On Taja Will’s Gospels of Oblivion: To the End

Chantz Erolin

gospels of oblivion: to the end
May 4-12, 2018
The Southern Theater Minneapolis, MN
Choreography: Taja will
featuring: tim rehborg, kathleen pender

Taja Will’s Oblivion is a speculative, narrative performance of living in the end times immediately before the death of the human race. The performers hopelessly ask for a Superman to appear, recant cataclysmic terrors such as 9/11, and wander through formations of connection and joy in what seems to be humanity’s overdue punishment for its incalculable crimes. Aloud, the performers ask, “What have we done?” While the bulk of the piece experiments with solutions to the subtextual question, What will we do when it’s too late?

In the olio of Oblivion, among show tunes, chants, movement, and sound, the set is a particularly effective element. Strips of astro turf on the Southern Theater’s floor around a collapsed tent compose the stage upon which Taja Will, Tim Rehborg, and Kathleen Pender navigate loneliness, collaboration, and memory. Will’s makeshift campsite evokes an inside/ outside domesticity; a semblance of home. This encampment implies the ruin of structures that the audience knows to exist in the world outside of the theater—social contracts, industrial society, and political ideologies made tangible, which house the actors of our reality’s theater of atrocity. The Southern’s exposed walls and threadbare lighting emphasize that scavenged, apocalyptic sense of space. Above all else, where Oblivion succeeds is in its insistence on survival. The performers’ relationships with each other take center stage and their intimacy often belies the ostentatious glitter of their costumes. Throughout the performance, they sleep apart and long for each other, crawl into their tent for comfort, play telephone through tin cans connected with string—there’s a sense of “no rules” and, in that, the language of “playing” remains alive in the rubble.

But I’m left wanting more while the performers of Oblivion “set up camp” in concept, content, and tone. Will’s campy humor and exaggerated exposition is puzzling to a point. On one hand, I sympathize with the desire to entertain the idea that cabaret’s absurdity could unearth what’s more difficult to see in the devastating anxiety of imminent apocalypse, but more than posit the perseverance of glamour in pre-extinction, the show frolics in the frivolity of critique. Where a collection of voices and phrases might make for a hermeneutics in “gospels,” jokes fail to land and tedium wins out. If this is excessively harsh, I confess I’m sensitive to that which emphasizes the tedium of our twenty-first century hellscape, but if the doomsday clock is being pointed to, I don’t want hear “made ya look” when I look at it—I want to see something.

To write good criticism, one should take something on its own terms and continue from there, and I just can’t get past the terms upon which Oblivion is built. It may not be good criticism to say this, but Will’s play of extinction as campy and corny strikes me as nihilistic and ineffectual, while the balancing element of tenderness and connection in catastrophe comes off as saccharine by comparison. It’s uninteresting to say, “I didn’t like it.” But, here I go: I didn’t like it.

Choreographer Taja Will is a queer, Latina artist. Her body of work includes multi-dimensional contemporary performance and holistic therapy. These two parallel worlds come together in her artistic work through modalities of somatic movement and structured improvisation.

Chantz Erolin is a Minneapolis based poet and musician. An outsider to the world of dance and performance, here he offers a passerby’s perspective.