Obscene Jester

the superstitious ethics of the auditor: heiner goebbels' stifters dinge @ the armory

In "The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader," one of Jorge Luis Borges' many small gems of critical essays, he writes, 

The perfect page, the page in which no word can be altered without harm, is the most precarious of all. Changes in language erase shades of meaning, and the "perfect" page is precisely the one that consists of those delicate fringes that are so easily worn away. On the contrary, the page that becomes immortal can traverse the fire of typographical errors, approximate translations, and inattentive or erroneous readings without losing its soul in the process.

Transposed to music, this might apply to those pieces that withstand poor interpretation (or technique--Bach's 5th cello suite is certainly still a force to be reckoned with despite its many poor iterations on undergrad recitals, my own included), score errata (yeah, Kalmus, I'm talking about you), and unfortunate sound track to rom com sentimentality (Beethoven's cello sonata no. 2 in "Along Came Polly," say). And what Borges asserts as the strength within good literature, that aspect of it that transcends such mundane elements as sentence structure and innovative adjectives, also speaks through performances of composers such as Iannis Xenakis, whose music is often so complex and virtuosic that to be absolutely true to the score is to  compromise some ephemeral element within it that indeed makes it as strong a work as it is--makes it, in Borges' assignation, immortal.  

What matters in these performances, what, indeed, makes each performance something new unto itself, is the intervention of the body. It is specifically in the fallibility of the musician, a sonic reckoning with her own mortality in face of the immortal page, that defines a performance as "live"--in opposition to the digitized perfection of the recording. 

But what of a performance predicated entirely on the lack of the body? What of electronic music that, in the dimly lit halls of conservatory recitals, would leave us in the uncomfortable moment at the end of a piece before an entirely empty stage, unsure of when or for whom to applaud? Stifters Dinge, by Heiner Goebbels and part of Lincoln Center's Great Performers Season and in collaboration with Park Avenue Armory, confronts these issues, and, in its mechanized perfection, offers both the sublime and something less. 

 

Stifters Dinge, as the program notes describe, "is a composition for five pianos with no pianists, a play with no actors, a performance without performers." Beckettian in scope and structurally reminiscent of Ballet Mechanique and its own Futurist influence, Stifters Dinge "revolves around awareness of things, things that in the theater are often part of the set or act as props and play a merely illustrative role. Here they become protagonists." The piece is entirely performed by its own mechanics, yet while the Futurists used the then-recent cacophony of the Industrial Revolution as an intervention into notions of music (and theatre), Goebbels instead offers a Romantically inclined consideration of the intervention of technology into notions of nature and the unknown. Comprised of texts from 19th-century Romantic author Adalbert Stifter, Claude Levi-Strauss, William S. Burroughs, Malcolm X, and indigenous song from Papua, New Guinea, Columbian Indians, and women from the Greek island of Kalyminos, and referencing as well Bach's Italian Concerto and details of Paolo Ucello's tempura-on-wood Night Hunt amidst a bricolage of acoustic (though entirely mechanically produced) sound, Stifters Dinge is very much the "theatre of collage" John Cage hypothesizes in an early interview with Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner. And in its 80-minute assemblage of these not-quite-disparate elements, it is truly a gorgeous work of art. Yet, in the seamlessness of its parts, its Borgesian perfection, Stifters Dinge is also something else: something too easy, too pretty, leaving the audience to this experimental music-theatre not so much challenged as necessarily passive to the experience.

This is where the body falls out--not so much in the lack of organic presence onstage (though the two stagehands manipulating oversize sifters and tubage in the opening segments of the piece do contradict the intention of "a performance without performers") but rather the lack of a realization of one's presence in relation to the piece. Usually, the interdisciplinarity and multimedia that has become synonymous to experimental performance offers up some sort of reconsideration of the very idea of genre, creating something new in its wake. Here, though, the music and theatre and technology and image merged into what to me was more akin to installation art, and the fact of assuming a static posture rather than moving through the site frustrated and stymied my own experience. This does has something to do with the venue--the main hall of the Armory is so vast that, while I cannot imagine this piece performed anywhere else in New York, there was too much space left around it begging to be explored; something like the unexplored natural spaces the piece references in itself. But, I think it has more to do with the rather apperceptive conflict between how we negotiate different spaces of performance. 

The notes describe Stifters Dinge as a piece that "takes [Stifter's] text as a confrontation with the unknown and the forces that man does not master, as a plea for the readiness to adopt other criteria and judgements than our own and even as an oportunity to come to terms with unfamiliar cultural references." It does all this, and the barren trees set between deconstructed pianos on the stage create themselves a paradox of the manipulated natural world. But, to my ear, and eye, what is most significant is the potential Stifters Dinge has to alter our understanding of contemporary music performance. That the unknown in this performance is the relation of the live to the technological and the explicitly disembodied presentation of a discipline, specifically, classical music, that is always already rendered disembodied in critical discourse. That is, the conflict here is between notions of live and technology: we're seeing a live performance completely mechanically performed and the aspect of the natural is in parallel conflict with the (conventional) notion of the live.

As the piece ended there was that same uncomfortable moment. It wasn't until Goebbels himself stepped up to the machines that the audience resumed a sense of security and self-recognition to begin a resounding applause. In its construction, Stifters Dinge is already immortal; whether it has a soul to lose, however, remains yet another unknown.

we care a lot

Returning to my previous piece on Mike Daisey, I was worried that my effusive headline was a bit too much. “Save America?” I groaned at my own hyperbole. But revisiting the piece and thinking through his new opus, The Last Cargo Cult, only at the Public through this weekend, I was reminded that, as always, Tweed’s judgments are sound, friends.

The fact that any performer can keep an audience captivated, alternately silenced and laughing hysterically, without ever moving from his chair is tribute enough. However, in classic Daisey style, his weaving of texts, events, and ideas puts more power in a ten-minute anecdote about blue jeans than most plays can convey in their entirety.

 In The Last Cargo Cult, Daisey documents his trip to the island of Tanna, a blip of an island on the Pacific rim. This is the last refuge of a phenomenon that is unknown to most Americans: in one of the most bizarre, unwritten chapters of World War II, Japan and the U.S. built army bases throughout these tiny islands in case the war escalated. (And, for reasons Daisey went into in If You See Something Say Something, it didn’t.) In many cases, Japanese soldiers were left to wonder whether the war had ended or not. Some soldiers were found remaining as late as 1972. They had never been informed the war was over, and then some.

On the American side, small island cultures, who had little if any contact with the world beyond, were suddenly overrun with American soldiers, who ate chocolate and flew like birds in giant contraptions, and had radios and strange clothes and languages. And one day, as quickly as they had come, they vanished, and these island cultures were left to wonder what the hell had happened. Many worshipped America/Americans as gods, and understandably so, thus the “cargo cults” were born. It’s this latter phenomenon that Daisey takes up in his piece.

Tanna is the last holdout, celebrating John Frum Day once a year, a day filled with American “history,” filtered mostly through the lens of the villagers, filtered mostly from lore of the 1940s encounter. Song, dance, and theatre are in abundant supply, featuring portrayals of American presidents, an obscene number of flags, and in one particularly amazing episode, a lengthy movement piece in which President Obama is chased around in a giant circle by “something like a dragon.”

Despite this great amount of intrigue and totally insane ideas behind the day’s activities, the celebration is surprisingly peripheral to the two-hour performance. He uses Tanna, a communal culture with no capitalistic system or ideals, as a corollary to the problems behind the financial collapse last year. Daisey is thrilled by even a moment of consideration for the foundation of Western civilization: money. That is to say, that ever since the removal of the gold standard by Nixon in the late 60s, the world’s monetary system is governed by consensus, by the market. In other words: it’s totally arbitrary.

So, who’s crazier? A “backwards” island culture that worships a volcano, eats fermented yak paste, and lives fairly peacefully with what they possess, or a “developed” country whose population and livelihood is determined by the ink on pieces of paper? Whose faith is more fucked? Whose values are stronger and more evolved with the times? The answer may surprise you.

And although this is the least nuanced of Daisey’s pieces—at times it verges on Michael Moore-ish bullying—Daisey is still one of the most phenomenal performers and cultural critics of the 21^st century. And a gesture made before Daisey even takes the stage (which some critics have totally spoiled) is one of the ballsiest and coolest moves I have ever seen an artist make in the name of conviction.

Go see it, and happy holidays. Keep buying all that awesome stuff.

ice flow

Spotlight on DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid (not his Christian name) on the gigantic BAM opera house stage, behind a simple yet elegant podium, upon which a small block of dry ice provides a percussive element, as Spooky slowly drags a set of chimes back and forth, amplified so loud to the point of it being almost painful to listen to. After a few minutes, he retreats behind the curtain, which opens to reveal him in his element, behind a set of turntables, surrounded by Jacob Greenberg, Erik Carlson, Jen Curtis, and Kivie Cahn-Lipman of ICE (the International Contemporary Ensemble), to launch into the opening movement of Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica.

By pure coincidence, I recently watched Werner Herzog’s delightful Encounters at the End of the World, the quirky meditation/documentary made during an austral summer (no darkness!) on the icy continent. Herzog does an amazing job of showing that Antarctica is not the “forgotten continent” of mythology, though we like very much to fetishize it as desolate, empty, virginal even. In reality, it is populated by (mostly) scientists and dreamers and drifters from all over the world (the continent has no official governmental affiliation), all of whom are looking for answers: to global warming, to microbes, to the big bang, to, in classic Herzog rhetoric, the meaning of existence. Herzog rarely shows the wasteland, vying for the abundance of animals, the dirt of the bulldozers, and the warehouses of laboratories and mechanics. Truly, Antarctica is bustling with life, politics, science, and a culture unto its own.

This is the very same impulse Spooky had when he went on a grant two years ago to compose Terra Nova; he learned about global warming and the ice floes that were threatened by human intervention, recorded them, and composed this piece. He claims in his notes that not only is Antarctica rife with action, but it can be read as information as well. Antarctica can be digitized (for better or worse) much like an Excel spreadsheet or an mp3.

The performance and piece itself are quite beautiful, as DJ Spooky almost seems incidental to the musicians and projections accompanying him. The members of ICE have an intense job—70 minutes straight of playing—and they plow through with the grace and intensity I’ve come to expect from them. (I could watch Greenberg play “Chopsticks” for hours in the same way we say we could watch an actor read the phone book.)

Very cool are the projection designs by the mighty, mighty Jim Findlay, who makes the very walls of the opera house screens for a combination of Antarctic landscapes, WTO bar graphs, and generic x and y axis play. Perhaps the most brilliant effect is the use of screens behind the performers in addition to a scrim in front, creating a dynamic layering effect that sucks in the performers and gives the screens their due; not just flat surfaces to put “cool” things on as I am so often annoyed by. To add to the screen-flow, the projections are intelligently conceived: text stretches to a bar code, which give way to a bar graph, which gives way to a striated ice shelf. These are so smooth and jaw-dropping that one wishes they weren’t used so much—we’re treated to too much video for the sake of keeping it going.

And the music! There’s music! In truth, with my limited knowledge of the sinfonia format, I doubt Terra Nova will go down in history as a groundbreaking piece. The music is nice, certainly keeps the audience involved, but I was disappointed in the lack of Antacrtic—the sounds DJ Spooky went to record at the South Pole are either too quiet to hear or are so well integrated that the threshold is lost. His occasional manipulation of the live instruments and employment of the theremin (always welcome, as far as I’m concerned) therefore stick out like sore thumbs.

Ultimately, the evening is quite spectacular, and Spooky, as always, is quite the showman, and Terra Nova may actually spark some thoughts about the Land of Nothing, the Land of Plenty beyond a march of some penguins.