Impossible to work

I went to see Sara Wookey’s Love’s Geography: Revisited and Walking LA at Links Hall back in May. It was great. I’ll just be talking about the first of the two pieces in this post, saving Walking LA for another time. Peggy Phelan’s text supplied a very moving set of words for the performance. I would describe it as a love letter to a city (or the city) or perhaps better stated as a (nearly, but not really) dear john letter informing a lover that the writer is truly in love with a city, a place. Wookey made use of an overhead projector as well as projected video in this piece. She wrote out the letter for the audience and then danced down the center of the room on a white piece of material (some sort of paper?). Nice and simple.

The text was amazing, thank you Peggy Phelan. The movements that went with them were also pretty amazing. It looked as though Wookey was being pulled from opposite directions simultaneously with each side quickly gaining and losing the advantage. Watching Sara Wookey whip herself from left to right quickly while executing very delicate movements was breathtaking. The friend I saw the show with commented that Wookey’s performance was more butoh than most of the butoh she sees. I think she has a point. I don’t think that what Wookey was doing was butoh, but it had the emotional intensity that I’m coming to believe most butoh artists are aiming for (and failing to achieve in the vast majority of performances that I have seen).

I can’t recommend this particular work more. Very minimal, very beautiful, very moving. What really sums the whole work up for me is a line from the text towards the end (which I will attempt to paraphrase”^a1a”): “I am in love with the memories of what never happened” I think that applies across the board today. Conservatives are in love with recreating an America that never was while I watch happy little Marxists call for a return to communist values that never really jibed with Marx’s ideas.

Talking about this sort of thing in the abstract is only so useful. Here is an example of how that single line of text (or rather the idea that is expresses) came crashing right into my everyday life this week while out shopping with my sister. We’re trying to help my mom redecorate her condo. It’s a rather dark space, so we’re looking for some bright colors to help make it feel less dark. Throughout all of this, my sister kept saying “Paris, that’s the way to go.” or “Doesn’t that go with the Paris theme we’re going for?” At first, I was totally confused. I thought “Paris? Mansard roofs and dingy floored cafes? Limestone fronted buildings with iron gates painted black? Dog shit everyhwere? That’s not bright and cheery.” But then I saw what she was talking about: Little pieces of decorative bits that evoke some never-existing idea of cosmopolitan early 20th Century Paris (and become muddled with a 19th century impressionist view of provincial France as well as colors that are more evocative of Provence than the Ile-de-France). The brightly colored additions were often very American, and very much so of this particular moment (which seem to also be very reminiscent of the 1970s, as far as colors go). My sister kept saying how much she loved “all that Paris stuff.” At some later point, it all came together as one: This is precisely the sort of love Phelan is talking about in her text and that Wookey is acting out in her movements. My sister was proclaiming a love for an entirely too common (and false) memory of a never existing Paris. This infatuation, in turn, pulls you in opposite directions simultaneously. In the middle, between what is and what never really was, is the self attempting to make decisions about where to go and what to do next.

If you get a chance to see Love’s Geography: Revisited, go. You will find it thematically intersecting with your life for many weeks to come, and isn’t that one of the things that we want performances to do?

1. This is now the correct quote, thanks to Sara Wookey. aaa