I was having lunch with a dear friend. We were talking about finishing things. Finishing work. Finishing works of art. He quoted Anselm Kiefer, who purportedly answered the question, “When is a painting finished?” with the quip, “When it’s sold.” When the piece is no longer available to the artist to add to or change because it’s no longer in the studio—that’s when it’s finished.
The tangibility of a painting—man, so alluring! Whereas an unfinished dance induces panic for me: the way it fades from memory so fast, like a dream; the meticulous documentation required to pick up where you left off—so much work! With 28 problems, dancers Julia Sloane and Madison Rough would rehearse on their own once a month while I was directing Confession just to keep that intricate, athletic, physically exhausting choreography intact. Then came Covid and with it the end of those rehearsals and with that cessation, the eventual task—still ahead—of reconstructing the dance before it can ever premiere.
You may remember that last time in The Junction, I shared part of the pro-ephemerality theoretical stance that Adam Smith and his collaborator, Arletta Anderson, historically held but maybe don’t so much ascribe to anymore. I asked him to expound. In his first point, concerning documentation, he included a passing reference to printed scripts that got me thinking: Though I still haven’t managed to digitize the 33 Fainting Spells show Adam emailed me about last month, Our Little Sunbeam (my nephew is working on it), what would it be like to transcribe a scene from that show? It can certainly be clunky and insufficient to script dance theater or devised or hybrid or experimental work, but what if I think of it less as documentation and more as intersemiotic transposition—taking content that exists in one form and migrating it into another?
Okay, let’s try it. Minimal context: In this scene, the woman is Gaelen Hanson and the owls—yes, owls—are both voiced by Linas Phillips. Their dialogue refers to Ivanov, the Chekhov play we adapted in Our Little Sunbeam.
Two taxidermied owls perch on lucite pedestals, side by side on a darkened stage. Crouching between them, a woman clicks on a flashlight and points it at one of the owls. It is tall and stands at a slight slant. Its name is Millbach, and it speaks in an inhale-voice, à la Instagram prankster Sarah Gray, aka Sue Dillon.
Millbach: Okay, man.
The woman shines the flashlight on Seamus, who speaks in an amateur Irish brogue.
Seamus: Okay.
Millbach: Okay, man.
Seamus: Okay what, Millbach?
Millbach: Well, Seamus, I was wondering what’s happening now?
Seamus: Well I think you know. Why don’t you tell me what’s happening, Millbach?
Millbach: Okay, man. The wife is dying.
Seamus: Naturally.
Millbach: And the man wants to die.
Seamus: Yeah, that’s it. You got it, Millbach.
Millbach: (Laughs.) That’s—that’s funny.
Seamus: Sure ‘tis. It’s fockin’ hilarious.
Millbach: But why isn’t he laughing?
Seamus: Because he can’t see the funny from where he’s standing.
Milbach: Oh. Okay, man.
The woman clicks the flashlight off.
Hmm. Worth a try? The owls, functioning as a chorus, poke at the irony of Chekhov’s play and tease the central theme of Our Little Sunbeam—the individual’s hyper focus on their own discontent within a larger context that is visible only to others.
I think the 20-year-old video will be more compelling than that was.
But back to Adam’s epistolary ephemerality essay: His second point has to do with the audience. I love hearing Adam’s perspective on this because of how different his performance practice is from mine. I love the danger and unpredictability of live performance yet these are not qualities I seek; also, like many, I tend to find “audience participation” stressful. For these reasons I’m utterly captivated by this central inquiry in Adam and Arletta’s practice:
How are we necessitating the audience? That's a big question Arletta and I always ask ourselves with any work we create. In devising work together, we think about a series of variables to be engaged with - a movement score, some improvised language, a task to accomplish, live music composition, some form of audience interaction... This stems from thinking about live performance as ephemeral in the sense that each performance becomes an unreproducible act. Our audience becomes necessary to inform it, participate in it, or simply experience the variables and compare notes with people who saw other nights.
Our play Theatre Show (a play about a woman) is a 45-minute structure built around a volunteer audience member, so it's innately different from night to night. It allows for an audience member to create a space, give honest, unique responses, and share a part of themself. We did six performances of it in June and we had a few people come back a second time to experience how different/similar another performance would be. I later heard that a group of folks who saw different performances also had a late night bar conversation revolving around the different audience volunteers and what happened in their own respective performances.
For me, this is heavily informed by my work with the Neo-Futurists, who were, in part, informed by Italian Futurism and Dadaism (though every discipline probably has some form of this and unique forebears). Their flagship show, The Infinite Wrench, is a weekly attempt to perform 30 original plays in under an hour. Every week they replace between two and 12 of the plays and write new ones for the following week. It is performed in an order determined by the audience, and if an hour passes before every play is performed - you don't see those that remain. While the companies do a lot of documentation (hello marketing department), the experience embraces the ephemerality of performance. No two audiences will experience the exact same order of plays, performed plays, or individual moments within the plays.
Me: This sounds amazing, and also like a massive amount of creative and administrative labor, and reminds me of another cool thing director/filmmaker Gregg Lachow (whose long-ago anti-documentation stance figured prominently in the last post) did in the ‘80s in Seattle—a weekly cabaret called “The Late Night Club” hosted by New City Theater, at which I was briefly a regular, along with Lynn Shelton and many others—and which somehow featured all kinds of brand-new work every week. Mostly unreproducible work, made quickly.
Adam wraps up with two examples, one of which has become ubiquitous…
I can tell people about Hamilton and they can see something close to what I described from Hamilton by watching it online or seeing the show, but when we embrace changing variables in performance the only way to experience something that only happened once is through the retelling of it by the people who were in attendance. In my opinion, the audience is more necessitated there than for something as codified and scripted as Hamilton.
Yes! Quickly hopping back to lunch: Moving on from Kiefer my friend and I agreed that central to the pleasure of experiencing live performance is the “I was there” phenomenon. I saw May B by Compagnie Maguy Marin at the Moore Theater in the 1987. I drove to Oakland in 1985 to see The Smiths. I watched Al Pacino shamelessly mug for the audience in Glengarry Glenn Ross on Broadway that time. I was at the closing night performance of Angélica Liddell’s Te haré invencible con mi derrota at On the Boards when Liddell went off script and smashed all the cellos. When I describe any of these experiences to someone who wasn’t there, I’m describing a thing that happened, a singular event. Unlike Hamilton, which is likely to remain with us indefinitely (and which, to be perfectly honest with you, I haven’t seen).
Adam’s final example has already had its fleeting New York run:
I recently saw Julia Masli's Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha, and this is such a great recent example of that. Without giving away too much of the show, she has constructed a set of variables that involve audience interaction, and, in-real time, she is able to react uniquely to the result of those variables. Each show seems to have a few landmarks and beats she tries to hit, but within that is a world of possibility. Even talking with a few friends who saw different performances, we relished in the retelling of our own experiences and comparing notes. When we stop trying to recreate a perfect thing from night-to-night, there's so much joy in the "you missed this, but you saw that" experience.
So, I guess, ephemerality could be thought of as a tool in art-making, and we can ratchet it up and down as it serves our vision.
Way to land it, Adam. Ephemerality is a given. Like change, a rare constant. And something to be embraced in a culture that seems collectively confused and ambivalent about things lasting.
I’m bummed I missed Masli’s piece, it sounds thrilling. But you know what? I don’t want to watch the video (if there is one). Maybe I’ll see it live someday.