Notes on Occupy Wall Street

Scene 1: in which we get off the bus from Great Barrington, plunge into the subway, and emerge right in Zuccotti Park.

Here I am, wandering the encampments of Occupy Wall Street with hands in my pockets, listening faceless with politesse as people fire off their views and opinions and myriad contentions around me. In the first five minutes, standing in the food line, I saw one man throw coffee in another’s face and stride away, simply quaking with righteous rage. Everyone around him in line (all men in bulky jackets, prepared to hunker down for the long haul) wanted to know, earnestly, what had happened, what the debate was. I went to the protests – like many people, I think – expecting to be swept off my feet by a sixties-revolutionary-style exuberance and collectivism that would incite me to… something. A smiling curly-haired boy handed me a freshly damp yellow flower and I smiled back at him, awed and taken out of context of my skepticism for a moment. Had I just felt an iota of peace?

While it’s true that this spontaneous collection of people, with their humane causes and armbands, is a beautifully unprecedented thing in America; this is not the sixties. The political issues are more indistinct, contentions are higher, there is much less violence and oppression… and then there is the issue of marked self-consciousness about it – the self-adulation of incessant tweeting and filming. It creates an atmosphere of ceaseless chatter, broadcasting absolutely everything to the point where it becomes more about the propulsion of the collective rather than the issues they are trying –  swipingly, abstractedly – to address.

Occupy Wall Street is obviously an expression of vitality that cannot be ignored, and I love that. What I do not like is that they seem to see themselves as perpetrators of change in American politics simply because they are all gathered together there in Zuccotti Park, simply being, simply showing themselves before the great faceless Moloch of New York City business and saying, Here we are, we the people without wealth or conventional social standing, we who do not buy into the capitalist system of success, we the 99%, here we are! Drop your Starbucks cup of capitalist gruel and listen to us breathe, here.

Scene 2: in which we assemble outside a Peter Seeger/Arlo Guthrie concert and follow the two fading folk balladeers down the streets of Broadway, singing.

Pete Seeger is smiling, doddling along with his cane and starry-spangled blue eyes, looking a bit dazed with happiness as masses of people around him tote acoustic guitars and iPads, singing Civil Rights-era protest songs that less than half the crowd knows. Seeger is 92 years old and can still hold himself up in the midst of social discontent. As I found myself pressed into the line of people, being pushed back onto half of the sidewalk by police (by “pushed” I mean that they asked us to move it over and we did), occasionally yelling out slogans I didn’t fully understand just to feel a bit more alive but quickly hating myself for it. It’s a strange thing to march for a cause that is not yours – at least not as you understand it. I hung back on a street corner with my friend to try to catch a glimpse of Arlo Guthrie’s gray clown mane bobbing through the crowd, but couldn’t find him anywhere. Apparently it all ended with the protestors and the sixties figureheads sitting in a circle singing songs into the night… I did not stick around for that possibly sublime moment of culture/era-shock, but was already on the subway rattling back into the bowels of the Bronx, thinking, feeling ashamed for wanting nothing to do with Occupy Wall Street.

Scene 3: in which I sit on the floor of the city, chanting and humming and straining my muscles towards enlightenment.

LOVE... IS... LOVE. LOVE... IS... LOVE. LOVE... IS... LOVE. LOVE... IS... LOVE. LOVE… IS… ringing in bodies around me, sitting stilled in the frigid wind of the city, traffic wheedling and drum-circle drummers bashing the lips of garbage cans, thudding away on overturned buckets, playing the railings… dancing, and we are still, sitting on the ground, meditating, in front of the Community Altar/Sacred Space (so denoted by a cardboard sign stuck to a tree). There is a thin man with bright, energetic blue eyes and a white beard pacing inside the circle, giving meditation direction. He has been saying things like: “The revolution will not be online. The revolution is in your heart” and “You are becoming a gem, feel the fire…” and “This is happening now. This has never been experienced before.”

This is warrior meditation, he explains, meant to make you internally strong so you can defeat your enemies. Quite literally… at one point I found myself tilting towards Wall Street itself, long beige buildings in the gray sky, with one arm extended, thumb pointed flat, and the other drawn close to my side like a bow-and-arrow. We rocked back and forth, leering toward the towers, chanting, “HAR. HAR. HAR. HAR. HAR. HAR. HAR. HAR.” The whole thing takes on a distinctly performance art atmosphere, especially with the rings of people gathered around us, watching… more than once, I felt a person pass a panning camera lens in front of my closed eyes. 

Scene 4: in which I spend my last evening in Zuccotti Park crouched on an icy marble bench, writing ceaseless notes and trying to make sense of it all.

Threads of mace, threads of weed, threads of chant through the primal drumbeat. This tenacity of this tiny human explosion on Wall Street is flavored with sex, felt through music and the luscious filth spreads of the tents. That insane, interminable, tribal drum-circle inundating everyone’s minds in pure rhythm… somehow the most eloquent expression of frustration and social contention I’ve witnessed here yet. I saw one sign today – cardboard, markered, leaning slanted against the ground – that said something like, “I don’t want money, I just want a girlfriend and some love. Occupy Wall Street forever!” Something like that.

It is early evening and the sky is bruising blue to black slowly above the glowering towers of Wall Street. Threads of B.O., bomb-shelter desperation, with some proud splashes of cologne here and there, cigarette tang, and the pure crushed-warm-leaves scent of human threading through the crowd. Sirens. Maybe I can still pass for a revolutionary, just sitting here… maybe the people around me think I’m writing brilliant, fluid anti-capitalist tracts of manifesto and documentation. I have felt the white-light flash of a few people taking my picture already. Believe me, conjecturers, I wish I could, but my brain is otherwise on fire. Under NYC sky, spiked with sky-scraping instruments of incisive capitalism. Helicopters provide a realistic atmosphere of civil disobedience. Girls tilted back, smiling and waving to the helicopters, hovering. Small conspiratory groups huddled surreptitiously around Burger King tables, getting warm and hi-jacking wi-fi.

A battle of emotions wages on all sides of me, a battle without any enemy except the towering landscape – the very TOWERS of capitalism! – around, and so it loops around and around in an endless drumbeat. So, middle-class America wants to feel human again. Hasn’t that always been the way? Despite the cool, drifting surrogate realities of their iPhones and scrolling Twitter feeds, these people want to feel like wet raging blossoming breathing singing breast-beating souls again, dancing to the primal blood necessities of drums and twisting their own minds outward to speak, speak, however indistinctly. MIC-CHECK! Mic-check. MIC-CHECK!! Mic-check! They are cocking back their heads and staring stonily into camera lenses, panning the crowd slowly to catch every face of contorted passion and that same stony revolutionary… stare…. The horrifying thing is that they are watching themselves act, watching themselves watch themselves, documenting every little detail and replaying… watching...

There are plastic Guy Fawkes masks bobbing around the air above my head, throwing off the sheen from streetlamps and rushing headlights. Guy Fawkes sits, a hunched iron statue with its pale plastic face crinkling mirthfully down at his lap. I sit next to him… I’m still amazed by how it is truly never dark in New York City – even the midnight sky is gray. How could you sleep even if you somehow madly wanted to? I feel myself sitting looking out the window of the bus tomorrow morning and feel numbing loneliness bestilling my brain like cruel, self-hating alcohol. Even if I don’t quite belong to this protest, this improvised collection of anarchism, socialism, good old kicking-and-screaming American individualism but mostly just anti-everything, I belong in New York City. Of course the first true American poet sang a song of himself – what else is there that can be sung, really? Francine Prose wrote a brief devotional for Occupy Wall Street, saying, “I kept feeling these intense surges of emotion – until I saw a placard with a quote from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself: ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’ And that was when I just lost it and stood there and wept." I just can't get close to this revelation, this beating vitality and blessed release that some people have felt at the hands of Occupy Wall Street -- when confronted with the very spectacle of it.

More importantly, what other single value can America agree upon besides individualism? It is what fuels this movement thundering around my ears this very moment and also what fuels the capitalist government they are raging against. Another placard, bobbing white and briskly joyful in the gloaming, sings Dylan Thomas: “Do not go gently into that good night – Rage, rage against the dying of the light!” A closing quote, a closing scene-snapshot... the couple sitting huddled in the cold next to me was basking in the whole weird wonder of the place, and the man said to the woman in a brotherly tone, “Listen, listen: tonight is all about you having fun with your friends and trying not to get arrested.” That's as good a slogan as any.

An Apology to the Pi Clowns

I like you guys too much to write a story about you.

So all I am going to post are my polished-up notes -- snap-shots, bits & pieces of this transcendentally silly clown troupe from San Francisco and their singular show. They were the artists-in-residence at the Berkshire Fringe for this season.

A brief note to explain my perspective: I was on tech duty for this show, so I saw everything from the gridwork above the theater. The pi clowns mostly handle all their own props -- all that I had to do was stay perched up there waiting for my cue to drop two toy parachute men down onstage when Bruce sends a paper airplane crashing into the wall.

 - The Pi Clowns are: Andrew (Quick the Stick), Leah (Miz G), Tyler (the Juggler), Jon (Macho. Manly. Fuzzy. MONSTER-STRONG), and Bruce (Bruce).

 - The Thrust: the clowns' pre-show ritual... in which they huddle up, settle into the moment with a sigh, tilt back pelvises and crush them all together simultaneously while making silly wheedling & animal-happy sounds. From above, it looks like a red and black sunflower ruffled with hair, white faces popping out like petals. The point is not to make an orgasm noise, exactly, but to expunge all stress out in noise (as silly as possible, of course)

 - Pre-show atmosphere: I'm sitting here in the burlesque glow of pink lighting above an empty stage, an audience humming with anticipation below, marinating in that old squeezebox carnie music... and then Andrew steps out onstage -- slowly, alone, staring down the audience.

 - The Pi Clowns definitely utilize their environment to create a new show every night -- its structure is constantly changing and evolving and flying off the seat of its pants. They listen to their audience, climb all over them, steal their purses (only to give them back with a shame-faced grin), and crawl into their arms to die heroically. This is all literal, by the way.

 - At a talkback after one of the shows, someone asks where the troupe got its name and Andrew (who studied math along with theater at UC Santa Cruz, where all the Pi Clowns met), jumps in: "Pi is irrational and transcendental, and we thought, well... that's perfect."

 - Another pre-show ritual: sliding down the sloping concrete hallway backstage in rolling office chairs, whooping and yahoo-ing.

 - Tyler's final juggling solo is pure magic. All the lights are out, and he is juggling with three glowing balls -- two orange, one blue -- that look like frolicking planets as he tosses them around wildly to an Irish step jig that accelerates into ecstasy and then dissolves into a violin strain that drifts off into space.

You can follow these lovely fools and possibly become their groupie by going here: www.piclowns.com 

(will write more later... when I'm not drowning in a hurricane and basting in humidity)

NYC notes, #4: Alexander McQueen

July 8
The savage ghost of Alexander McQueen has kept museum-goers at the Met up past midnight for the first time in the museum's history. According to Time magazine, 66,509 people visited the exhibit during its run (May - August 2011); making it the 8th most-attended event in the museum's history. Clearly something extraordinary was going on inside that dark twisting labyrinth of rooms that constituted "Savage Beauty", a retrospective exhibit on his avant-garde fashion concoctions.

Alexander McQueen. Buddies with Lady Gaga. That was only shred of pre-existing knowledge I took with me to the exhibit; besides the facts of the obituary. He hung himself in his closet full of cocaine, tranquilizers, and sleeping pills. His mother had died nine days earlier, and her funeral was that evening. He left a simple note that read: "Look after my dogs, sorry, I love you, Lee" (a nickname). He was forty years old.

McQueen was a self-described romantic schizophrenic; therefore, this exhibit was constructed around the theme of romanticism. McQueen's particular brand of romanticism consists of uneasy pleasure, incredulity and revulsion, wonder and terror blending together to create the sublime. The show was divided into further segments based on further themes: individualism, historicism, nationalism, exoticism, primitivism, and naturalism. It was all very academically-plotted, but that couldn't stifle the raw power of McQueen's creations.

Image smash, first impressions (because the thing is a sensory overload):
 - eerie electronica droning over the crowd
 - a dripping blazer with blood lining and human hair
 - space whores & frothing burlesque ballerinas. Angels of the postmodern denarrative world
 - gorgeous gloom -- black marble & mirrors
 - the Spine Corset: aluminum and black leather, bondage of the human form. Skeleton frames for flesh.
 - wings and feathers, talons and fibulae. Plastic bones.
 - Joan '98: a red-draped model dancing in a ring of fire, becoming a gyrating priestess
 - gold thorns down the arm, crowning the head, face-mask of bright-red dripping blood -- deadly beautiful
 - rotating girls in purple flowery football bodysuits
 - silver barbs stabbing cheeks, hair covering face in a smooth mask, petticoat of glossy shells: masochistic
 - nature, aliens, bondage, rot, fire, lace, gauze, flowers ("I used flowers because they die"), heartbreaking fluttering beauty, the rolling mud dirge of time

I'm circling in tight lines of people passing in front of these clouded, bombed-out old mirrors in the gaudy gold of old art frames lining the walls. People's reflections bob up briefly, confusedly. I overheard one man telling his companion, "It's actually very beautiful. Actually... gorgeous, isn't it?... Beautiful...", very surprised. People were very excited and talkative at this exhibit, and Gaga's name was repeated through the crowd like a hypnotic helpless tongue-tripping virus.

One of the rooms is a hall with scarlet and bloodied devils lined up along stone castle walls glowing with fire like a royal court at attention, facing the oncoming crowd. The most dramatic and beautiful classical soundtrack is bathing the awestruck hordes. These halls of bloody gentry all have gold-studded masks, and the finery is truly spectacular. This is the Nationalism room, filled with pieces inspired by McQueen's Scottish heritage (all black, red, and white -- lots of plaid, checkers, lace, patterns orderly and disoriented by turns).

Just to give an example of the performance art style of these fashion presentations... There was a dress called Highland Rape; hanging synthetic lace with spiderweb twine, autumn-flower colors torn apart, a gaping hole at the plump white mannequin crotch. An electric guitar "Star-Spangled Banner" plays overhead. Exhibit background of rough, brutalized barn wood walls. Spectacular terror. There are sobbing violins in the next room... A cluster of people is jostling around a box in the wall. It's... a tiny matted-hair Barbie whirling in white gauze ruffles of swan feathers, suspended in a glass pyramid until she melts into a glowing ball of life that blips away into space. The atmosphere was heartbreaking, entrancing, like watching a flower grow in fast-forward; violins falling apart sweetly, suffused with tears. This kind of occurrence in Alexander McQueen's work is what makes it so hard to pin down in a critical mindset -- how could this kind of thing ever be considered shallow? As art, it is magnificent, unexpected, fresh, raw, lavishly lovely. As fashion, a product and market line, it is extravagant and almost painful to consider wearing. These clothes all have fantasy personalities, and occupy the realm of the alien other -- where beauty is daring and absolutely free.

Like Lady Gaga, one of McQueen's passions seems to be the thrill of the chase to grab the public's attention and slay them with art. He wants them to see the possibilities inherent in the human form, the logical extreme of lust and romance, by brutalizing it (somewhat) and putting it on display. Near the end of the exhibit is a video being shown inside a glass box. In slow-motion, the walls of a box standing in a bare industrial room fall and smash, sending sparkling glass flying in flurries. Inside the box is a fat model lounging on a couch, swarmed with butterflies, a gas-mask on her face. We watch her gently heave as she breathes, staring abstractly down at the floor. The film ends, and the audience's reflection surfaces in the glass box the video was shown in. A rapid-fire series of realizations occur: they see themselves staring, they see themselves, and a few women automatically send up fidgeting hands to fix their hair.

On a placard mounted on the wall beside the glass box, McQueen says, "In this collection the idea was to turn people's faces on themselves. I wanted to turn it around and make them think: Am I actually as good as what I'm looking at? The show was staged inside a huge two-way mirrored box, whereby the audience was reflected in the glass before the show began and then the models could not see out once the show had started. These beautiful models were walking around in the room, and then suddenly this woman who couldn't be considered beautiful was revealed. It was about trying to trap something that wasn't conventionally beautiful to show that beauty comes from within." Unfortunately, Lee wasn't able to hang onto his inner beauty long enough.

Alexander McQueen, the brightest star in the fashion world just snuffed out.
R.I.P.

NYC notes, #3: The Carnie Glory of Coney Island

July 11: I wanted to go there & write Ferlinghetti-style odes on picture postcards to every strange little nook of life I saw amid the screaming neon marquee madness, but we ended up just spending a day at the beach instead. While my friends were in the water, I sat in the sand and watched families unpack their lunches, couples stretched out on towels, stubby old men peddling mangoes across the sand... and one beautiful Mexican/Hispanic/Italian/who-knows man with spiky black hair and a tattoo of the Madonna spread all down his back, rays shooting out from her pliant robed loveliness and pinging off his pointed shoulder-blades.

            Coney Island is a huge carnival, in a perpetual state of Fourth of July, tinged with a forbidden fading despair that reeks of gypsy carnival. I was enchanted by everything I saw – just the spread of colors and lights and explosions of life when you turn to look back down the beach is enough to melt the heart of any Americana romantic (which I am, undoubtedly). We played in a dingy arcade, ring-tossed, browsed cheap sunglasses & hair-clips & Chinese groceries. Dinner at a buffet beneath the rattling train-tracks.

            Mostly to say that I did, I got a psychic palm-reading from an overflowingly large woman leaning back in her lawn-chair along the boardwalk, her huge brown serious scam eyes globbing meaning onto mine. She told me a lot of easily applicable things in a musky foreign accent, such as: I have something holding me back from my cherished future, I have gone to psychics before but they never helped (false), that I need to avoid romantic relationships because they had been disastrous recently. So, she basically listed all of the reasons that someone would ever go to a psychic, seeking answers to their life’s little struggles on the wayside of Coney Island's mystical, reality-defying carnival atmosphere. The most amazing thing was how seamlessly she launched into her sales schpele. Mid-sentence, without changing the cadence or tone of her voice while she was looking into my eyes and telling me about my life, she said, “Now why won’t you let me help you by buying this crystal that will help to balance your chakaras?”

            I thought that freakshows had been outlawed, but right next to the fortune-teller there was a man in suspenders & gray whiskers on a soapbox selling tickets to Coney Island’s very own home-grown freakshow, The Coney Island Circus Sideshow, only five dollars. The audience is squashed into rows of soft, old wooden bleachers in a dim-lit theater (atmosphere of intrigue... the venue also doubles as a late-nite burlesque). The MC, Insectavora, was a woman in long, banshee-black dreadlocks, thoroughly tattooed, the right side of her face marbled into a Mayan ruin. She closed out the show with a breathtakingly beautiful fire twirler-swallower-spitter-flinger act. I saw her reared back with a flame curling out bright-yellow from between her kissing lips, a torch held in each hand. She was also scheduled to appear in the burlesque show later that night. Around 11 pm that night I saw her walking down the street, talking to friends she passed in doorways, looking like Amy Winehouse in a black tank-top & her black dreadlocks piled high.

            There was the Illustrated Penguin, a little man with hands but no arms, who drove a screwdriver into his nose – a trick called the Back-Alley Brain Surgeon. There was a buxom bondaged woman who danced with a pale-gold python (Serpentina), a Southern woman who escaped from a straightjacket with much sighing and laughing to the audience, a burly man who lifted weights with his earlobes and bottom eyelids. Screaming kids, squirming women, awestruck men. An old, old piano kept dusty vaudeville vigil over the show from the back wall.

            After walking around until dark in the vast human carnival, through the old and new sections of rides and games, we rode the famous 90-year-old Cyclone roller-coaster. The whole thing is made of rattling white wood, and feels like it's threatening to collapse at every moment. The riding arc caught the milky half-moon glowing at the very cusp of the first drop before we all went down screaming and clenching our teeth. I was in the last car, with the most bone-scraping neck-cracking whiplash. Staggered off dazed, violated, happy & dripping with adrenaline.

The Erotics of Doubt

I should have expected it, but I was still impressed -- dancers sure know how to make a salad. I come into their tiny cramped kitchen, and there’s a veritable garden of avocado, arugula, tomato, apple slices, thin sweet dressing & heaps of greenery. This is our version of an after-party at the Berkshire Fringe; there are some clowns there from San Francisco, Jessica Farris of the one-woman show Missing with her incidental cousin, and the dancers from The Erotics of Doubt, all crammed into a mod dorm-room living room & kitchen. With my little bowl of salad, I’m standing in a one-person hallway with three other people, and in gesticulating about how much I love their work I knock a plate of food into the chest of a dancer standing behind me. Later, on the couch, all was forgiven and everyone was talking to each other. I wasn’t taking mental notes, just enjoying myself… as a result, I don’t remember a thing. This was on the night before the dancers left the Fringe festival.

A few hours ago, at the show: “Did you know that bats, termites, and seahorses are the only animals with truly lifelong monogamous relationships?” Two dancers stand on a stark stage, facing the audience. The dancer on the left side, Sarah Konner, iterates this fact calmly. Austin Selden is on the right side of the stage with soft blue eyes that never flinch once. The audience laughs, comfortable.

Cut back to around midnight – now we’re outside on a dark porch, a warm raggedy gathering, moods simmering in warm wine, talking about the amazing moral resilience of bats, termites, and seahorses. I'm standing next to a couple of dancers, conglomerated around the tiny frizzy-haired apex that is Sarah Konner. She says abruptly, with a smile, "It's not true. Completely made up." The fact is, the fact is made up; but it adds a wonderful zing of bestiality to a show about sex more than anything else.

In The Erotics of Doubt, Konner & Selden are out to outline the precious absurdity of human relationships. They are frequent collaborators, though not an actual company, working in this show with a group of other dancers (Catherine Coury, Aidan Feldman, Edith Freyer, Wen Chun Liu, John Pizza, Adam "Fuzzy" Konner, Jordan Risdon, David Schmidt, and Nadia Tykulsker).
They play on tension like an exquisite harp, creating an atmosphere of surrealistic free-associative freedom and potent exploding sexual frustration. There are harsh jagged spasms of movement interspersed with moments of meltingly sweet intimacy. There are high kicks and pointed toes in the mayhem; the ghost of ballet technique sifting through crazy jazz. One particularly wonderful effect, one moment that gives me an adrenaline rush of fear, is when the dancers are patterned out on the floor, flopping & jerking & arching in formation, and they continue these motions for at least ten seconds after stage blackout. The audience is insulated by the environment of heavy breathing and murky commotion, sightless, with no possible defenses. The sound of movement seems to be all around them. There's a touch of Artaud's Theater of Cruelty about it -- a sensibility that comes into play in the final piece (more about that later). The Erotics of Doubt often presses the misplaced sense of security of an audience, whether through disorienting light play or abrupt extreme intimacy.

The images -- character tableaus -- generated in show are often unexpected and always revealing. In Ashamed to Be Balding, a solo piece, Selden emerges as a pathetic, adorable character holding a small box and asking the audience if his tie is on straight. This man is seen crouched on the toilet, eating slips of paper gleefully, leaping around & flinging sheet-music around; but the most sublimely silly moment is when he approaches a tall, thin lamp with burning intense eyes, and begins to... seduce it. He grinds and thrusts towards it, grinning crazily, holding it by the neck and stomping like a fevered savage. The whole piece is a romp through his demons and fantasy worlds, in the sanctuary of his own bathroom. At one still point, he steps into the toilet bowl, turns to look at the lamp, and says, "My socks keep getting wetter! Every time!"... and it's weirdly tragic! The absurdity of it is endearing. His verbal delivery and facial expressions are amazingly, exactly identical every night (I saw the show four times). He has sweat dripping in beads from the nose, his breath is ragged, and he loves it.

John & David have a two-character duet of romping physical intimacy that cements the show together. They appear periodically, between pieces, alone onstage together. They explore each other’s physical limits by wrestling, dancing, tumbling over one another, pulling toes, tearing off clothes. They spar and have lovers’ repartee. In the final performance, they were tangled on the ground and John tried to put his mouth over David’s head. They were both red-faced, the audience was laughing. On some nights, it was more shock and gravitas – some nights were more purely exuberant and delightful. The freedom of improvisation makes it one of the more light-hearted pieces in the show.

Chateau de Silling is a decadent deadly battering ram to the senses, a hothouse of Sodom sex & death, power, rape, manipulation, the final full piece in the show (choreographed by Austin Selden, starring Sarah Konner). It begins as a dancer in red satin strides in majestically, the very picture of power, her fingers stretched out toward the ground being sucked by a gaggle of cowed victims crawling after her. Giovanni Martinelli's "Giovinezza" roars out over the crowd and glints in her eyes as she strides slowly forward with her slurping minions following behind. The red satin dictator elects one of her minions with an application of red lipstick to chase the others around the space, grabbing them and planting gnawing kisses on their necks. As the piece progresses, one pair of dancers ends up in the corner; one knock-kneed & lying the ground, the other straddling her and slowly but surely insinuating rape. There is a tall male dancer with rubber limbs slithering and jerking along the back wall, simpering at his own reflection in a hand-mirror. The red satin dictator luxuriates in sheet after sheet of her cascading black hair in the spotlight. It is an absolutely eerie presentation of scattered episodes of perversity, decadence, sadistic love. 

After this plays out for a while, Sarah Konner enters in a bunched-up white dress, tight lace around her torso, holding a bare-bulbed lamp aloft – the Good Witch. The denizens of the dark scatter from the light like roaches, listening her as she hypnotizes the audience with a slow, politely and perfectly enunciated monologue. She strokes the rape victim up from the floor, pulls her into a jilted waltz, stops suddenly and says, “But my dear little cabbage, mon petit chou, you’ll soon lie ravaged in the morning dew” … and then begins to DANCE, like an epileptic ballerina, whirling all around the terrified scrabbling roaches, voracious for sweat, wiping her hands panting on the pulp of her own lips. She falls on the floor in a series of seizures, her bubbling white ruffle skirt bursting on the floor. It was her last line that made me realize that they were really re-creating the Marquis de Sade’s Sodom: “The Duke is coming… all over your back.”

Curiously, they don’t then all fall on each other in an orgy. There’s so much fear and power-manipulation along with sexual excitement that each dancer fairly explodes when a soppy easy-listening swing fills the space… and there is more ensuing chaos, flailing bodies hurling themselves over & over onto the floor, but each is alone. They are moving to the sound of the music, the thuds, the scraping and heavy breathing. The Good Witch stops in the middle by the light and looks around, gasping & admiring the chaos she has created. They follow her in heaving clusters on the floor, out the door, led by the white light.

The closing image of the show is John & David, holding each other closely and swaying in center-stage to the aftermath schmaltzy droppings of the previous piece's soundtrack. Somehow, after this intricate architecture of human relationships has fallen away and we are left with one closing image of a simple, sincere embrace… it’s heartbreakingly perfect.

I'll admit something -- this show makes me feel hugely lonely. It's true that The Erotics of Doubt is about sex more than anything... which might explain why it's at once so entrancing and so hard to reconcile with. But it nags at my subconscious. I'm not sure if I have still fully processed it. Before the dancers left, I couldn't really do more than thank them for their performance. I was even lonelier in silence. Maybe this feeling of loneliness is just the old loneliness of an audience member, trapped in dark anonymity in the face of something so wonderfully alive; physically longing for a state of bare honesty mixed with what seems to be total physical freedom.

A Unique Opportunity

I am currently spending a chunk of my summer before sophomore year of college interning at the Berkshire Fringe Festival, a theater & dance & music extravaganza that spans four weeks. In spending all my time doing whatever the directors tell me to, I don't have a lot of free time to write; however, I am determined to get out at least a few pieces about the shows because this insider's-view vantage point is just too good to pass up. Plus, because the shows are free for those involved in the production, I can see them up to four or five times each.

I will try to resist using this as an online journal or gabbing on too much about my process, making excuses for myself just to fill dead Internet space, blah blah blah. I started this blog yesterday on an anxious split-second whim (the way I always start blogs, wracked with uncertainty) not only because of the Berkshire Fringe, but because I need a place to post some journalism pieces that I am working on for my own personal joy. That's all.

And finally, here is where the title came from:

"It was a strange time for me. Many rogue volts of euphoria. I went from one side of this country to the other and then from one side of England to the other. The people I met -- the things they did -- I was entranced. I met Carol Doda. She blew up her breasts with emulsified silicone, the main ingredient in Silly Putty, and became the greatest resource of the San Francisco tourist industry." 

       -- Tom Wolfe, introduction to The Pump House Gang