Enjoyably baffling, as I was expecting. I have neither a strongly positive nor a strongly negative reaction to the Woosters’ tepidness: it is what it is, and I’m obscurely happy someone somewhere is exploring their really particular aesthetic. They definitely have, like, a schtick: audio fed to performers via headphones, scrolling text on CRTs, a way of both acknowledging the original context of works and also kind of gently exploding that context.
As with their Emperor Jones, which I saw yonks ago, I wonder if this approach is really the best for material like Acker's dealing with intensity. Acker isn’t exactly a dispassionate writer. And yet also the Wooster thing—their suite of concepts, whatever you want to call it—lets us grapple with things that might be too uncomfortable to otherwise stage. In the loveliest moments, a one-person vocoder duet between Romeo and Juliet, the avant-garde weirdball weirdness yielded moments of real loveliness. At other points, you know, it was vague and a little bit uncomfortable and kind of amorphous. Definitely one (1) unit of late New York avant-garde; I left with the feeling of the dutiful art-goer rewarded with some capital-A art. What I didn't feel was in any sense wrenched apart, or confronted with a truth of the universe; once again, instead, I got intensity in quotation marks.
No comments:
Post a Comment