“Perhaps, one day, this century will be known as Deluezian” —Michel Foucault
By Rob, Nina, Sage While Merida presents a vast array of free cultural events, we have had a difficult time attending them in large part because they usually start at 9:00 pm (with school alarms going off at 6:20) and because our weekends are often full of travels and other activities. When our kids opted in favor of home schooling for a day, however, we seized the opportunity.
Not knowing quite what to expect, Chris and I ventured off with Sage and Nina to what turned out to be an impressive contemporary dance performance. Titled “Plan de Consistencia” and performed by maKina de Turing, a Mexican-Uruguayan collaboration, it was based on the work of the renegade philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (an influence that we were unaware of before arriving at the theater).
When I realized that it was based on Deleuze and Guattari’s basically unreadable dense, confusing, abstract philosophical tome, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, I was secretly intrigued but feared for the worst. Even under the best of circumstances, postmodern culture is fraught with potential peril. With its aesthetics of shock, fragmentation, and semantic rupture, often bordering on the absurd, I was concerned that a work with such an obviously and aggressively postmodern premise might go way over my head, let alone the girls’. It turned out, however, that I need not have feared: my preconceptions were dead wrong. In short, it was one of the most cleverly crafted and delightfully postmodern performances that I have ever seen.
To be certain, the work began with a strong contemporary, modernist and even postmodernist, rhythm, disjointedly segueing from a hidden philosophical conversation in a camping tent to running, leaping, and loudly yelling “listo” (Spanish for “ready”)—often still in midair—into a mike dangling from a cord above the performers’ heads. And the tent and mike proved to be only the beginning of a long list of seemingly random and unconventional props: an impressive beekeeper’s outfit, numerous pairs of shoes, a gigantic ghetto blaster, electric guitars with amps and speakers, cans of paint and spray paint, and a stuffed Scooby Doo—all before things got really interesting during the final coda.
Against this stream of props, the dancers performed a confusing choreography of twisting and intertwining bodies mixed with long static periods with little more than walking a few steps backwards and movements that bore little or no resemblance to any conventional understanding of dance: the occasional (but tasteful) stripping to underwear, the undulating twitching of arm and back muscles, pratfalls, the eating of tacos, break dancing, playing soccer with a 2-liter plastic Coke bottle half-full with water and the subsequent pouring of that water onto a performer’s head, contortionism, acrobatics, and mysterious leaping from a prone position on the floor into the air.
And the eclectic sonic soundscape mirrored the choreography, morphing from random channel changing to a Hendrix-esque electric guitar solo to a dancer crawling on the ground rubbing the loose connections of electrical cords and a “tuning” solo in which one of the musicians creatively tuned his electric guitar to unconventional frequencies. None of this, however, prepared us for the final coda—a carnivalesque rock jam session on the philosophical significance of existence accompanied by much confetti and other messy celebratory substances.
I’m not sure that the family trip blog is the place to fully explore how this performance relates to the theories of Deleuze and Guattari or even to postmodern aesthetic more generally, but I’d be happy to share my thoughts about this in more private conversations. I’ve seen both the dance company, Alvin Ailey, and the avant-garde acting ensemble, The Wooster Group, perform Chekov, and excepting jazz performances these are probably the two best late modernist/postmodernist performances, if not performances period, that I have ever seen. Obviously, a minor experimental performance collective cannot present the same level of technical expertise—either as dancers, performers, or even rigorous technical postmodernists—as these elite, pedigreed artistic institutions, but who better to perform a multi-media Deleuzian drama—given Deleuze’s celebration of minor art—than a “minor” group. The spirit, logic, and execution of their performance brilliantly personified the wild, joyful exuberance of Deleuzian thought without being derivative, jargonistic, sloppy, or predictable. Both complex and fragmented, but neither intellectually abstract, nor sanctimoniously pretentious, their performance proved as entertaining as it was thought-provoking. For all of its chaos, we all really enjoyed the experience as this performance magically worked its way from confusion to nonsense, from nonsense to madness, from madness to the carnavalesque. It was absolutely delightful to see performers who could magically work such transitions while still remaining interesting, engaging, entertaining, and both fun and funny.
In many ways the funnest part of the performance was watching Nina and Sage (and another young girl seated near us) watch the performance. Seeing them laugh delightfully at what many in the audience stared at blankly and confusedly was instructive. The performance was indeed nonsensical, but it was joyously—even deliriously—so, and it was the most youthful in the audience who seemed to recognize this almost instinctively. As Deleuze and Guttari themselves once put it, a “concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” maKina de Turing not only showed up at the theatre with wheelbarrows full of bricks, but they have pretty good arms too. I pity the poor janitor who had to clean up all the broken glass.
Nina:
There were a lot of things going on and it made less and less sense as it went along. It was super crazy. I liked at the end when they started singing the song in Spanish and these weird people came out and started attacking them with silly string and putting clothes on them and spraying confeti and hitting them with these plastic hammer thingy-ma-jigs.
Sage:
I thought that you could interpret the performance in many different ways, but it was impossible to find out what they really intended it to mean. Even through it was in Spanish, it didn't have much talking other than they quoting quotes from the book it was based on. You didn't really have to understand it to enjoy it. My favorite part was the scene where a woman was sitting on the floor eating a tortilla while another dancer ran around the stage with his shirt over his head.
I also enjoyed two of the dancers who danced a lot by twisting their bodies in unusual ways that looked like a cross between acrobatics and dancing. It surprised me that they didn't have a curtain call like most performances do, but it made sense that they didn't have a curtain call.
[The performers simply walked off the stage, leaving behind a messy dark stage that a lonely janitor eventually began to clean up, our only sign that the performance had actually ended and a clever—even unprecedented in my experience—dramatization of postmodernism’s refusal of narrative closure. When I talked to Nina and Sage after the performance, they both could relate to the metaphor that the performance was like taking several puzzles, mixing them together, losing half the pieces, and then trying to put it back together.]
