Giving Performance Art Another Chance

I’m sure you’re shocked that after yesterday’s post I decided to watch a few more offerings of the Exponential Festival, given my declaration that I don’t like performance art and I’m sick of it.

I felt really bad after I wrote that post. I felt judgmental and unfair. Haven’t I seen experimental theater and performance art that I’ve loved? Maybe I was just picking the wrong performances to stream.

So I watched three more. Let’s talk about it!

On View: WFH

I was hesitant to watch Sunny Hitt’s On View: WFH because I haven’t been loving a lot of the content that directly addresses the COVID-19 crisis. As I’ve said in previous posts, I don’t really feel like we have the aesthetic distance to make strong and reflective artistic choices about the time we are living through. That being said, I’m very glad I watched this performance and it is my favorite piece of the Exponential Festival thus far.

Sunny Hitt is a choreographer and movement director, and On View: WFH is a recording of a live performance that took place in a gallery. Hitt begins by setting up her space. She decorates the window of the gallery, looking out into Canal Street in Lower Manhattan, with many post-it notes, each with the name of a Black victim of police violence, including those we lost in 2020- George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and sadly many more. Interspersed were notes of connection, inspiration, and resilience, with messages such as “keep going,” “my liberation is tied to your liberation,” and even “I’m glad you’re here.” After the post-its were set up, Hitt set up a computer screen and logged into a Zoom call with other dancers. The performance begins.

To a mixture of music and audio of the news that defined 2020, Hitt and the on screen dancers express the isolation, pain, grief, and rare moments of collaborative joy that were the hallmarks of last year. There were times when I felt like Hitt and the on screen dancers weren’t really communicating, and I don’t know if that was intentional or not. When they were able to come together and respond to each other’s movements, it served as a reminder of the joy of connection and the gift of technology during these dark times.

The best part of On View: WFH was that you actually got to watch Hitt engage with her audience through the windows of the gallery. While many people stopped by to express support, giving thumbs up through the glass, most of them moved on. However, one little girl, maybe two years old started watching the performance from her stroller. You could tell she was mesmerized by the dance. As the performance went on, she got out of her stroller and joined in, dancing on the side walk. Of course, it’s unlikely she was reflecting on racial injustice or the hundreds of thousands of victims of the government’s neglect to control the pandemic, but she connected to another human being through art, and that’s beautiful.

Okay kids, buckle in, cause the next two reviews aren’t as glowing.

¿comfortidades' 錢意識?

Tina Wang’s comfortidades’ is self-described as an “experiential self-care guide,” and features Wang going about self-care rituals in her apartment, such as stretching, cleaning, showering, etc. While there were a few moments I found very funny, like watching a roomba run into a wall, and even mesmerizing, such as her running a small bar of soap over her spine in the shower, overall, I felt the piece was lacking. Like many of the pieces I’ve reviewed over the past week, it felt too long and there were many snippets that could have been cut. In the description of the piece on Exponential Festival’s website, it reads: “Are comfort and commodities meant to soften us into compliance or restore us to keep standing up against the injustices of the world?” Based on what I watched alone, that question never would have occurred to me. It seemed to be more of an amusing exercise in looking at daily habits in a different way, which can be fun and enjoyable, but as an audience member I did not feel directed to examine my relationship to comfort and self-care.

Look Out Shithead

I had high hopes for this piece by Object Collection. For one thing, the title is hilarious, and it bills itself as a love story. I love love stories! I also love unpacking and examining love stories! The poster on the event page also makes it look fairly traditional, or at least more traditional than other pieces in the festival. Dear reader, I was fooled.

Look Out Shithead is inspired by the films of French new wave filmmaker Eric Rohmer. I don’t know anything about Rohmer or his work, so I can’t attest to whether having intimate knowledge with his filmography would have improved my viewing experience. The “love story” is a series of vignettes featuring friends, couples, etc who seemed to represent archetypes of romcoms, such as the quirky girl, shy guy, person who falls in love too fast, etc. Some of the scenes were filmed in person, and others put the scene partners together in editing, and it showed. While I don’t mind the choice to emphasize the distance between the scene partners in general, it felt very out of place when it only occurred in some scenes in the piece. I think it would have been more cohesive to either have all the scenes filmed separately and edited together, or commit to filming in a more traditional way, of course taking all necessary safety precautions.

However, the truly damning thing about Look Out Shithead was the writing. The text was composed (their language, not mine) by Travis Just, and to me it seemed like what someone watching an English movie who doesn’t speak any English must feel like. While the cadences and patterns of speech were all familiar, the language deliberately did not make sense. I’m sure this was all completely intentional, and maybe has something to do with Rohmer, but I found it completely grating. It seemed to be making a point about cliched dialogues and cultural ideas about love and romance, but does it take 47 minutes to make that point? No! Say it with me everyone- it was too long.

And that’s all for today’s festival wrap up! I don’t have plans to watch anymore pieces today, so maybe it’s the last of the season? Only time will tell.