Phil Soltanoff, An Evening With William Shatner Asterisk photo Shilpa Bakre |
Of course, we can look at such leisure activity as a social ritual in which we encounter one another in a specially concentrated way. Yes, we pay for the privilege, and that might reduce performance to the status of a consumer product. Such is the world we currently live in. We assign meaning through consumer choices. To this Lefebvre offers a ray of rebellious hope: despite the reproducibility of the leisure product, the body seeks “revenge” for the damage such repetitions inflict on it. It tries to make the experience mean something more than just a cultural night out.
Gob Squad, Kitchen photo David Baltzer |
Actor Sharon Smith attempts to perform Screen Test, in which she must simply look at the camera and do nothing. Her creativity gets the better of her and she alters Warhol’s original intent by doing something—putting a clear plastic bag over her face as personal artistic statement. You could interpret this, following Lefebvre, as her body taking revenge on a hand-me-down parcel of culture. Her moment of authenticity is, of course, rehearsed. So how will a ‘real’ moment be found? One by one the actors replace themselves with volunteers from the audience. Eventually there are four un-trained performers standing in for the spectators. They are given headphones through which the actors feed them lines. The words come out sounding either more wooden or more spontaneous. Sometimes something surprising happens, something that momentarily breaks the conventions Gob Squad is playing with—such as a full-mouthed kiss between an actor and a spectator.
Of course, putting un-trained performers on stage has become its own convention. They stand in for us the way trained actors stand in for us. We end up in George Banu’s representational hall of mirrors with nothing to contemplate but our selves and our values. Banu calls them empty values.
Phil Soltanoff, LA Party photo Lisa Barlow |
In An Evening With William Shatner Asterisk, Soltanoff’s other show at the festival, Captain Kirk of the original Star Trek TV series speaks to us from “the future” on two flat-screen monitors. He has come back to talk about the binary of art and science. His 1960s TV performances have been meticulously edited in such a way that he speaks sentences he never uttered during the show. Given that the editor and writer have had to excerpt Kirk speaking just a word or syllable from wherever they could, and stitch the images together to construct the sentences, the effect is visually disjointed and robotic-sounding—also humorous and fascinating. It takes effort to stay with the argument when presented in this jarring manner, but I enjoyed the challenge. And the pay-off is well worth it. A pre-recorded monologue by Mari Akita takes over the screens (as text only) for a while. Akita recounts dressing in drag and watching confused people try to fix a gender category on her. Kirk returns to explain that in the future there is no language to describe binaries such as male-female or art-science. A surprising dose of optimism. Or is it wishful thinking?
Quiet Volume, Ant Hampton & Tim Etchells courtesy the artists |
Rabih Mroué (Beirut, Lebanon) returns to PuSh with The Pixilated Revolution, a lecture performance about camera-phones and how the immediacy of the Syrian revolution is almost instantly transmitted through social media. As Mroué lectures at a table, we contemplate, on a large screen upstage, what a camera-phone operator saw at the moment he or she was shot at, and possibly killed. Later we watch another camera eye discover a sniper just as the sniper fires on the camera holder, and kills him. The jittery phone images are contrasted with official state videos in which government cameras record President Bashar’s motorcade in carefully staged processions. These stable, stately images are made possible by the use of a tripod. Mroué likens the tripod to any other government weapon of control and intimidation, such as a rifle scope. Where the camera phone is fugitive and embodies rebellion, the tripod is an instrument used to project the state’s desired image of stability.
As is the trend in performance these days, projection screens of one kind or another are everywhere. Banu’s hall of mirrors is multiplied perhaps even beyond what he described a few years ago. He is right in saying we have nothing but ourselves to contemplate in these situations. But is this really such an existential tragedy? I seem to remember that Plato, the ‘father of philosophy’ wrote, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
PuSh Festival, Vancouver, 14 Jan - 2 Feb; pushfestival.ca
RealTime issue #120 April-May 2014 pg. 16
© Alex Ferguson; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]