Silverlake Blvd.

The Numinous Has Many Shapes and Ways: On SITI and Aaron Poochigian’s "Bacchae"

 

See my review of the Getty Villa's production of Bacchae, published today in the L.A. Review of Books.

Bacchus Uncorked @ The Getty Villa

Trisha Brown Dance Company @ Hauser & Wirth

 

It was a bright, clear Sunday afternoon. A teaser of a show—barely an hour long—but it was free, the atmosphere was festive, and the dancing exhilarating. Accumulation (1971) was like watching disco dancing in precisely synchronized slow motion.

 

Watermotor (1978) was engrossing, disturbing and funny all at once. It starts with a chorus line of women executing the same series of movements in synchronization. It goes on in perfect order until a guy grabs a woman and repositions her, as she continues with her routine. Then another guy repositions another woman. And so on. And the guys kept putting the women into positions that complicated their routines. They get knotted up, their legs and arms in each other’s way. It was satirical (this is real life) and exciting (where is he going to put her next?) and sweet (the dancers would crack up).

 

Dance as alertness, discipline and fun. I was still humming with the reverberations when, a week later, the news came that, Brown was gone.

Shakespeare400: the history plays

 

During the election I was tuning out the news and reading Shakespeare’s Histories. The Bastard’s comment (King John, 4.3) is a fair synopsis:

 

The life, the right, and truth of all this realm

Is fled to heaven, and England now is left

To tug and scramble, and to part by th’ teeth

The unowed interest of proud swelling state.

 

History as a succession of thefts, destructions and murders perpetrated by squabbles between aristocratic nincompoops, ham actors, lunatics, swindlers, …. The Tragedies present the dead-ends of the individual, the Histories present those of the community. Perhaps the solace—if any—is in the Comedies.

Shakespeare400: Anthony + Cleopatra + Coriolanus

 

I hope the scholars are right; I hope WS wrote Anthony & Cleopatra immediately after Macbeth, and then wrote Coriolanus after that. After two plays about the disaster of politicians with too little honor, a play about the disaster of politicians with too much. Good thoughts for election season.

 

Anthony and Cleopatra say “Screw it” to all their professional responsibilities. What’s wrong with that? At first their lovey-dovey behavior seems rather sweet. But that’s immediately followed by a scene with Cleopatra’s ladies and a Soothsayer, that makes explicit what kind of idiotic milieu they live in.

 

Not that the characters who take their responsibilities more seriously are in any way admirable. Caesar is solely interested in himself, criticizing Anthony’s behavior as an insult to his authority. Pompey, in contrast, goes on about A&C like a prig. Caesar’s great moment comes in Act 3, when his offer to make a private deal with Cleopatra achieves the precisely calibrated effect, and the loving couple turns on each other. Anthony whips Caesar’s ambassador, and then makes a completely incoherent, raving speech. It’s already over.

 

Coriolanus, in contrast, along with his mother Volumnia, represent monsters of duty. Too bad their context is post-Brexit remorse:

MENENIUS: Why, masters, my good friends, mine honest neighbours,

Will you undo yourselves?

FIRST CITIZEN: We cannot, sir. We are undone already.

 

WS shows the start of reality TV, over-sharing, selfies, Anthony Weiner, and Donald Trump:

SECOND CITIZEN: He used us scornfully. He should have showed us

His marks of merit, wounds received for’s country.

SICINIUS: Why, so he did, I am sure.

ALL THE CITIZENS: No, no: no man saw ‘em.

THIRD CITIZEN: HE said he had wounds which he could show in private,…

Shakespeare400 (Macbeth)

 

Goethe said somewhere that this was Shakespeare’s best work for the stage. Not his most profound or poetic, but the cleverest, most exciting theatrical contrivance. It could be true.

 

Think of Macbeth and his wife after the murder. This scene could have played in Athens, before an audience accustomed to Euripides. He is already raving (“The multitudinous seas incarnadine”) while she preserves a placid front (“A little water clears us of this deed. / How easy is it then! …”)

 

Every exchange is contrast and paradox.

 

For once even the passages of silly banter (The Porter) revive the discourse of paradoxes in a minor, bawdy key.

 

And yet, for such an action-packed spectacle, the action is interrupted by an interlude with the Witches and Hecate. This is usually cut. It follows Macbeth’s ghastly banquet, and preceedes some political speech by Lennox. It is a masque, a pagent, rather than a hard-boiled account of political assasination, like Julius Caesar. “Show” the witches cry, like good stage directors.

Shakespeare400 (Lear)

After Timon, another story of a Great Man abandoning the world. But in Shakespeare renunciation comes with a cost. In the same way Cordelia’s silence is the opposite of meekness: she wills her estrangement. Her renunciation is striking for a Shakespearean heroine: refusing eloquence, refusing poetry.

 

In the first Act, Lear plays at being mad, before actually being so. He jokes about blindness, before experiencing it. And then he anticipates his eventual disassociation when he shouts at Goneril, “Doth any here know me? This is not Lear. / Doth Lear walk thus? Speak thus? Where are his eyes?”

 

Later it’s Gloucester who answers, after picking up the trick of oracular utterance from Lear and the Fool, “I see it feelingly.”

Haunted House Party @ the Getty Villa

 

 

A preview of Haunted House Party at the Getty Villa last night. Luckily, I’m going to see it again later this month. Today I just want to note how unfailingly resourceful the Troubies were at finding ways of making Plautus’s characters, situations and imagery laugh-out-loud funny.

 

For instance, Philolaches’s introductory monologue—where he compares himself to a well-built but delapidated house. It’s one of those moments where Plautus’s point is inscrutible: are we supposed to laugh at his audacious frankness? Is it supposed to be shocking? Touching? Or is it just backstory needed to propell the plot forward?

 

The Troubies read it as an idiotic adolescent whine, augmenting the absurdity by having Philolaches croon his story to the tune of Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s “Our House”. As one of our party commented, “I missed a lot of the lines because I was laughing so hard.”