Comme Toujours Here I Stand at The Kitchen from Big Dance Theater on Vimeo.
Premiering NYC this week at the Kitchen, Big Dance Theater presents its latest production, Comme Toujours Here I Stand, which will travel in January to the New Museum. A performance group dedicated to the integration of dance, theater, and media, Big Dance appropriates Agnes Varda’s 1961 film, Cleo from 5-7, and reinvents it for the experimental stage. Reversing the usual process of mediatization, Comme Toujours represents an ambitious experiment in translation: celluloid narrative into theatrical language.
There’s a bit of unmistakable irony in the choice of Cleo for this adaptation; for the new wave film ostensibly documents in real time one afternoon from a celebrity’s life. Thus, a live performance aspires to enact a movie that in its turn aspires to enact life. Whereas Cleo replicates “real time” with a cinematic language, Comme Toujours, happening in real time, is more concerned with miming this plastic language. Engaging an imaginative set of mobile props and video projections, Parson and Lazar mime film techniques such as the cut, the dissolve, the close up, the dubbing, etc. There’s even an opening credit sequence. At once ingenious and pathetic, Comme Toujours highlights the clash of two radically different systems of spatial representation respective to the medium of performance and cinema.
According the the Kitchen, Comme Toujours treats “the film’s script as a found object,” and “the ensemble uses costumes, set, and video to contrast the vivid agility of film with the endearingly burdensome nature of theater.”
With less success, Parson and Lazar made an effort to illustrate the trials and errors of production. Hickok might “accidentally” drop the hat she’s passing to Rutherland; the latter could stumble over her lines and repeat them. These gestures are obviously well rehearsed; their “rawness” rings hollow given the level of polish in the production as a whole. Indeed, this performance of performance is but one distracting thread among many others, in a work burdened by rather too many gimmicks.
Too often Comme Toujours references its own medium just for the sake of self-reflexivity. Since live theater will inevitably rupture cinematic distance, the harder actors try to preserve this alienation the more starkly disjuncture will emerge. Comme Toujours, however, exploded the fourth wall in so many places and on so many whims that it diverted from that interesting tension between presence and image, so exciting even as a proposal.
Despite its initial intelligence and some highly effective moments, Comme Toujours sold itself for tricks and laughs by curtain call. Diverse spectacles muddled up its conceptual focus. The stream of cultural savvy insider jokes and wink-wink sexy innuendos make no sense in context of the deadpan French scenario. Elements of dance, though expected, strikes one nonetheless as out of place; the bizarre insertion of a Broadway musical number marked the height of randomness.
Big Dance may have set out to reconcile theater with film, dance with video, performance with production, and art with life, but the result is not so much a total work of art as totally all over the place.
