Looking for a Sparking

So, the past two nights have been taken up (pleasantly) by two events at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Two nights ago, I saw Charles Mee and Anne Bogart speak, and last night I went to see their latest collaboration, a play called Hotel Cassiopeia.

The talk was interesting, but too short-- less than an hour! Maybe I'm only mad because I had to pay for it. The q+a was mercifully truncated, at least. Man, I hate q+as!

Charles Mee was wearing red suspenders. I had seen him once before, the summer after freshman year, when Erin and I went to Skidmore to see Craig's presentation thing at the SITI training program. Craig pointed C. Mee out to me but at the time I didn't particularly know who he was....just that he had had polio and was on crutches. (This is also the time that I witnessed Anne Bogart give Craig a hug.) Anyway, he sort of looks like Abraham Lincoln, which of course makes me love him right off the bat. He seems a little taciturn, or, I don't know, maybe he was nervous---it was opening--but he was less sort of friendly (whatever that means) than Anne Bogart struck me as being. And I definitely would have thought that it would be the opposite!

Anne Bogart opened things up with a funny story about marrying Charles Mee and his wife, Michi-- A.B. performed the ceremony, in a Chinese restaurant, in Queens. She apparently told them to do some sort of physical thing, and they did it wrong, and she was terrified that if "they didn't do the right ritual, they wouldn't be married!" They got married, of course.

I took a bunch of notes and had the pipe dream of assembling them in a readable fashion in here....but now I don't think I'm going to.

So, last night, the show. First of all, I have never been to the Harvey Theatre, and it is CRAZY. I was in the super cheap seats, which are sort of like bar stools with backs on them....really, really, really mightily uncomfortable. I was sitting next to a nice girl who was knitting before the show, and next to her was a crazy lady who asked her "Are you planning on doing *that* during the performance?" I hope someday that lady sits next to Eve at a show and asks HER that questions. But the theatre itself it so strange-- it looks all run-down, but a lot of it must have just been made to look that way. Which I have nothing against. It looks beautiful. The stage extends all the way out to the floor, so people in the front row were sort of on stage. And vice versa, I guess. My seat was one row from back, but the balcony (excuse me, gallery) was so raked that I could see everything just fine. It was the same kind of steep as the place in London where I saw some ballet and I kept fantasizing about how if I took a running leap from the last row, I could jump over the balcony edge so easily. Scary.

Ellen Lauren, who Judith talked about every day in Suzuki, was in the show. This was great for me, because I didn't get to see her in bobrauschenbergamerica. She really is beautiful-- and her neck is just as long as Judith said it was! She played a ballerina, and Lauren Bacall. This is off-topic. Somewhat.

But there were a lot of SITI people that I HAD seenn in b.r.a-- the bum, the dork, the trucker, of course the eternally hot Akiko--and they are all so awesome. They are all in amazing shape, first of all-- and though they all do look good, that's not even what I mean-- they are just solid muscle, and so, so controlled. There wasn't a single misstep, no faltering movements, no stumbles! There was a part where the man playing Joseph Cornell had to attach a bunch of wires to various objects-- a barre, a chair, a tree. And he was sort of controlling the descent of the wires by waving his hands at them. And then he oh-so-calmly attached the wires, while doing other stuff, while other people were doing other stuff...and I thought about the moment when I was in Rhinoceros and I had to latch part of the wall to part of the floor. And how it literally made me break down once because I found it so stressful. It appears to me that in the SITI company, there is none of that stress. It is all ease. And I guess that all makes sense if I think about it, because the whole central tenet of Suzuki as I understand it personally is experiencing rigor so that we can then experience ease. Or choose to feel rigor so that we then know what that is like, and can then look for ease. There was no ease in what I did. There was no rigor in what they did.

As usual, the text was funny and fragmented...with little exhanges that then later came back in different forms....lots and lots of repetition. Some characters who drifted in and out- a waitress, a girl on a bike, two love interests, Joseph's mom and brother, Lauren Bacall....

And when it was over, I didn't want it to be over. It was not at all a linear story-- I didn't learn as much about Joseph Cornell as I thought maybe I would, and I was totally okay with there. There was so much other stuff going on, and somehow, although I'm not quite sure I know how, it all was part and parcel, thematically, of what he and his work were about, and were trying to explore, or were trying to create or compensate for.

In the talk the night before, Anne Bogart talked about how Cornell wrote about "looking for sparkings," which were moments where everything was just right. She talked about how that was the driving narrative, in a way, of the piece.

Oh, crap, I have to go.