Intimacy is front and center in And Lose the Name of Action, Miguel Gutierrez’s collaboration with The Powerful People at On The Boards through Sunday, but that front and center is skewed in both form and content. The intimacy found on this multifaceted stage is mostly a topic and less often the experience.
In its literal sense the deviated intimacy of the staging brings us onto the performance space with a mitered thrust. House left and right face one another in a parallelogram with the center section aligned with the building. The alley between these loges brings focus to parallel screens hanging above the playing space. There is video, there is nudity, there are people crawling backwards. Despite these well-worn tropes the motives are pure and admirable.
We face one another across this asymmetrical space without perfectly matching one another suggesting the infinite reflections of slightly misaligned mirrors. A few white chairs dot the front rows of the black house. These will be filled by performers. They will be carried, tossed, and toyed with. They will bring the performers into our space and with their removal to the stage they will carry us, by proxy, into the performance space.
The title may ring familiarly as it’s from the end of Hamlet’s To Be Or Not To Be soliloquy in which Hamlet speaks of uncertainty, especially that regarding eternity, as the fundamental roadblock to achievement. That the achievement he seeks is to oppose troubles by ending them in suicide seems extraneous to the work at hand. The concern here is an existentialist approach to physical movement.
The questions Gutierrez hopes to explore deal with personhood and the ways that physical movement and response to those around us define perception and personality. These relationships feel immediate in a world where our daily interactions become increasingly virtual and the dissipation of personality becomes an accepted stage of aging and dying
We begin with an older woman (K.J. Holmes) reading from something in a box full of light while two men sit on chairs slowly performing a series of poses: Feldenkrais via Meisner. This scene gives way to a courtly welcome in which Ishmael Houston-Jones, in a cloth crown, regally and stiffly welcomes us, assures us that we are safe and invites us to join hands with one another and the cast members seated in those white chairs. There is never an invitation to release hands.
Vocal music follows including live and looped lines with words about opening eyes and squeezing hands. These are both bedside instructions for the severely debilitated and an invitation to connect simply and directly with one another. This gentle, imperative invitation to intimacy is almost enough to overcome the distancing repetition and obscurity of all the follows.
Most of the show is defined by fleeting moments of emotional impact interrupting vast swaths of inscrutability. The dance is dominated by brief, stiff-limbed suspensions and long sections that feel improvised due to an intensity of focus and a looseness of form. Often the performers take on the childlike qualities of adults seriously pursuing play. Many pieces within this work end with oppressive light and sound accompanying spasmodic movements as if the attempts to complete action were stymied by a great outside force.
Verbal text plays a large role though it is often inaudible or incomplete by design. The show approaches a climax in a text-heavy section in which the cast reads lines out of binders. The artifice of the form establishes the conversation as a performance and permits a homemade laugh track to take that artifice to its apogee.
The content of this section feels like a sophomoric philosophical argument about the nature of thought and action. Appropriately this descends into verbal and physical violence before resolving into a bookend of the show’s beginning. We expect this bookend to cue the curtain call but And Lose the Name of Action’s smartest moment is its last and the set up requires a coda. Unfortunately the show feels long even before the climax arrives and the coda tries our patience.
David Tabbart’s costumes are heavy on light knitwear and gauze, often suggesting Greek and Roman looks. Michelle Boulé is set apart in black and often stiff fabrics that give more focus than her roles seem to warrant.
The ensemble is consistent in their bravery, playfulness, and abandon. The Powerful People is an aptly named group featuring active artists in dance performance, choreography, and improvisation. It is marked by diversity in size, age, and race with Gutierrez, Boulé, Holmes, and Houston-Jones joined by Luke George, and Hilary Clark, who was seen here a year ago in Young Jean Lee’s delightful Untitled Feminist Show. While pieces of Guttierez’s work are highly effective re-encountering Clark at On The Board’s stirs a longing for Young Jean Lee’s irreverence and sheer entertainment.
{And Lose the Name of Action plays at On the Boards through Sunday, March 9. Tickets and more information available here.}