performance as an act of intervention - part two

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

Susan Sontag (b. 1933), U.S. essayist. AIDS and Its Metaphors, ch. 1 (1989)... performance has participated in shaping ourunderstanding and experience of AIDS......theatrical practices as instances of various cultural moments - in all their multiplicity and even contradiciton...ACTS OF INTERVENTION; Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS by David Román (Introduction, 1998)

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an excerpt from WHAT'S IT LIKE? - EXCERPT ENTITLED; Does This Giacometti Make Me Look Fat or ART IMMUNO DEFICIENCY SYNDROME - written and performed by David Bateman

I get tired of the excessive minimalism cluttering the stark white walls of the post pre-middle modern wing, so I wander away form the posing as straight, poly amorous bisexual couple with the autistic grand daughter in the black and white room and then I see them again in the Giacometti gallery 

And I ask the woman if she would be so kind as to take my photo beside The Walking Man sculpture

She politely agrees to do so, and when she is finished I thank her and say,

“Does this Giacometti make me look fat?”

She smiles a quizzical smile and walks away

I wasted my best joke of the day on her.

But that was my aim.

I wanted to see how she would respond, so I said something peculiar to her to see what her reaction would be.

I can be such a rude, manipulative bastard sometimes.

It’s great fun.

But there are also times filled with great tenderness and serenity, mostly when I’m all alone.

For example, I daydream about having all of the drinking glasses in my white IKEA kitchen cupboards in perfect order.

I imagine them all standing in a row in a beautiful white cupboard.

And then I begin to imagine filling them all with water while they are still in the cupboard

And then setting up lighting in my kitchen with soft lighting on them.

And then photographing all of the gorgeous glasses

And the photo comes out this stunningly beautiful study in shades of grey and black and white

And I call the photo (pause) Whistler’s Cupboard,

and for those viewers unfamiliar with the original title of the iconic American painting Whistler’s Mother - Arrangement in grey and Black No. 1 - located in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (pause) France)

I subtitle the photograph (pause) Water! - and do a series of prints in color with a blue tint for a more (pause) ‘populist’ sensibility

And then one day I go to a gallery where my photograph is hanging

And the couples from (pause) Chicago, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Saskatchewan, Toronto are standing in front of my photograph

And they just stand there and stare at it

She is wearing a loud print skirt and a plain yellow blouse.

He is wearing a pastel sports shirt and plain brown trousers

They look like a modernist diptych tableau vivant come to life

I squint and their bodies in front of the photo begin to look like a collision between Jack Bush (slide) Peter Max (slide) Jules Olitski (slide) and a fabulous silk floral arrangement form the home décor section at Walmart

Through this haze of strained commodified modernism I hear the people begin to speak

(woman speaks first)

It’s just a picture of water glasses. Anyone could have taken that. I wonder how much he got paid for letting them hang it in here.

He should have paid them. Can you buy the art in this place?

No dear, I don’t think you can. But I’m sure there are some lovely postcards in the gift shop.

We should have gone to the gift shop first, then we would have known where the good stuff was.

But we would have missed a lot of interesting things.

What good is it just hanging here all the time? It should be for sale.

Well, if you could buy it, wouldn’t you think that one of the farmer and his wife would have sold by now. It’s very famous.

I read the brochure. That’s not his wife.

What are you saying?

That’s not the farmer and his wife. That’s his daughter.

That’s just stupid.

Well I read it in the brochure.

She looks old enough to be his wife and she’s very homely. And he’s no Rock Hudson himself. Very strange shaped head, but quite life like. I don’t like it.

It’s a good painting. I still find it hard to believe Rock was gay, even though he got the AIDS. I mean, anyone can get it now, right?

[American Gothic slide} I don’t like it so much.

It captures a real sense of those two people as hard working farmers.

I don’t see why you can’t be a hard working farmer and attractive at the same time.

That’s not a nice thing to say, and if you can’t say anything nice [interrupted]

I know, I know, and then don’t say anything at all.

They look like very pleasant down to earth people

They look boring as hell. And if that is his daughter then I’m a monkey’s uncle.

Well you really don’t know much about art do you.

And neither do you.

I know what I like.

I know what I don’t like, and I don’t like what you like.

You liked that one of the diner.

Yes, I did. I did like that one. The people in it are quite nice looking.

You can barely see their faces.

You can see enough to tell that they’re good looking.

I heard that the guy who took that photo of the glasses died of AIDS.

Where on earth did you hear that?

When you were in that room looking at all those flowers that look like vaginas I went into the next room and two very feminine gentlemen were standing in front of it and I overhead what they were saying. I think one of them might have been crying. He kept saying how beautiful the glasses were and how the water looked so clear and pure and how it was some kind of metaphor to illness.

Well what on earth was he crying about?

Feminine men get very worked up about AIDS sometimes.

Well I get thirsty looking at that photograph. It makes me thirsty. It certainly doesn’t make me cry, and if he died of AIDS, that photographer, well, it was his own damn fault.

'Global Projects' - performance as an act of intervention, part one

"... I oppose the global project and I believe in another kind of global eccentricism project that comes from within, from the bottom up, that is ‘cooked’ on the streets and that organically emerges out of it. You know, the migrations of people throughout the world; and that kind of global project is almost opposite to the one imposed by the master minds of globalization, right?" 

Guillermo Gomez Pena

"And what in the hell did Puccini know about the identity crisis of a Japanese Geisha in Nagasaki in 1904 anyway? What in the hell did he know about butterflies? What in the hell do I know about the identity of a Geisha in Nagasaki in 1904? I am a middle aged white Canadian faggot. I have the ethnicity of a loaf of Wonder Bread. My forefathers are the Man from Glad, Mr. Clean, and Jack Daniels. How on earth do I position myself within a fragmented postmodern narrative about an innocent Geisha and Popeye the American sailor man?"      

from Lotus Blossom Speical; Metamorphosis and misidentificaiton in Madama Butterfly by David Bateman

Add caption

Butterfly’s Borders: Gender, Geography, Fantasy and Experience in David

Bateman’s Lotus Blossom Special

Larissa Lai

Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly begins with a mock marriage.  This type of

marriage supposedly belongs to Japanese tradition, at least, in the imagination of the

librettist. The callous American sailor Pinkerton, eager for a temporary Japanese wife

marries the naïve, fifteen-year-old Butterfly in a contract that binds them for nine

hundred and ninety-nine years, “but with the option, at ev’ry month, to cancel the

contract.” Both are ecstatic at the union, but for Pinkerton, it is a frivolity, while for

Butterfly, in spite of her relatives’ admonitions, it is deadly serious. The opera’s tragedy

turns on the misunderstanding between play and reality. This is indicated in the very

opening of the opera, with Pinkerton and Goro observing the mobility of the walls of the

house in which Pinkerton and Butterfly are to be husband and wife. The walls and ceiling

“come and will go, just/ as it may suit your fancy.” Pinkerton calls the house a “fairy

dwelling,” which, Goro observes “Springs like a tow’r from nowhere.” Like the fairy

house, Butterfly, for Pinkerton, is a toy (“the age/ of playthings”)  to play with until he

marries “a real wife from America.” To Butterfly, who, in the logic of the opera, inhabits

only the world of play, the marriage is serious and solemn. Those who live in fairyland

experience it as “real.” Tellingly, while showing Pinkerton her treasures, she throws

away her pot of carmine (the stuff of artifice) but keeps the very real dagger her father

used to commit suicide at the Mikado’s command some years prior.

The opera draws a frame around Butterfly, her house, and indeed, Japan itself. It

is self-aware, but it is not self-reflexive in the sense of seeing it’s imperialist

misrecognition of Asian women. It lays the error of reading at Butterfly’s feet. She can

not see who she is. Pinkerton might be callous, but because he is American (and real) and

she is Japanese (and therefore of the imagination), he cannot be expected to stay with her.

In the logic of the opera, Butterfly’s tragedy lies in her own misrecognition of both

herself and her lover.

Of course we, as good postcolonial readers think we know better. We understand

that Madama Butterfly is a racist, imperialist imagining of Asian femininity. In the

context of American imperialism in Asia, if one thinks of its military bases in the

Phillipines, or more pointedly Vietnam (which is what makes the newer rendition of the

opera, Miss Saigon, so appalling) the international political context in which the opera

circulates is racist and offensive. The right-on stance of contemporary race politics is to

read the opera as a bad Western race fantasy, and move on to produce other, better

representations. However, in recent years, as myself and others have discussed elsewhere,

the difficulty of producing “better representations” that do not get consumed in a newly

Orientalist way, has shown itself to be difficult if not impossible.

David Bateman’s performance piece Lotus Blossom Special, then, takes on a

slightly different strategy. He re-engages the narrative of the opera to show us something

about whiteness, masculinity, camp and queer sexuality. In so doing, he reveals that these

may in fact be the real subjects of the original opera, and not Asian femininity at all.

Puccini may have been more conscious of this than his audiences, if the framing is any

indication.

GLOBAL TOURISM AND OTHER ROAD TRIP MUSINGS

I COLLECT SNOW GLOBES FOR A CLOSE FRIEND. ON A RECENT TRIP ALONG THE NEW ENGLAND COAST I WAS HARD PUT TO FIND ANY UNDER SEVEN DOLLARS, AND I WAS ON A FIFTY DOLLAR A DAY BUDGET. IN PLYMOUTH ROCK I FOUND ONE FOR $1.79. THERE WERE PLENTY OF OTHER SOUVENIRS TO BE PURCHASED. BUT I SUPPRESSED MY INNER KITSCH CONSCIOUSNESS AND LEFT THE MORE DUBIOUS ARTIFACTS TO LIE ON THE SHELVES OF A GIFT SHOP ON THE EDGE OF CAPE COD BAY AND ONLY METERS AWAY FROM THAT FAMOUS LITTLE ROCK. AFTER LEAVING PLYMOUTH I COULDN'T GET THE LYRICS TO THE COLE PORTER SONG, ANYTHING GOES, OUT OF MY HEAD. WEEKS LATER THEY STILL COME BACK TO HAUNT ME WITHOUT WARNING - AND A STRANGE NEW COLONIALIST NARRATIVE THAT I AM SURPRISED, AND HALF-ASHAMED, THAT I NEVER NOTICED BEFORE.

“The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all.”

Daniel J. Boorstin quotes (American social historian and educator, 1914)

PLYMOUTH ROCK GIFT SHOP

"Times have changed,
And we've often rewound the clock,
Since the Puritans got a shock,
When they landed on Plymouth Rock."

THE ROCK

"If today,
Any shock they should try to stem,
'Stead of landing on Plymouth Rock,
Plymouth Rock would land on them."

DOLL KIT AT GIFT SHOP

PLYMOUTH ROCK SITE (WITH ROCK INSIDE!)

 "In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
But now, God knows,
Anything Goes." 


PILGRIM CHILDREN DOLLS

"...The world has gone mad today
And good's bad today,
And black's white today,
And day's night today..."

MAYFLOWER

SNOW GLOBE the final purchase

lyrics from Anything Goes by Cole Porter

GERT'S BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE - REVIEW

             

                  "If little else, the brain is an educational toy."

                                                                                

                                                               Tom Robbins

In P.J. Thomas’s second novel, Gert’s Book of Knowledge, there is a deceptively whimsical quality that draws one in at the outset and leaves you with a semi-hollow pang of paradoxical delight-cum-remorse for all of the antics you have been privy to over the course of this thoroughly engaging ninety-three page journey. You don’t want it to end.

The hollowness I speak of is not of the superficial kind. It is more akin to the kind of hollowness Eliot speaks of in his iconic ode The Hollow Men, a poem that moves through a simultaneously light/dark narrative, littered with scarecrows and columnal ruins, ending with the playful, conflicted image of the prickly pear and the iconic whimper - in lieu of the apocalyptic bang. The paralysis apparent in Eliot’s metaphoric description of men caught within in a decidedly bleak physical and emotional landscape is captured in Thomas’s fleet footed prose by an attention to both broad and intimate personal details. The very first line of the book sets the stage for an exploration of love and sexuality that, although it is not always at the forefront of the narrative, it is always a pleasingly teasing storyline that informs the adventures of the title character and her cohorts from start to finish.

Gert’s journey, both physical, spiritual and philosophical takes the reader to a variety of global sites that represent a cerebral longing for knowledge - as Tom Robbins has pointed out - as an enlightening and profoundly enriching toy. The writer tinkers wisely with the notion of playfulness as she creates scenes that may remind some of us of past escapades where recreational drugs, sex, rock and roll were at the forefront of a life changing learning process. The difference between Gert and the rest of us may lie in the fact that she never really loses her sense of whimsy, play and radical adventure, even during the most somber and tragic moments. She is a kind of grown up Pee Wee Herman with all her toys and her past ‘indiscretions’ intact  - and proud of it. Like Peewee she is always a child and always grownup.

"Gert . . . was renewing herself all the time. I try to define her but when I think I have pinned her she shifts, slips into something I cannot quite grasp. The paint on her portrait is never dry. . . [She] was wearing pink eyelashes and a Goldilocks wig. Her wedding dress consisted of ancient beaded Thai wedding garments sewn together into a “tribal wrap,” as her designer called it, which barely covered her unmentionables . . . Cameron crawled out of the tent reeking of good hashish and stood red-eyed and laughing with his great wide teeth. We all laughed and laughed with left-over high and giddiness from the days before, and then Gert bent over, then each of us, one after another, careful of our swimming heads, and we started to pick up the trash . . . I think I enjoyed the cleanup most of all the wedding favours." (pp 68-69)

The narrator, Gert’s former lover and constant student, continually reminds the reader of how down to earth this frequently flighty character really is. He opens with a personal detail about his own life and then embarks on a selfless journey of reminiscence and magical knowledge that Gert herself is largely responsible for.  She is one of those truly memorable characters from fiction, like the zany off the wall personalities that inhabit a Tom Robbins novel. They are made believable by an unflinchingly personable and lyrical writing style that Thomas has cultivated in her previous novel, Always Up and Down. In both pieces of thoroughly entertaining and engaging fiction she has shown us, that, as Robbins claims -

"Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."

Gert’s Book of Knowledge is all of the above.

                                                                        

THE DIETRICH GROUP PRESENTS

I am an animal...

A playful quality,  drawing one into the beginnings of D.A. Hoskin's I am an Animal, is a delightful and deceiving introduction to a powerful piece of dance theatre that dares to move from fancy free to furiously quirky and romantically challenged at the drop of a hat. Cabbage patches (romaine in fact, but cabbage sounds better) and sofas unite as a quintet of dancers take turns at mesmerizing spectators with a panoply of movement and vocalization that interrogates the naked body with precision, athletic endurance, and beautifully nuanced movement. Hoskins has created solos and duets for his ensemble that flow with such precision and sensitivity from each inidivdual body - it feels like the movement has been created as a unique, personalized gift for each performer to skillfully unwrap.

from L to R - Fabien Piche, Paul Charbonneau, Andrew Hartley, Mariana Medellin- Meinke, Emily Law

Fabien Piche commands the stage with a powerfully ambiguous gender presence, impeccable technical prowess, and disarmingly  beautiful vocals that allow him to inhabit a variety of complex choreographic roles. Paul Charbonneau possesses an athletically defined ethereal quality in one solo segment as his intensely, measured, introverted, and fluid movements travel delicately through a soft, formidably haunting sequence. Andrew Hartley initiates the many magical moments of nudity - moving in and out of clothing, with the help of the ensemble, with a kind of unassuming grace and exquisite, limber, subtlety that infuses his performance with an emotionally and physically engaged presence. Mariana Medellin-Meinke delights the eye and ear as she races, cavorts, and softly engages with Hartley in a sensual duet. Her comic timing and her amazing agility render her role a strong, unabashed study in a diverse form of corporeal dignity. Emily Law rounds out the ensemble as her hair and body are rendered mutable and irresistible bodily agents that she very skillfully manipulates through gorgeous movement and a piercing, enviable charm. When Fabien Piche delivers a series of frank, at times comic love quips to her, the stage becomes a kind of kinetic tableau vivant testament to the intricate nature of love, romance, feigned disenchantment, and the will to control one's frequently fickle romantic destiny.

The ensemble is aided by diverse musical selections ranging from Streisand to Roberta Flack, giving the overall piece a kind of nostalgic dance/slumber party feel (of the erogenous kind) that includes an onstage turntable beside a sofa large enough for all five performers to lounge and laze as they move toward an unexpectedly poignant and gorgeously written finale - a finale possesses a brief monologic segment that tugs at the heartstrings with a relentless and moving charm. Written by Hoskins himself, this   celebratory, requiem-like segment adds a rich, moving texture that acts as a beautiful counterpoint to the dominant playfulness of the choreography -

the beginning of one’s finality of desire

is when one dies.

not as easy as one thinks

It can be hard work to die... 

It is an exquisite death

It is an exquisite death

the recognition of this fleeting existence...

And so what do we do?

we graze

we graze

Ultimately, the piece is framed by a disarming joviality that impeccably cushions the full frontal eclecticism Hoskins is famous for. With wardrobe coordination by Mikey G. and 'mother nature' this is a sexy, exciting, funny, and poignant selection of explosive meditations from the Dietrich Group that embraces jovial interplay and beautifully reverent/elegiac moments addressing romance and mortality in a provocative, enlightening, and thoroughly entertaining way.  

running at the Citadel at 305 Parliament until Saturday Septemebr 29^th