the matter of memory

Your perception, however instantaneous, consists then in an incalculable multitude of remembered elements; in truth, every perception is already memory.  Practically, we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future.
                —Henri Bergson

The stage of Red Fly/Blue Bottle is littered with mechanical detritus—film projectors, clocks, lamps, record players, recorders, and other generic gray machine with unrecognizable lights and dials—the antiquated, clunky machines that even my underfunded high school threw out once a year.  Most are propped up on just as aesthetically displeasing suitcases and storage units.  In other words, it’s immediately recognizable that this piece will be about time and memory.  And indeed it is.  A result of HERE’s delightful HARP program, Stephanie Fleischmann and Christina Campanella have pieced together a haunting performance through the use of wistful poetry and dark, quirky music, respectively.

The performance features a protagonist collapsed in space and time, as a young woman (Jesse Hawley), old woman (Black-Eyed Susan), and an interlocutor type (Campanella).  Although Campanella’s role serves as more of a conductor-puppet master, her obsession with definite articles (“These—no, those”) indicates an anonymous storyteller struggling to distance herself from an evocation of memory and pain.

The entire production team, performers and designers alike, is a force to be reckoned with: Jim Findlay’s remarkable dump-set and moveable screens, the lovely and haunting video work of Peter Norrman are some of the most seamless and flowing technical work I’ve seen.  The white screens are set in perfect intervals to serve as both ambiance of memory as well as striking moments of revelation, mostly thanks to Miranda k. Hardy’s complementary lighting design.

And the trifecta of women are all wonderful, with a particular nod to Hawley, who plays Clarissa with an eerie subtlety, an affect of detachment that somehow charms.  She navigates traveling across countries and decades with equal expertise.

Despite the appeal of all these elements, they never really come together, a common pitfall in these multimedia opuses.  While the screens look cool, and provide a few choice moments, they mostly seem gratuitous and totally outshone by the simplicity and uselessness of the actual devices onstage—a return to the classic concern brought up by the likes of Adolphe Appia over a century ago.  And the narrative, albeit abstract, conflicts with the direction.  The entire piece plays one note—macabre—which leads one to question the motives of the characters entirely: why does this young woman care about the man (“Him”—too painful to even recall the naming)?  Although one could stretch to interpret that this is a retroactive projection of pain and loss upon the ingénue, it remains unclear and unjustified, to the point where it’s almost offensive that these three incarnations of the woman’s self are obsessing over the lost male beacon.

Criticism aside, Red Fly becomes a wonderful touchstone for intelligent and moving multimedia pieces, and I certainly expect big things from this promising team.