ANYTHING LESS IS LESS THAN A RECKLESS ACT
choreography and performance: Donna Miranda
dramaturgy: Angelo V. Suarez
performers on video: Marah Arcilla & PJ Rebullida
* Watch an excerpt from the performance here
To go to the theater or to go shopping, to watch
a dance performance or to watch the latest John Lloyd Cruz movie: before one
goes thru an aesthetic experience, s/he must 1st of all make the decision to experience it. (Even a supposedly
‘accidental’ aesthetic experience must be distinguished as such to be
experienced as such, in cases where, for example, one opts to consider the
supermarket as a vast theatrical space, or the commercial movie as a kind of
dance.) The decision to do so, however, means deciding not to do something
else; a possibility is always foreclosed.
Donna Miranda’s Anything less is less than a
reckless act calls attention to this decision-making process as
constitutive of the aesthetic experience itself. Choreographing more than just
moving bodies but the conditions w/in w/c these bodies move, Miranda pursues in
this performance work what she has called “an exercise in disclosure &
transparency.” But transparency about what, the disclosure of what
exactly?
Possibly the modes of production in a work of
dance, possibly the theatrical machinery one subjects him/herself to in the
very act of watching. Dubbed as a “research-performance project,” Anything
less is less than a reckless act may as well be called “a dance-lecture in
two rooms,” confronting its spectators w/ the inevitability of making choices:
Faced w/ the fact that thruout the duration of the work they can only endure
what transpires in 1 of 2 available rooms—that they cannot simultaneously
endure both—the audience is bullied into picking w/c 1 to be in: the room where
a video that features 2 dancers enacting a duet is being played where the
audience knows nothing of its context or mode of production, or the room in w/c
the video is absent but where Miranda talks in a lecture-type set-up about the
unseen video’s motivation & mode of production.
But knowing that even such forms of choice or
participation (the term in vogue these days is “interactivity”) only reasserts
the active-performer/passive-audience micro-political structure of
theater—theater, after all, can only thrive w/ this a-priori distinction;
theater is kept safe, kept from being reckless, by this very distinction;
theater by virtue of being theater will always fail to be reckless—Miranda
exposes the sick humor of participation, of this seeming democratization of
performance: just as the oppressed classes in a democracy in an electoral
context get to eagerly vote for w/c leaders will oppress them next, passive
audience members in this work of dance are given the chance to eagerly vote for
the means w/ w/c they will be further made passive.
There is, of course, always the option not to
watch Anything less is less than a reckless act. But who among us finds
no pleasure in occasionally being subjugated, especially when subjugation comes
minus the threat of authentic recklessness?
To go to the theater or to go shopping, to watch a dance performance or to watch the latest John Lloyd Cruz movie: before one goes thru an aesthetic experience, s/he must 1st of all make the decision to experience it. (Even a supposedly ‘accidental’ aesthetic experience must be distinguished as such to be experienced as such, in cases where, for example, one opts to consider the supermarket as a vast theatrical space, or the commercial movie as a kind of dance.) The decision to do so, however, means deciding not to do something else; a possibility is always foreclosed.
OF COURSE NOT, THIS IS A BATHTUB
By way of Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, Of course not, this is a bathtub probes the familiar in detournment, delving into the constructive elements of melodrama -- that moment when tragedy meets comic relief. Staged in a private apartment bathroom in the beating heart of former Manila Bohemia, this solo dance piece underscores the levels of mediation taking place in a performance where the live performance taking place in the bathroom is only witnessed by the audience through a live television feed installed in the living room in the same apartment.
Feeding the delightful voyeur, it reveals what levels of separation there are between audience, performer, frame, screen and the machine. And if watching were a social contract implicitly agreed upon in a performance, how much commitment to truthfulness and digression should each party exercise?
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