Jessica Chalmers Published in the December issue of Off

Dada Today: On Not Offending the Audience

When Dada was in its heyday, catcalling audiences would hurl cabbages, garbage, beefsteak, anything, while the onstage dadas, gleefully judging their success by the crowds hostility level, kept up their provocations. Wrapped in Sonia Delaunays oversized paper contraptions (sometimes with built-in funneling for flying garbage and beefsteak), they intoned African chants, shrieked nonsense poetry, rang bells noisily, and read out paradoxical or inaudible manifestos. For a brief moment in history, the dadas ruled the art scene this way, through deliberate chaos. They wanted the outrage, not applause. They were childish, maybe, but in those heady days before shock got old, it seemed like the rules were there to be broken, decorum to be violated. The twentysomething dadas rose to the challenge, aggressively pitting themselves against everything: theatrical tradition, the seriousness of great art, pleasure, continuity, meaning. Especially meaning. Hugo Ball instructed the Dada actor to spit out words....the dreary, lame, empty language of men in society....But inwardly be in a state of tension. Reach an incomprehensible unconquerable sphere. There is one well-known photograph of Ball reciting his nonsense sequence Karawane at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. He looks timid, not unconquerable, in a giant cardboard suit. Wearing a stiff cape tied at the neck, and cardboard cylinders on his head and around his torso and limbs, he is a strange Cubist tin man with wispy squid-like claws. Advance the clock, now, to the present day, to a superb

re-staging of Tristan Tzaras The Gas Heart by director Paul Lazar and co-director/choreographer Annie-B Parson. Before a quiet (because entranced) audience at the HERE arts center, marvelously skillful young actors breathed something like meaning into Tzaras non sequiturs and his repetitious, silly, and yet often also oddly beautiful lines. Tzaras stated intention was to create, as he put it, the greatest three-act hoax of the century. At the beginning of the script his written instructions are about making The Gas Heart into a parody of normal theater and its selfseriousness. He insists that the actors should perform with their usual gravity, but that they should treat the author who is not a geniuswith no respect and to note the levity of the script which brings no technical innovation to the theatre. Lazar and Parsons have gone so far in their disrespect as to turn the play into something very different from what its prankster-author would ever have imagined. They have made a lovely piece, full of precisely choreographed moments. Presented at the Threshold Theater Companys annual festival of one-acts in English translation, The Gas Heart (which followed a cloying Icelandic play about two fetuses arguing in a hammock) was thrillingly subtle. The piece begins with a typists sneeze, a sound and a gesture which launches a complex sequence of other sounds and gestures. Tim Cummings, as Eye, proceeds (British accent, superior air, slightly amused): Statues jewels roasts statues jewels roasts statues jewels roasts statues jewels roasts statues jewels roasts and the wind open to mathematical allusions. 2

The others represent other parts of the face, Mouth, Nose, Ear, Neck, Eyebrow. Often, as they speak, they do things with typewriters. They merge with them, play them like instruments, type fast with them. The actors engage with each other in wonderful, mechanical dances. Except for Mouth, who wears a dress, all wear 1920s suits (the dadas day-wear). Each speaks English with a different foreign accent. Wistful Neck (Kourtney Rutherford) sing-songs repeatedly in a pseudo-French accent, Tangerine and white from Spain, Im killing myself Madeleine Madeleine. Mouth, played to brassy, regal perfection by Rebecca Wisocky, is the only one with an American accent. She has a relationship with Eye. Im cold, Im afraid. Im green Im flower Im gasometer Im afraid. You are married. My teeth tremble, says Eye. Mouth rebuffs him: Too sensitive to approval by your good taste I have decided to shut off the faucet. The hot and cold water of my charm will no longer be able to divert the sweet results of your sweat, true love or new love. Cummings, an actor with remarkable presence, works well with Wisocky. There is one flawless moment in which he kneels at her feet. Not quite abject, he gazes up at her, catching a few falling drips from her mouth in his mouth as she swills down an entire plastic purse-full of red liquid in one long gulp. The Gas Heart was selected by The Threshold Theater Companys Pamela Billig, who also asked Paul Lazar to direct. In an interview, Lazar said that after he had accepted her offer, the first challenge was how to overcome his own fear of the text. Initially, he explained, he tried to come up with an idea which would allow him to avoid having the actors speak Tzaras lines at all. Reasoning that the Dada play had originally been performed by writers and not actors, Lazar thought about getting some of his writer3

friends drunk and then recording them as they read through The Gas Heart script. Then, in performance, he would play the tape over whatever the actors were doing. He wasnt in it to recreate the original, though. He didnt want to wrap the actors in Sonia Delaunay costumes or try to drum up a confrontational situation between the audience and the performers. Too museum-like, he said. It would just be an intellectual exercise if he did that, and anyway the play could never seem as new or as startling for todays audiences. Eventually Lazars fear subsided, however, and he, Parson, and the actors began to get together to fool around with the script, make it their own. There is the sense of camaraderie among the actors, many of whom are students or graduates of New York Universitys Experimental Theater Wing who had worked with Lazar/Parson in 1993 when they came to NYU to direct the Fassbinder play Bremen Freedom. It is possible to imagine the hilarity during rehearsals for The Gas Heart, for example when Lazar suggested that each performer present their version of a Dada DJ broadcasting live at 4 a.m. During these sorts of exercises, certain elements of the final piece began to appearthe accents, the typewriters. Something like characters were emerging, as well as relationships: the mocking anti-love between Mouth and Eye, the competitive typing relationship between Nose and Neck. At some point, Lazar suggested that Stacy Dawson take on a Romanian accentsince Tzara was originally Romanianand for a model gave her a tape of Lenny Bruce doing his Dracula skit. In the final production, Dawson is wonderfully vampyric. It is interesting to see the Dada filtered through a more contemporary attitude towards the audience-and interesting to try to describe contemporary attitudes, since 4

they vary. When Lazar and Parson were asked who they imagine their audience to be and how they go about addressing that audience, there is a brief silence. Then Lazar responds that he practices a particular kind of self-entertainment. A moment later he adds that he is also hugely obsessively desirous of entertaining the audience, whomever they might be. He speaks about directors who are only concerned to let an idea develop and to hell with the audience and what they might feel. Of course, the idea of entertaining anyone is a far cry from the hostility lauded by the dadas against an audience they thought of as pompous and bourgeois, a mob of conformists with staid expectations about art and the world. In his memoirs, the dada Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes described repeatedly announcing to the fat and utterly uncomprehending Zurich philistines that they regarded them as pigs. The audiences in Zurich and elsewhere responded in kind. In 1920, to take only one example, LEcho de Paris reported on the Dada phenomenon as a few paper costumes of doubtful imaginativeness, and some scatological vulgarities recited like at school, by pale youngsters... Tzara, ambitious to invent himself in the role of anti-art impresario, reveled in all this, cultivating an atmosphere that, night after night, led to verbal and even physical violence between those on stage and the spectators. He bombarded the press with announcements, and the cabaret evenings, taking place in the largest possible halls, attracted huge numbers of people who came to witness the scandal or to participate. If the Dada attitude towards the audience survives, it might be said to do so in theater and performance which use audience discomfort for some end. One thinks of visual artists like Marina Abramovic and Adrian Piper, some of whose most interesting work has involved playing around with 5

the boundaries of personal and public space. Often without announcing that any sort of art event was taking place at all, Piper, for example, would appear on a city bus riding contentedly with a huge towel stuck into the side of her mouth. Faced with such behavior, the audience of commuters would be automatically inside the experience, forced to react. The 1960s saw a number of such experiments outside conventional theatrical spaces and also inside them, such as Peter Handkes play, Offending the Audience. In todays avant garde there has evolved a more explicitly educational strain of audience confrontation, in sync with contemporary sexual politics and politics of identity. Take the work of Karen Finley, master of unseen and unspoken ugliness. Her recent piece, American Chestnut, featured larger-than-life slides of herself giving birth, blood spurting everywhere while a tiny muck-covered head is just seen emerging from between her legs. Naked and seminaked on stage in front of these slides and others, Finley went into her customary out-of-body state, her voice rising out of a shuddering trance. At times, she also addressed the audience directly, casually, on opening night asking a man who seemed trapped in a convulsion of weird, uncomfortable laughter, please to stop. She halted mid-sentence several times, waiting for quiet to proceed with a section about a friends AIDS-related death. If Finley doesnt exactly consider her audience to be uncomprehending pigs, neither does she spend too much time catering to their entertainment. Like the dadas, she holds the audience at a distance, distinguishes herself from them. The dadas may have been more extreme in some ways (although not in others), but they do share with Finley their view of the audience as living to some extent in a bubble of normalcy that can and should be violated. Lazar/Parson 6

obviously do not share this agenda. More in the Richard Foreman camp of entertainment, its probably more accurate to trace their Gas Hearts line of descent not to the dadas but to that break-away Dada group, the artists who eventually came to call themselves the Surrealists. This type of work does not hold its public in contempt; nor is the point to cuddle up with the audience like some encounter-oriented work of yore (recent yore). Neither nihilistic nor utopian, the contemporary surrealist work approaches the audience without foreknowledge, almost indifferentlyor rather in a childlike way, with the desire to draw others into an odd zone in which the playful and the menacing are juxtaposed. Richard Foreman, along with the Wooster Group, is of course the most well-known practitioner of this type of theater today, and Foreman has had a strong influence on many younger directorsincluding Paul Lazar, who says that although he is not a huge fan, he is nevertheless really aware of Foreman. Another example of Foremans influence was recently to be seen in Hare Follies, by visual artist Nayland Blake, at the Brooklyn Academy of Musics Next Wave Festival. Part of the Artists in Action section of the festival, Blakes work-in-progress featured performers in bunny suits (bunnies are his obsession generally), and Blake himself as a foolish king in long underwear. The Foremanesque elements were evidentthe rapid shifts between perkiness and contempt, the play-on-words, the mix of spoken and recorded speech, cartoon personalities declaiming sad absurdities while engaged in stylized movement. Instead of Foremans suggestive dream-flow of words and sentences, though, there was a pretty confusing pastiche of unattributed quotes. A character would go without marking the shift from speaking as Anita Hill to speaking as 7

Clarence Thomas, in practically the same breath quoting from Nat Turner and the Turner diaries, Malcolm X and Timothy McVeigh. The beyond-good-and-evil quality of this indiscriminate postmodern jumble marred what was an otherwise pleasant and well-executed piece. So the recent Gas Heart reads Dada backwards through Surrealism, its successoror maybe it is just that Lazar/Parson have discovered Tzaras own affinity with Surrealism in The Gas Heart script itself. Interestingly, Tzaras Gas Heart was featured during a soire which turned out to be a crucial moment in the Dada-Surrealist split. Breton came to this July 1923 event with his followers expressly to make trouble for their former Dada pals and, in particular, for Tzara, who continued to hold fast to Dada principles and to call for its preservation in the face of increasing quarrels and defections. It was just a short time after Breton had accused Tzara in a newspaper of being a publicity-seeking impostor, so tensions were high. The heckling became especially violent when the curtain rose on The Gas Heart, and after a while all hell broke loose. People started fist fighting; Breton broke the poet Pierre de Massots arm; Paul Eluard fell into the stage set and was later fined for damages. Audiences will have another chance to see Lazar/Parsons Gas Heart, at the Dance Theater Workshop from December 11th through 21st. This time, it will be shown with another Lazar/Parson piece, The Simple Heart, an adaptation of the Flaubert story which they recently took to an international theater festival in Tbilisi, Georgia. The evenings at DTW are a not-to-be-missed opportunity to see two pieces back-to-back by this excellent husband-wife team. Annie-B Parson, who danced for ten years with the Butoh company, Laughing Stone, has taught choreography at NYU for 8

the past five years. Paul Lazar, familiar to audiences particularly from small parts he has played in Jonathan Demme films(Married to the Mob, Lorenzos Oil, Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia), has also done extensive stage work, for example with the Wooster Group (Three Sisters, Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape). Their collaboration with The Gas Heart actors will continue. Mac Wellman, who is presently having a year-long retrospective, is planning to write a play expressly for the Lazar/Parson team, and there are plans to present the work next fall.