show in 2010 from the same distance as she was from the original video. So basically, it’s a show today about a show from five years ago about a video made five years before that.

What all three of these shows explore, then, is some sense of what it means to perform something when the authorship is distanced or alienated from the performance. Jacob Wren turned his songs over to five different bands to realize, through their own style and aesthetic, his songs. Manwatching imposes a deeply lived and felt female experience on a male performer who doesn’t even know what he’s going to have say until he reads it onstage. And Like You Were Before confronts Pearson with being forced to re-enact prior versions of herself, aware that she’s no longer that person (which is basically the theme of the show). Pearson’s work is, in other words, doing much the same thing as Manwatching is: Pearson’s no more “actually” the person she’s performing than the guy doing the anonymous writer’s monologue.

Of course what I’m doing in writing this is placing a technique or device above the content of the shows themselves, which risks making it seem like all three are interested in doing the same thing. They’re not, exactly–though it’s also worth pointing out that all three are essentially performances in which the inaccessibility of deeply personal experience is explored through this device. But seen this way, one begins to realize the cynicism of this artistic vision, which is kind of at odds with their presentation. Wren spoke of his project as an act of “gifting” (albeit of songs that, as he put it, “no one wants”), and Pearson’s show is certainly heartfelt, even sentimental (which is almost a bad word in contemporary art, and may explain why the show is so squarely about the failure to completely connect, rather than a celebration of what’s left to her of those prior selves).

But even more to the point, I think it gets to what troubled me about Manwatching, which is certainly the most polemical of the three. It’s about how female sexuality is a topic of social discomfort (at best) and actively suppressed (worse), and therefore it employs the cipher of a male performer and his occasional clear discomfort to deliver its message. The thing is, for such a fraught topic it felt like a pretty easy pill to swallow. The audience is indulgent of the performer’s discomfort, and placing female experience on a male body seems to rely on the very inequality the show wishes to challenge. But as it turns out, the night I saw it part of the script was missing from the stage, so there’s a good chance that show somehow resolves this shortcoming. I’m curious what spectators who catch it Friday or Saturday think–I certainly want to see it again if I can swing it.

Day two of Waffle Chats brought together four artists, Luis Garay (choreographer), Daniela Libertad (visual art), Rachel Mars (performance maker) and Anna Rispoli (filmmaker and one third of art collective Zimmerfrei). Moderator Leslie Moody Castro quickly picked out themes that all four approach in their respective practices, she also prodded Luis into sharing personal stories from his childhood. All four artists are investigating limits in related but different ways. Libertad is conceptualizing the limits of form via the triangle, simplifying the study so much that it becomes infinitely complex. Her residency at MoHA has just begun, but already there are collections of clean lines and geometric questions lining and intersecting on the white walls tucked behind the stage.

Mars’ work seems to be pushing, pulling and testing a multitude of limits; the line between comedy and theater, emotional potential and the ability to discipline oneself properly, humor and despair. Last night at Our Carnal Hearts I found myself chuckling at the same moments that I wanted to go draw a bath and turn out the lights because I was ashamed of how much I related to her enraged envy.

Luis Garay admitted a similar feeling to me in the car after the waffle chat. He is one of those totally brilliant people that can come to a talk hung over and nervous but still spit out some mind melting metaphysical ideas about ritual, religiosity and running away.  His work Maneries  shows Sunday. Stay tuned for an interview with The Walker that I overheard him give, or just catch him in person to find out how this work is inspired by French philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

As for Anna Rispoli, I need to write a whole separate post about the limits of utopian living and the connection between her film Hometown Mutonia and the magical east Austin venue that it screened at tonight.

https://soundcloud.com/jeremy-m-barker/fusebox-waffle-chat-7april2016

Every song I've ever written: band night #fusebox2016

A photo posted by Jeremy M. Barker (@moptop745) on Apr 7, 2016 at 2:10pm PDT

I’m sure I’ll have more on this later, but I was pleasantly engaged in the notion of “interpretation” by the shows I saw last night, the Royal Court’s Manwatching and Jacob Wren’s Every Song I’ve Ever Written: Band Night.

Whatever else they’re doing, both shows are explicitly playing with the materiality of interpretation of some sort of source. In Manwatching, it’s a long monologue on a woman’s sexuality that’s performed by a male comedian who’s never read it before. In Wren’s piece (the first part of a quartet) it’s the result of handing off five of his songs (songs he wrote when he was young, which–he seems to acknowledge–may only have value to him) to be performed by five different bands who then talk with him about why they chose what they did.

Leaving aside any personal feelings about how successful either enterprise was, I thought the pairing was a great way to kick off the festival as they both dealt with these issues of where “art” actually exists. While both pieces rely on a previously authored text, they both exist as a result of a distinct performance, muddying the idea of “authorship” in a provocative way.

The kickoff Waffle Chat at #Fusebox2016 got to the heart of things real quick. Panelists Kee Hong Low ( West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong), Matthieu Goeury (Vooruit, Belgium), and Cory Baker (The Long Center, Austin) joined Ron Berry for some real talk about the state of international arts funding, the role of arts centers in local communities and future aspirations for their institutions.  Kee Hong Low, the Head of Artistic Development in Theater for the massive new Hong Kong Arts district, West Kowlhoon, jokingly referred to arts centers as monsters that require a lot of food. He was alluding to the huge amounts of investment money taken to build a center, but his analogy surpasses the financial. Arts centers constantly need to reinvest in their communities, as new Vice President of the Long Center, Cory Baker discussed with a local Austinite. The long Center offers a residency program that gives local artists access to rehearsal space, marketing and other perks, but in 2015 no one applied. This speaks volumes to the disconnect between artists and the resources at The Long Center. With the loss of several key performance venues in Austin this year, such residencies will be crucial for presenters. The question that faces Baker is how to make The Long Center feel more accessible to the local arts community. As she said, it’s not about bringing new work to Austin, but about how to engage with what’s already here.Matthieu Goeury, on the other hand, is looking ahead to a future community in Belgium that will be quite different than the current patrons of Vooruit. He is faced with an influx of young non-white immigrants that will largely reshape the demographic in Belgium. He wonders how to plan ahead for a different audience. I wonder what strategies Vooruit is using, and how those might be in conversation with the ones we are having in Austin and in other regions? How can local artists and art centers, like the the Long Center, engage with one another more effectively? How can a large scale district for the arts  be developed in a way that feels like home for locals?

This talk got me thinking and wondering. Have a listen, comment here or come find me IRL (I’m the gal with purple hair) I’d love to keep ‘chewing the fat’ together.

https://soundcloud.com/jeremy-m-barker/fusebox-waffle-chat-6-april-2016