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Something Mundane and Something Extraordinary
Something Elegant, like this by Anat Shinar + The Ways I Wished to Love Her by A.P. Looze
January 17th – 26th, 2019
Pillsbury House Theater
Taja Will
Repetition is a key method, theme, and comment in Something Elegant, like this. I was ready for Anat Shinar’s repetition of movement, but surprised with her use of text. This text repeated, became fragmented, adopted various speeds, timbre, became an earworm; weeks later I remember “the key, the key, the key” and “why not keep it truly simple.” I know what Anat’s going to say and I still find myself excited to hear her say it, much like with reality TV’s key phrases, “Do you accept this rose?…Ready, Set, Bake…” It suggests monotony and retains a pleasurable amount of suspense. The methodology of repetition itself brings up a million questions for me, “Do we repeat until successful? Do repeat successes for the feeling of doing a good job? Do we repeat because we’re afraid of change? Do we repeat because it’s convenient? Don’t western medicine doctors, mental health workers and physical therapists caution against the injury of repetitive movement/lifestyle?” The answer is yes and there’s an equally as strong argument for repetition and I felt this argument was an integral theme to this work. Anat’s way of exposing private and public, social conditioning, and the obsessions of pop culture come together in this relentless, humourous, sometimes erotic and little grotesque work.
I found myself most drawn in by the false starts, the way she interrupted herself, the moments where she lost the poise that seemed required by the inflection of her voice. I loved the sound of the high heels, the smell of cooking meat, the white wall, “this wall is white”, knees slamming against the table, the sound of the empty LaCroix can being set down. I was compelled by speed as she stood up on the table. At times I was concerned about her, up there again and again, in heels with bright lights pointed directly at her. I was excited by the moments where she stumbled. I thought about the guise of domesticity and an outdated, but currently popular, illusion of poise in domestic entertainment. Making the private public and selling the most successful of private moments – it’s been happening a long, long time. It is the foundation of lifestyle & reality media programming and who hasn’t watched an episode of The Great British Baking Show or Marie Kondo’s Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up? This work left me confronted by the idea of repeating myself in pursuit of some illusion of domestic fame to the point of exhaustion.
The Ways I Wished to Love Her challenged my expectations for A.P. Looze’s signature aesthetic with its tender, serious and contemplative nature. I’ve seen everything they’ve made over the last few years, and I’ve fallen in love the complexity, self introspection, relationship with objects and humor. However, this piece didn’t invite humor, not even in the Laurie Anderson-esque autotune that began the work. A.P. evokes something which is entirely personal, yet universal. The work landed as an exquisitely nuanced meditation on the child and mother bond and the vitality of the psychological stage of mirroring in that relationship. Early in the work we see a film projected on multiple surfaces. Its high definition and the way the projection was layer gave it a larger than life quality. To me A.P. took a supporting role in the video with the central character being the Mirror. This personification included Mirror sitting next to a dead tree in fallen leaves, Mirror reflecting A.P., Mirror reflecting its surroundings, Mirror in movement. There was a moment I felt the mirror would fall out of the video and smash on the floor. My breath caught the moment the mirror in the video was smashed and then we see pieces appear on stage. A moment I’ll never forget was when the first piece of mirror was picked up and placed back down, the sound caught by the microphone and a cavernous, never-ending, hollow, grief-like sound echoed for several moments. This is when my personal experience attached to this work. As a transracial adoptee and someone who identifies with motherlessness, I felt my own grief, loss of biological connectedness, confusion and longing through the rest of the performance.
A.P. continued to transform the Pillsbury House Theater by using the mirror to create a kaleidoscope of light and shape projected onto the floor, the walls, and themself. The space disappeared where the light met the dark, and shapeshifted into something like a planetarium. I was fully immersed in the light, and dark, and my memory, and my grief, and my projections of birth, my upcoming birthday, A.P.’s recent birthday, the patterns and shapes, like the developmental stages, the puzzle of identity as we are taught it in infancy. On opening night I cried a few silent tears, on closing night I could barely catch my breath, audibly sobbing and holding the hand of my dear friend next to me. It ended with A.P.’s clear falsetto textured with emotion singing on repeat, “hold yourself.” I felt it, I felt it, I felt it.
Anat Shinar and A.P. Looze were two of three Naked Stages Fellows, who shared a evening over two weekends, while the third fellow Chitra Vairavan devised a durational work that traveled through the Pillsbury House Theater for a single performance. I unfortunately didn’t have the privilege of seeing Chitra’s work. The Naked Stages program is a 7 month fellowship for emerging performance artists funded by the Jerome Foundation and is overseen by director Pramila Vasudevan.
Taja Will is a queer, Chilean adoptee, performer, choreographer, therapist and restorative justice facilitator. Her approach integrates improvisation, somatic modalities, text and vocals in contemporary performance.
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