Mediated Understandings

by Nicholas Birns

Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland (A Richard Foreman Theater Machine)

Ontological-Hysteric Theater, New York, January 22 – April 13, 2008

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, February 2008. Copyright © 2008 Nicholas Birns and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

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Richard Foreman’s recent turn towards making extensive use of film in his theatrical productions evokes the argument of Philip Auslander in his seminal book Liveness: that the traditional distinction between ‘live’ and recorded media is no longer tenable in today’s technological milieu. Not only do we watch ‘live’ telecasts of events that are in fact only conveyed to us through highly mediated mechanisms, but even when we see ‘live’ action in front of us, Auslander argues, our expectations of what we should see are influenced by our far more frequent encounters with recorded action, images, or sound—so liveness for us cannot be what liveness was for, say, the Victorians. Foreman’s intermingling of the ‘live’ and the recorded summons what Friedrich Kittler might call the postmodern “discourse network.”

The unlikely cultural similarities between Britain and Japan have long been pointed out by cultural analysts, for instance, the late David Titus of Wesleyan University. Both countries are made up of islands with often vexed relationships to the large continental land masses which adjoin them. In the terms of Gilles Deleuze, Britain and Japan think they are Oceanic islands—thus Orwell’s use of ‘Oceania’ for the English-speaking totalitarian state in 1984—despite the attempts of China, France, and Germany to periodically see them as Continental islands. Thus the near-total Japanization of any foreign import, from Buddhism to baseball; thus the long-established xenophobia of England, which has, in our day, been stanched not by any sort of Europeanization but through the growing racial diversity of the contemporary United Kingdom.

Both Japan and Britain are constitutional monarchies whose royal family is valued in affective and symbolic terms long after all actual power has passed from their hands. Both have traditional class systems that have had to engage with more egalitarian discourses; for the past few centuries tea has played an important role in both cultures. In his latest multimedia production, Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater takes this uncanny resemblance as his premise in a challenging production that ultimately sweeps far more beneath its purview.

The performance space is not separated from the audience by a glass shield as in recent Foreman productions. It contained two small pianos (never actually played), a large white basin on a red stand towards the back (complemented by a similar basin towards the left of the space). Two clocks—one hanging from the ceiling, the other on the wall flanking the space to the right—ticked in real time through the performance, letting the audience know exactly how much time was left in a piece explicitly advertised as lasting one hour, two minutes. A glass-framed cabinet, eventually revealing various blankets and bibelots, stood at the right end of the space, flanked by Victorian spirit photographs on the wall; these are also on the floor. Four small light bulbs hung in a pendant fixture suspended from the ceiling. About 20 of the bulbs were placed beneath the large screen at the back of the space.

The décor of a Foreman set is important to think about because its effect often sharply divagates from its initial impression. When viewers first confront the set, they see items that could be the inventory of an old curiosity shop: bric-a-brac, old furniture, various hand-me-down items with a faded glory or piquancy. But what might seem to be an effort at quirky nostalgia or a general period style ends up testifying to a fragmentation of a totality of which the bric-a-brac items are mere shards. In other words, they seem to be vestiges of the past, but end up being the rubble of modernity. It is later than we think, later than the bric-a-brac has initially prompted us to think. This is particularly crucial when the production’s on-screen images evoke unified images of other cultures, against which the ‘live’ actors on stage display a deliberately far less coherent and organic impression.

The haunted, disembodied nature of the set of Deep Trance is emblematized by the fact that it also contains Victorian spirit photographs of the sort displayed a few years ago at the Metropolitan Museum—photographs that were claimed by those who took them to actually capture spirit visitations, and which are somewhere between overt hoaxes and materially configured séances on which at the very least the yearnings for transcendence, if not its empirical manifestation, are troped. In its wish to bridge life and death, matter, and spirit, the Victorian photography frames and illustrates the piece’s concern with bridging the ostensibly real and the allegedly unreal, between past and present, life and death, animate and inanimate, subject and object.

A woman, The Girl with the Golden Dress (Caitlin Rucker) enters the space. She swallows a pill, which on one narrative level (itself, ironically, a rather realistic topology) takes us into the dream-world, the trespassing of barriers, that encompasses the rest of the piece, which is seen as a sort of nomadic night-vision. This is a gesture that is repeated throughout the piece—with ambiguous reverberation. Is this a moment of privileged access to the sacred, to the extraordinary, a trip to fairyland? Or is it a mordant comment on the way our contemporary equivalents of the transports of past ages is the anodyne of prescription drugs, which, the novelist Sylvia Engdahl has recently contended in Stewards of the Flame, are arguably the most effective current means of social control. Is an otherworld conjured by taking a pill necessarily an ersatz otherworld? Or does the numinous end transcend the prefabricated means? Is the repetition of the gesture ritualistic, accumulating a succession of enacted meanings, or does the repetition make it trivial, render it parodic? These sorts of questions recur throughout the piece, and with respect both to what happens immediately before us and on screen. Deep Trance does not permit us to assess it squarely or straightforwardly; we continually reassess not only what we see but our own role as spectators during the course of the performance.

The first actor is soon followed by Girl in the Sailor Hat (McDonough Thayer) and Girl with Black Hair (Fulya Peker), the only character not named, metonymically, by an article of clothing, also the only female character who does not wear red-striped socks. The theme of red in the décor and the actors’ clothing is at once colorful and disturbing, with a sustaining force whose gaudiness can also alarm. The three actors display themselves in almost reverent postures. Stillness, or at least the taut potential of movement, is a major technique of the piece’s ‘live’ aspect; it is a stillness given torque by the marked characteristics—usually denominated in terms of clothing—displayed by the actors. Throughout the piece, it is vision as much as movement that focuses our attention on the ‘live’ performance. The effect is far less choreographic than in earlier Foreman pieces. But music is unobtrusively present throughout, including intriguing melancholic snippets from Mihaly Vig’s soundtrack to Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies, a film whose dream-like evocation of a world whose constraints and modern uncertainties resembles Foreman’s evocation of old Japan and old England as witnessed through the prism in today’s America. There is also a brief, rousing American carousel-tune which spurts up in the middle of the piece, providing a wakeup call so jolting as to be almost disruptive in its hearty merriment. Images, ‘live’ and on screen, and spoken phrases, in various languages, dominate the scene, true to Bonnie Marranca’s early characterization of Foreman as a practitioner of the theater of images.

The spoken phrases, voiced by Foreman and his wife, Kate Manheim, help frame the themes of the play. As, on duplicated screens, a woman strides down a corridor, regally gazing at the audience, the three women on the ‘live’ level scoot towards a glass cabinet. A voiceover intones: “Go to Japan.” There is an invocation of a “mental window,” a proving for the “real.” A male actor (Joel Israel, playing “Man In Striped Suit”) came onstage, looking foppish. A fourth female character, Girl With The Tiara (Sarah Dahlen) also manifests herself, scooting around the stage more boisterously than the other performers. Then comes the first of the piece’s major verbal leitmotifs: “He who drinketh the water never shall thirst.” This line from the Gospel of John seems, in context, to refer less to direct spiritual revelation than to the wisdom offered by cultural contrast, by an evocation of a Japan that the theoretical frame of the play concedes to be expressly fictive.

As has been true of all three of Foreman’s productions since, in 2006, he began to give film as much emphasis as ‘live’ action in his work, sometimes the action on screen mirrors what is happening ‘live,’ sometimes there seems a deliberate disjunction, sometimes no relation at all. Measuring the correspondence of screen to site is part of the interpretive and responsive work required of the audience. Five minutes into the piece, the action seems disjoined on the screen as several of the actors caterwaul in the ‘live’ space. But, for most of the piece, there seems to be more frenzy on screen, while the ‘live’ level is characterized by an eerie, limpid calm.

The calm, though, is certainly not without interruption. Several times during the performance, the house lights are dramatically switched on, breaking the frame usually maintained during a traditional performance, as if to alert the audience and prevent them from succumbing to any absorption into the tableau. In addition, from the left of the space an actor in a large green bird suit enters, with the legend “King Hummingbird” (perhaps reminiscent of Foreman’s 2004 piece King Cowboy Rufus Rules The Universe, a parody aimed at George W. Bush in the wake of what at the time seemed his Iraq triumph) and bearing several small American flags on his shoulder, as if to break the illusion of cultural tourism-cum-explanation fostered by the exotic Japanese settings on the screen.

But what of the British level? This indeed is the most vexatious question of the piece, as the English images are simply not as frequent or as compelling as the Japanese ones. Despite receiving equal billing in the structure of the production, there is a noticeable asymmetry between the production’s own investment in the Japanese level and the stake it musters in the English referents. As the voiceover announces “Young English People,” we see these on the screen, all female, all seemingly privileged and upper class: chic, perky Bright Young Things. This is disconcerting when a young person in England today is as likely to be of West Indian, Bangladeshi, or Cypriot descent. The Japanese scenes seem far more varied both in terms of gender and cultural milieu. But is this difference deceptive? Are we lulled by our greater familiarity with things English, our jaunty ease with them? The audience laughs at the line about young English people, which itself is said with a kind of latent humor, whereas the contemplation of Japan is portentous and laden with the burden of cultural crossover, tourism, contamination. What we may not notice are the Victorian spirit photographs, which are by old, dead English people and attempt to claim to picture the spirits of other old, dead English people returned to life. In this way, the spirit photographs are the English-ghostly equivalent of the manifest ghostliness of the filmed Japanese locations.

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