Rashaun Mitchell, Stephin Merritt + Ali Naschke-Messing: PERFORMANCE @ ICA
January 25, 2014
Begun during a two-week residency at the ICA in the summer of 2013, PERFORMANCE is inspired by a quote from Richard Avedon: “We all perform. It’s what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintentionally. It’s a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we’d like to be.”
In a sneak preview in July (under the working title Romance Study #1) Mitchell’s virtuosic choreography, live music from singer-songwriter Merritt of the Magnetic Fields, and Naschke-Messing’s richly glowing installation combined to celebrate the mystery of performance, individualism, wit, musicality, fancy, and the absurd. — http://www.icaboston.org/performance/co-lab/PERFORMANCE/
Watching this performance brought me back to my very first “welcome to art school moment,” when I found myself in a five-hour, improv performance art class. I say “found myself” like I had nothing to do with the arrangement, but really I chose this situation because I felt like being adventurous. I loved performing in plays in high school, but this was some next level shit. I loathed every self-conscious second of being a tree, of mirroring strangers, of wiggling around like birdshit falling from the sky.
Amazingly though, despite how horrified I was to put my body through that experience, I’ve recently realized what an appreciation it gave me for dance and dancers, and the incredibly beautiful gestures they can create with their bodies.
For me, the most beautiful part of the performance was the end, when Stephin Merritt appeared outside of the huge auditorium window leading a procession of dancers, who were blowing bubbles in a trail behind him. The bubbles froze and burst in the air, and the frozen shards dropped like lead balloons. Merritt singing “I Die” and plucking on his ukelele was barely audible from outside, while inside was perfectly still and quiet. Merritt and the dancers were lit by moonlight outside, and the lights were off in the auditorium. As the small parade shuffled off out of eyesight to the left, a brightly-lit cruise ship in the waterfront floated out of sight to the right at almost the exact same moment, leaving everything dark inside and outside. The timing was so perfect it seemed like it had to have been planned that way, but it couldn’t have been. I thought it was interesting that the last time they had performed this, it was during the summer residency, so the bubbles freezing like that was something brand new in this performance.
After the performance, there was a Q&A with the collaborators and the dancers, all of whom gave profound insight into the process of collaboration, but the take-away was how dry and hilarious Stephin Merritt is. His answers were all extremely terse compared to the abstract artspeak of his collaborators.
I did not attempt to shake his hand or say hello because I’m afraid of meeting my idols, but my friend Meg was brave and asked a question: “Did you enjoy the summer residency?” He responded with a perfectly brief “some parts better than others.”