irritating and disturbing work that both assaults and distances the audience, and finally becomes impossible to watch. That too is part of the content.
Obedience School, written, designed, and directed by Laura Farabough, is about power, control, and technology in our commodity obsessed, media-dominated culture. In this intelligently conceived and beautifully executed theater performance Farabough’s use of video operates solidly within the framework of media allusions. Actions and relationships are dictated by idealized standards of perfection and achievement, and externally determined states of desire induced by television and advertising. The two main characters are stereotypes — a Hollywood hero and heroine who function as collective cultural and sexual role models. He is a test pilot programmed for controlled efficiency and fearlessness. His wife is a high fashion model programmed to please, as image, product, and fantasy. They have “the right stuff.”
Farabough’s staging reverses real and recorded time, fact and fiction, reality and fantasy. The tightly choreographed live action that describes the narrative is highly stylized, theatrical, “unreal,” dreamlike, and hypnotic. On the other hand video actions and images that simultaneously provide an internal commentary on the live action are naturalistic, realistic, comfortably and seductively familiar. The characters are introduced in repeating “commercials” in which the Model enticingly puts on red lipstick — Test Red, the latest color — and the Pilot takes his blood pressure, “checking out the system” — everything is “OK and Go!”
In the Domestic Bliss scene, while the performers simulate cooking hamburgers, eating, drinking, dancing, and engaging in sexual play, the video provides us with luscious “product shots” and “romance” in tight close-ups. Later when he sexually attacks her in the shower wearing a dog’s head, the video portrays footsteps on the stairs and her repeated screams from the shower in a manner that directly refers to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. When he maneuvers a toy plane on stage, we witness the “real thing” on TV courtesy of NASA and Edwards Air Force base footage.
Farabough uses the television image to translate and re-contextualize reality on its own terms. Four television monitors occupy the set, not as mechanisms to watch video images on, but as themselves — TV sets. She alludes directly to the forms and conventions of television and the power of the media and the photographic image in defining and manipulating our cultural, sexual, and personal roles and identities.
In the theatrical performance poem Hajj writer/director Lee Breuer combines both live and recorded video channeled through a complex switching system, with a live solo performance by Ruth Maleczech. He seamlessly integrates the video into the theatrical structure, creating images that function almost magically as memories, dreams, and reflections, projections of consciousness and a confrontation with the self.
Hajj means pilgrimage in Arabic, a journey taken once in a life. It is the journey itself, not the arrival in Mecca, that is the true goal. In this Mabou Mines’ production of Hajj, the pilgrimage takes place in a performer’s room, at a dressing table covered with cosmetics, in front of a triptych mirror. But this is no ordinary mirror, for like everything else in Hajj it functions as metaphor. It becomes a window into the mind and soul. Maleczech sits with her back to the audience, facing the mirror. She begins to make up her face. “I have nothing to hide,” she announces. Her pilgrimage and ours has begun. We are all performers who wear many faces in our lives. Her face is seen in the mirror in triplicate. Portrayed from three different angles by the hidden cameras above her, her face is reflected three more times in the video monitors in the top half of the two-way mirrors. The images change in relation to the text, her voice and actions. Sometimes her face appears eerily superimposed like a ghost image over a moving landscape, or over an old man — her father, the two faces melting into each other. A child resembling her stares back at her. The child is wearing the same scarf she has tied over her hair. Three generations, three phases in life, appear and disappear, fade in and out in the mirrors. At one point she “blows out” each mirror video image as if they were candles. The video images are so intricately interwoven that they are as inseparable as the text and the voice. They are the performer’s eyes looking back at us, faces in a mirror and a means of transport.
Hajj is the result of a collaborative effort — Breuer’s text, Maleczech’s remarkable performance, Craig Jones’s video production, Julie Archer’s set, and Chris Abajian’s music. It is an adventurous and inspired work, perhaps even an unprecedented one. It demonstrates what is possible given the vision and the necessary resources. It involves a level of technology not easily accessible, and it is the product of great perseverance on the part of the artists at great cost.
All three performance works deal with multiple levels of perception, synchronous time, non-linear narrative structures, complex layers of meaning and references, and a synthesis of multiple disciplines and media within the context of live performance.
Sex and Technology: The Politics of Intimacy (1990)
Hard as it may seem in this age of fiber-optic telecommunications, database networks, car phones, and computerized everything, a little more than a decade ago not everyone had answering machines, and almost no one I knew had call waiting, let alone home computers with modems. FAX machines were non-existent. The voices that answered the telephone emanated out of flesh and blood bodies not microchips, and life was a lot sexier.
It’s not that I’m any less addicted to, or dependent on the technology that has transformed our lives, than the rest of you. But I am also perturbed by how it appears to have affected human relationships. When reach out and touch someone is instantly equated with pushing buttons on a keyboard instead of the skin-to-skin kind, something has shifted in the communal psyche. Can a life be reduced to a digital code? When is “a kiss no longer still a kiss … as time goes by”? How does one build a history based on shared experience via computer, etc.?
The fantasies of science fiction are no longer fiction as we simultaneously inhabit parallel realities. There’’s the physical realm where we eat, make love, dance, get sick, go to war, and die in, make, consume, and destroy things in, with all the accompanying emotions and consequences. Then there is this new electronic universe of disembodied words and images that operates in quite another time/space continuum where the body is not subject to causality. What does it mean when we as a society not only choose to replace the tactile reality of our most intimate experiences in which we must face each other, with the safety of an anonymous electronic mind fuck, but recommend it as preferable. How do we reconcile the endless display of beautiful young bodies in heat used to sell everything, with AIDS and the hypocritical anti-sex ranting of the religious right? We call 976. How do we practice ““family values”” without pain in a nation without families? We join a network. Or watch TV.
These are the kinds of questions performance and media artist John Goss grappled with in his newest performance Forbidden Planet, which more aptly should have had a 2 after the title, as it picked up where the original sci-fi movie classic left off. Slick video projections of computer graphic movie titles in which the old MGM lion roared above the logo SILENCE=DEATH 1 set the stage for the arrival of Alta, a “notorious intergalactic dyke,” self-consciously played by Mary Slusarski more like a wind-up Barbie doll Earth girl than a liberated alien. Having survived the destruction of her own planet by monsters from her father’s unconscious, and three hundred seventy eight days in hyperspace with eighteen perfect specimens of 24.6–year-old straight white manhood, our disillusioned and radicalized heroine arrived on Earth to find it heavily legislated against human pleasure. This is the authentic forbidden planet!
Alta’s antidote is to become the operator of a global phone sex network, propagating electronic intimacy. This seems a contradiction in terms that puts the definition of intimacy up for reevaluation. In a series of vignettes populated by predominantly male homosexual client users of the network, Goss examined the problems of sex and intimacy in the age of AIDS and telecommunications. Humor and irony characterized the more successful scenarios.
In Risk Trading, Calvin (Klein) and Perry (Ellis), two men on the phone sex line, took courtship from the