Bodies on Stage

Superstition

There is a skeleton me I rarely meet. She jangles and dangles through the farmer’s market and down the aisle to her seat at the opera, pieces becoming suddenly unhinged in the direction things are meant to come apart. There is the muscle and fat me that is always aware of her. My mimic, my delay. My repetition, my echo.

Signpost

This body is a signpost, like the one in my brother’s backyard pointing to all the places he and his family have visited. The foot slides forward, toward Tibet. The pinky finger escapes sideways, to that small bakery on the Rue des Martyrs in Paris. Palms flip up, returning to the San Francisco Bay Area. Shoulders twist, one to the sky and the sparse Antarctic, one to the earth and the ash memories of a dinner at Manka’s Inverness Lodge. The miles are obscured, but the directions are clear. This body signposts outward, to paths I’ve travelled or have yet to sojourn.

Partner Dance

Us going in directional unison didn’t work. We thought this seemed an elite way of being, to move in sync—forward, up, back, down—together. But “together” was the awkward grinding problem. It would take the end of us and miles of time walking, alone, to admit we were best in opposition. The definition of us as “well-oiled” was not two smooth gold bands of circumambulating promise. Rather, our best purpose was going big, going small, apart and away from each other.

Magician’s Assistant

She climbs into the magician’s box knowing what comes next. One, two, three, and he pulls the saw clean through. Her legs are the first to escape. They run away stage right, down some invisible steps, out the blue gate, through the garden, and over the horizon. There go her legs, setting like the sun. Meanwhile, back in the box, her torso struggles to decide. Maybe escape is not the answer. Maybe wait. Maybe her legs will return. Maybe lie here unmoving. But her mind says: No. Go. Slide like water through the seams of this box and seep into the ground. Let me escape, at least.

Horizon

The horizon is old and knowing like a deep blue scar. I see all I want galloping westward toward it, even while the thunderstorm of others’ opinions renders my body unable to follow. The horizon is in agreement with me. “I’ll hold your secrets safe!” “I’ll keep naysayers away!” I sleep facing west; otherwise, insomnia. In the east, the horizon sleeps, and I cannot bear to look back on packed up yesterday. The western horizon is tomorrow in my hands. Shape it, set it down, shake off the storm, and stumble towards the next accident.

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Love Stories

Let me tell you a story. A love story.
It’s about sharing.
Making room. (Move over.)

It’s general admission.
You don’t get to claim your seat.
There’s never enough room.

Yes, it’s a love story.
You. Me. Your ego. My id.
There was never going to be enough room.

(Give a girl a seat!)
I told you: This is a love story.
It’s about sharing.

~Text for performance; Premiere August 2019 at The MilkBar in Richmond, CA.

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Art Is

You could park a big ol’ Cadillac inside Grandma’s walk-in pantry. To a child, the great windowless room stocked with jams and sauces and pickles and puddings was nothing less than a theater. The rows of metal shelving parsed the space into my very own backstage, wings, proscenium, and house. And on a shelf at the back, below the neatly indexed cake mixes, rested a simple cardboard box— the costume box.

The pantry became an escape from chores—from pulling weeds, picking green beans, and hanging laundry on the line. Grandma, perhaps knowing the futility of wringing work out of a girl on Christmas or spring break, would allow me to spend hours playing dress-up. I made tiaras out of tinfoil and cast spells with a pair of twirling batons. I built worlds and stories—lies to live with, get lost in, argue and fall in love over. The costumes were my willing accomplices as I discovered the art of performance.

In the brown tweed skirt and chevron-striped blouse, with grandma’s white scarf wrapped around my head, I sublimated my country girl life and became an international spy. I discovered the power of sound effects—the snap of the clasp as I opened the black vinyl purse—and of deliberate gestures—my hand reaching into the purse’s depth to pull out a tube of dried-up lipstick or a pair of cat-eye sunglasses. With these props I would save the world.

I did not differentiate between art and art making. Art was the world I created and the objects in it, as well as the physical actions used to articulate a story. Nothing was truth, yet everything became a strategy for dealing with the truth of the world.

Sometimes I sat outside on the porch bench, tucking the too-big crepe-de-chine dress under my bum so I looked more elegant. Turning my knees to the east, and looking over my shoulder to the west, I mentally snapped my black and white photograph. I could even imagine some soldier overseas looking at it with affection.

At the thought, my body would flush in a fever and I’d run back into the pantry and press the side of my face against a row of glass jars. This was art: the drama of the unspoken, the bodily reaction, the saving grace of a quart of canned peaches.

Eventually I outgrew playing dress-up, and grandma took the costume box to the annual town yard sale. But by then the box had served its purpose, teaching me the benevolent deception of art and performance.

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Memories Above the Seat

I attended West Edge Opera’s Poppea this past weekend and was reminded how much I enjoy the little companies, the ones that reside in the cracks between the Bay Area’s more venerable institutions. In a small theater (Poppea was presented at El Cerrito High School’s Performing Arts Theater) I can sit in the cheapest seats (a comparable row at War Memorial would command a premiere price) and feel an immediate connection to the performers onstage. The company, in turn, can articulate character, style, setting, and ensemble in ways that might be lost in a three-tiered grande opera house. Granted, this production of Poppea was pared down in terms of both the script and the cast (seven singers, two acts, and a nimble seven-person baroque band) but that served to imbue the melodrama with playfulness. I can only imagine Poppea, in larger forces, as a fierce moral and political construct. Serious, and thoughtful, but maybe far less fun.

It’s with the small productions that I find myself “imagining” afterwards about the things “I would have done differently,” to a much greater degree than when I hear professional companies such as San Francisco Opera. I feel, somehow, that I’ve been given the green light to participate. While Lucas Krech’s grid-like video backdrop, for example, helped fracture the timeline, easing the 17th-century tale into the 1960s, its looping, distorted, clips felt a little more 2013 than mid-century modern. The high-contrast images never stopped moving, and the constant flickering layer of imagery just behind the scene(s) onstage sometimes distracted. A few well-chosen still shots might have given punctuation and dynamic shape to what was essentially an added character (or two). But there I go, directing.

The morning following the show, I delighted in this serendipitous commentary by Pete Miller on the importance of sending the audience out of the theater with memories … and a desire to communicate them. He, too, acknowledges how performers can turn the tables on the audience, empowering the concert- (or theater-) goer to participate, engage, and further the experience of something ephemeral. For me, this tends to happen with smaller productions à la West Edge Opera’s Poppea.

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The Black Glove, Op. 5

August Strindberg’s The Black Glove (at the Exit on Taylor through November 11) is like a two-year-old who, taken to the park for a playdate, proceeds to throw a tantrum, pick some wildflowers, lose a shoe, kiss the new girl, and get stung by a bee, all within an hour of arriving. In other words, it’s a difficult child. Verse, fantasy, and self-reflective monologues coexist in ways that amuse, surprise, tire, and sometimes test your patience. The production feels, at times, “lost and found, lost again, and found again,” (scene 4).

With an “innocent kidnapping” at its core, the work is a study of the lives of people who reside in an apartment building, as well as their reflections on the meaning of childhood. From cellar to attic—realized side-to-side across the stage—the super, the maid, the stricken mother, and the old man perform their individual moments with vigor, but no story compels more than another. There is an even tempo to the pacing of each scene, as well as parity between the characters’ individual concerns, and the shallow, horizontal use of the stage likewise reads flat. Although the characters live in the same building, and their lives intersect by circumstance, they seem disconnected. Their actions are isolated rather than reactive.

That I found it difficult to relate one character’s intentions to those of a character in another scene is not necessarily a fault on Strindberg: as my attention waxed and waned, I was reminded of being a child, where the fascination with an object or game fades as quickly as it is transferred to something new. My adult mind, however, resisted the effort it took to fully engage in each isolated scene. I wanted to relate every detail to some other detail in a perfectly worked out, cause-and-effect narrative, and The Black Glove simply doesn’t work that way.

Director Rob Melrose describes Strindberg’s fifth chamber play as the most “cheerful and redemptive,” and I would add that a thematic undercurrent of childhood helps create those qualities. The mother’s stolen baby is a constant reminder of the promise and hope of being young (each character comments on this), while the set design reminds one of a playroom littered with objects. There’s a table spread with the holiday feast, a candelabra, and a Christmas tree; a toy pony, a doll, and a doll’s chair; a desk and its requisite books and piles of papers. In addition, the two immortal spirits act, themselves, like children, playing with the apartment dwellers as if for their own amusement. The Black Glove, while fragmented and strangely (loosely) held together, is a thoughtful—if patience testing—reflection on the magic of childhood.

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The Ghost Sonata, Op. 3

On a whim, I decided to go see Cutting Ball Theater’s production of August Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata, one of five chamber plays in repertory at the Exit Theater on Taylor. The venue is the tiniest of spaces (60 to 70 seats), which made for one of the most engaging, up close, and intimate performance experiences I’ve had in a long time. (Two days prior, I was perched away far away in the balcony at San Francisco Opera.) At the Exit, the size of the venue supports Strindberg’s style so well: there is an abbreviated quality to his storytelling, and though the characters do not lack emotional intensity, they seem sketched as if in outline with a dark pencil. There is a creep factor to this: those outlines invite the viewer to step in and become the possessed old man, the young student, the lovely daughter, the crazy old lady.

The structure of the play likewise demands your faith before you’re sure if you’re willing to offer it, and there’s never any going back; the three concise acts march inevitably forward and become more confining, from the street, into the house, and finally, to a special room in the house. Strindberg works the small scale, drawing the audience in, and then–once he’s got you–he provides subtext and metaphor to deepen and enrich the situation. I was immediately captivated and amused by the macabre flavor of the play, but found myself, the next day, thinking more seriously about the characters’ relationships and what it all meant. It wasn’t just a simple spook story to shrug aside.

Things are set in motion from the start by the old man, Hummel, who feels he’s been wronged and wants his just desserts. He enlists the “help” of an optimistic young student. The student falls in love with a young woman (she happens to be part of the family that consumes Hummel’s thoughts), and the old man seizes the opportunity to join the family for a dinner party. Once we arrive in the house, it seems that every character holds fast to a personal agenda or is otherwise hung up on some matter of the past, and no one is capable of moving beyond their situation. Like in Chekhov, the inaction is what does everyone in.

Repeated motifs throughout the play heighten a certain quality that I enthusiastically described afterwards as “twisted.” Strindberg keeps women behind windows, hides people in closets (they “see nothing and [are] not to be seen”), and generally covers things up (people die behind a Japanese screen). When, in the third scene, the young lovers exchange poetic sentiments about flowers, it also rings false. Their dialogue, which should be romantic, is a facade. It does nothing more than echo the nonsensical chirps and caws of the senile old woman (she mimics a parrot, except when—wise fool—she speaks a great truth). The sound design helped connect all the various strange facets of Strindberg’s world: reverberant glass bells punctuated the symbolic moments and lent a dream-like quality to the proceedings.

The Ghost Sonata does remind one of chamber music, where a skeleton crew often creates musical meaning equal to that found in an orchestral work. There can be such intensity in “small” forms. This intensity, as it played out Saturday night, felt like a warning, against stagnancy and against being resigned to one’s situation. I am insanely curious to see what transpires in the other four plays!

p.s. I was initially surprised at the period costume and set design. It was tastefully done, but perhaps my expectations had set off on another course while I waited pre-show in the lobby, watching a video projection of Strindberg Twitter feeds. I may not have been the only one who felt the contemporary resonance of the script: everyone in the theater laughed when the young student quipped, “I don’t care for publicity. … The art of belittling is so highly developed.”

p.p.s. I really wish, too, that he had sung the ending lines of Act 2 and Act 3.

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