The Times Quotidian

North Atlantic, Wooster Group at REDCAT, February 10–21, 2010
by Guy Zimmerman

Many things went through my mind walking away from REDCAT after seeing the Wooster Group’s North Atlantic, but one of them was surely hats off to the company’s artistic director, Elizabeth LeCompte. First created by LeCompte and company in 1982, North Atlantic holds up remarkably well. The writer, James Strahs, pulled from texts by Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill and Gertrude Stein, and the company, anchored by Francis McDormand, Kate Valk, Ari Fliakos and Scott Shepherd, hit their marks with style and precision. Set on an aircraft carrier moored off the coast of Holland, the piece juxtaposes tough-talking military exchanges with kinky sexual banter, presenting life during the Cold War as a fever dream full of violence and desire. Devoid of the multi-layered video projections that play a major role in later Wooster Group productions, North Atlantic features the fast noir rhythms and the Grotowski-esque physicality that define the company’s approach to performance. Evidently LeCompte remains as sharp as a tack.

North Atlantic was created shortly after LeCompte took the reins from founder Richard Schechner and changed the company’s name from the Performance Group to the Wooster Group. Schechner had been one of America’s earliest and most energetic proponents of the visionary Polish director Jerzy Grotowski’s laboratory aesthetic. This past summer I saw Schechner at the Grotowski Festival in Wroclaw, Poland, where the elite of the global avant-garde gathered to pay tribute to the legendary Pole. Schechner spoke to our group about Grotowski’s impact on American theater, the rigor and seriousness he demanded from performers in every aspect of their craft. The Wooster Group’s highly physicalized performance style and their intensive working methods are among the most visible examples in America of Grotowski’s belief in theater as transformative ritual grounded in fully embodied presence in action. Beyond any rigid doctrine, the stamp of Grotowski is the absolute conviction that theater is linked in crucial ways to our collective sanity and, as such, merits the highest level of commitment.

At the same time I got the sense that Schectner’s earthiness and urbanity helped to limit the transcendent aspirations of Grotowski, pushing things in the direction of a kind of neo-Brechtian irony and spectacle. Or perhaps LeCompte is the source of those qualities in the Wooster Group’s basic affect. Either way, part of the reason the Group has found favor with the American art world is that they don’t mess all that much with depth. If American theater is a vast inland sea, wide and shallow, the Wooster Group is one of the bigger crocs, sunning themselves on their mossy log just North of Canal. Their productions are best thought of as comedies that don’t really have time for a sense of humor. It’s interesting to compare with the Polish company Theater Zar, which is Grotowski-inspired work at its most achingly transcendent. Unlike Zar, the Wooster Group does not traffic in reverence; leave the tragic dimension to the Eastern Europeans and pass the smutty jokes.

Rigor without transcendence manifests as kinetic energy, which is LeCompte’s forte as a director. Energy is where the agenda of art links up most easily with the American mindset, and this helps to explain why a counter-cultural enterprise like the Wooster Group has managed to slip past the informal censors that guard American sensibilities from challenge. One searches in vain, in a Wooster Group production, for the subversive silence in which self-recognition can bubble up. And yet one reason North Atlantic holds up so well is that America has matched the shallowness the piece is intent on satirizing. North Atlantic feels much darker now than it would have in the early 1980s. The addition of a Moslem call to prayer way in the background and some references to water boarding are all LeCompte needs to remind us of Abu Graib and Blackwater – of how far we have fallen. North Atlantic does not lack edge, it just aims its edge at tissue where the nerve endings long ago died.

For me the most successful Wooster Group piece was Hamlet, which came to REDCAT in 2007. The piece showed LeCompte’s command of a full high-tech barrage working to support her performers, and the brilliance of her meta-theatrical staging. And yet despite all the distancing and irony, the grandeur of Shakespeare’s mythic text came through loud and clear. To me, and as a playwright I am fully biased here, theater remains at root a literary activity. It’s when rigor in performance meets an original text with true depth that the full transformative display of the art form arises. This is why the highest points in the history of world theater tend to center around a significant playwright rather than a director. Think of fifth century Athens, Elizabethan England, the European era of Ibsen, or to a lesser degree the post War Europe defined by Brecht and Beckett; the playwright-centered convergence seems to occur when a culture begins to run a kind of maximum energy, an energy that translates into a willingness to collectively engage with the radical freedom of the present moment. We do not seem to be currently living in such a time, but perhaps the best way to move in the right direction is to pretend that we are.

[View with PicLens]

That said, it’s impossible to overstate the challenge of maintaining an American new work theater company over the last thirty years the way LeCompte has done, much less a company that has consistently produced such excellent and original work. Theater is pre-eminently an emergent art form, each performance resting on a huge web of complex social and artistic interactions. From the banality of board meetings to the Shakespearean treachery of inter-company politics to the ecstatic energy of performance, an artistic director like LeCompte has to engage with the full spectrum of human experience and remain operative. We are lucky to have artists as strong as LeCompte and her Woosters, and we should treasure every performance.

Dark Hope in No Country
by Guy Zimmerman

That Oscar gold will shower down this year on James Cameron’s Avatar, with its connective planetary goddess, says a great deal about how deep a ditch we have dug for ourselves. The central idea of the film, after all, is that while the ruination of our own ecosphere is a done deal there exists, somewhere far far away, a planet where human greed and aggression will finally meet their match. If hope is your cup of tea you might want to look a little closer to home. For that purpose another recent Oscar winner comes to mind – No Country for Old Men by the Coen brothers, based on the noir thriller by Cormac McCarthy. The hope it contains may be on the dark side, but so are the forces that have pushed our world so dangerously out of balance.

In my last post, Theory of Miracles, I wrote about emergence, a concept central to many intriguing developments in the physical sciences. It’s a concept expressed in deity figures like the benevolent life force in Avatar. A good candidate for the opposite of emergence, in my view, would be reification. Reification is a fancy word for a kind of collapse we all encounter at various levels of experience throughout the day, and it is central to the culture of materialism. To reify is to reduce a complex process to a static thing, separate and apart, unique unto itself.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber

If you made a deity figure out of reification (as opposed to emergence) that deity would look very much like the Protestant God of Capitalism. This deity is all about breaking connective bonds (social, psychological, chemical, molecular, atomic, etc…) in order to exploit the energy they contain. And along with the boundless dynamism and creativity that have given us automobiles, moon walks and the small pox vaccine, this God of Thingification has also bequeathed us species extinction, nuclear weapons, and a badly damaged ecosystem. He is the Christian God shorn of the Virgin Mary, who represents that balancing, feminine instinct for staying in touch with Being.

Karl Marx wrote a lot about reification and so, in his own way, did William Shakespeare. Read Shakespeare’s great tragedies and you will find the theme everywhere. King Lear’s root error, for example, is to turn love itself into a thing that a father can demand from his children. And in Macbeth we see the concept of a king get plucked out of the complex web of relationships that supply its meaning and become centered in a thing, a crown, that can be seized by an act of violence.

The process of reification turns every man into a would-be usurper pursuing the tokens of material success. And sure enough, a short time after Shakespeare wrote The Tragedie of Macbeth the king-killer Oliver Cromwell appears on the scene, launching the modern era with his New Model Army. The various Protestant sects born in the fire of that Civil War left England to settle America, which has become a land of little Macbeths sharpening hidden knives. This kind of thumb-nail history is always tricky, but the fact that we still inhabit the world Shakespeare foreshadowed in his plays explains why Hamlet and Lear remain mainstays of global drama, and why Shakespearean writers such as Cormac McCarthy feel so relevant to our lives. In novels such as Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men and The Road, McCarthy has been tracking the trends that so worried Shakespeare.

One paradox McCarthy loves to illuminate is how desperately the god of reification strives to avoid being reified himself. No god wants to be reduced to just another thing, and especially the “jealous god.” And so he hides, receding into the woodwork of the universe where he masquerades as Natural Law. He is the one-God of Adam Smith and Isaac Newton, the deity of materialism who is difficult to free oneself from because he hides from view where his authority cannot be questioned. And this is where No Country for Old Men, becomes especially interesting.

Buried under the plot of No Country lies a complex meditation about fate, Ananke, karma American style. The hero, Llewelyn Moss commits a series of cosmic indiscretions and the hit man Anton Chigurh is dispatched by our implacable, impersonal deity to make a corpse-thing out of Moss. Moss’ first “error” is failing to kill the antelope he shoots at in the beginning of the film. Some little hesitation, perhaps, ruins his aim and the antelope runs off, wounded. Next comes Moss’ biggest error – he returns to the scene of a massacre to give a dying man water. Through these errors Moss identifies himself as an apostate in the temple of materialism. His heart is not true – he worships at some other altar. In the domain of the one jealous god this is not okay and Chigurh is sent to “thingify” Moss.

In numerous scenes Chigurh presents himself as an agent of “necessity.” In his vanity he refuses to acknowledge that he works in service of a god. And, again, this is fitting because Chigurh serves the god who conceals himself because he wants to be the only god. Hulking around with his pneumatic cow-killing machine, Chiguhr is a demon of the hidden monotheism that underlies the material view of the world.

After Moss is dead, Chigurh pursues Moss’ innocent wife, Carla Jean. Before taking her life, Chigurh tells Carla Jean he is only enacting a fate Moss himself set in motion for her. Carla Jean scoffs – Chigurh has come to kill her because he likes to kill, plain and simple. No impersonal law is being served. This insight doesn’t gain Carla Jean anything – Chigurh kills her anyway – but driving away he is grievously wounded by a speeding car that appears out of nowhere. What is the meaning of this odd bit of seemingly random violence? The tables have been turned on Chigurh. Either the car slamming into him had no meaning at all – in which case his own acts of violence are equally devoid of cosmic significance – or the car slamming into him represents the intervention of some rival force or energy…in which case the “impersonal law” he claims allegiance to is the expression of one deity among many. Either way, Chigurh is revealed as a creature of delusion. As he hobbles away on his broken bones, we sense that he has been reduced in his own eyes.

Birth of Venus, 1879, William-Adolphe Bouguereau

As powerful as he is, all it takes to undo the god of materialism is the whisper that he is not, in fact, alone. In McCarthy’s understated, hyper-masculine way what No Country announces is the rebirth of the connective deity that reigns over the planet of Avatar. She is the great emergent rival of the reductive Protestant god, the presence the poet Ted Hughes identified as the “the Goddess of Complete Being” in his remarkable book about Shakespeare. In the four centuries since she departed from the scene the world has been transformed. In flight from the mystery of Being we have pulled nature apart to analyze matter and energy down to their smallest components. And there we have discovered…mystery. Particle-wave duality…action at a distance…non-locality…the materialistic exploration of the world has unearthed, not the longed-for certainties, but the most mind-confounding paradoxes ever contemplated. Every time we use a computer, a cell phone, or a microwave oven we are reaching down into a miraculous quantum realm where matter and energy are interconnected in ways we can scarcely comprehend. And now, having reached the bottom of the world, the scientists raise their eyes…and there she is, clothed in the very real hard science of complex systems and emergent form, like Venus rising up out of the waters…

Alternative Thoughts on Walking the Red Carpet
by Nancy Cantwell

It is awards season here in Los Angeles and along with the traffic we seem to be stuck in a glamour glut. Is it the handlers, stylists or just me: it’s so boring out there! The constant parade of Elie Saab, Marchesa, L’Wren Scott and J. Mendel blurs from one podium to the next. The two exceptions, off the top of my head, would be Sandra Bullock’s SAG Awards knockout Alexander McQueen and the ever fashionista Chloe Sevigny at the Golden Globes in Valentino…que bella!

So I did some scouting about and came up with a few alternatives. To keep focused on getting fancy was actually tiring, giving me new found respect for Rachel Zoe, whose taste drives me sideways, but who can really anticipate what the viewing public wants from their celebrities (see the spread in C Magazine September 2009 with Jennifer Garner). And just as I was becoming totally discouraged I fell in head over heels in with love the Givenchy Riccardo Tisci’s Spring 2010 collection. While I understand that full length gowns are the expected I want you to consider the impact of these lush, polished short frocks and pant alternatives.

These first set of six are all Riccardo Tisci. 1-3 are from the Spring 2010 Ready to Wear Collection, while 3-6 are from Spring 2010 Haute Couture. To really appreciate the Haute Couture you must visit the Givenchy site and see these garments from the rear. Spectacular.

RED. Enough said. From the team of Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli at Valentino.

Rick Owens other worldly designs take on a softer note here. So much more to say about our local Angeleno gone stellar, but for now suffice it to say that the chic of these pieces would be a welcome site on any red carpet.

From Jil Sander’s Raf Simon. Pretty slinky for a guy who started in industrial design.

And finally I would love to see these three from Nina Ricci’s Peter Copping. Fresh, Fem and wouldn’t you love to see a splash of fur on the shoes as well.