Attended from 7:00pm (start) to 3:30am
Blackbox Theater
Left for about 10 minutes at some point after 11:30pm to quickly stuff a cold sandwich down my throat. I was still in the Arts Center lobby though.
I have very mixed feelings about Nik Bärtsch’s “Mobile.” Staying inside that black box of magic for so long was indeed a challenge, but I’d say a better word to capture the essence of what my experience there was would be “experience.” It was an experience most certainly unlike anything else I had ever experienced before. The reason why it was such an interesting experience is mainly related to the atmosphere that was created inside that room.
It all starts with the entrance. You walk through a circling corridor dimly lit with blue lights. The walk is just long enough for you to stop thinking about the outside world somewhere along the way so that when you finally arrive at the performance space you feel like you’ve already journeyed to a different world. And when you arrive that’s almost what it feels like. A square pit in the center, containing all the instruments and an odd knot in the center, made with ropes that then spread out in all directions towards the roof, surrounded by mattresses and further back some chairs. The center pit was focused on with colored lights, and there was a constant fog inside the room throughout the entire performance. Eventually the musicians begin to arrive, one by one, and begin to play. I must have been very tired when it all started, because for about the first hour or so I dozed off, until a camarographer tripped with my leg and then I was unable to go back to sleep. The toughest thing to do inside that room was then to find out something to do. There were times in which I admired the musicians, who were absolutely stellar. From where I was (I didn’t move for the whole night) I couldn’t see the percussionist, but I was left in awe by how the pianist directly influenced the chords of the piano to make different sounds, how the saxophonist could use his instrument for percussion, and by how the drummer was so resilient (I think he spent the most time playing out of the bunch, from what I saw). The musicians were especially nice to admire in the more intense segments of their music, when they were really just “rocking it out.” I remember somebody shouting “yeah!” at one point because it had been so good. The music would shift between many different moods, going from the intensity that I just mentioned, and through some delightful jazzy tunes, which allowed for good peace of mind, to some avant-garde “stuff” that my musically illiterate mind couldn’t really understand. The other things I would do to entertain myself then varied between looking at the other stuff there was to look at - the moving patterns that were sometimes projected onto a screen above the musicians, how the fog moved through the beams of light, or just people in the audience, shaking their heads to the beat or just laying on the mattress in deep sleep - or writing random thoughts on my notebook - of which I couldn’t see the pages - or talking with my friend around after 2:00 am, when pretty much everyone else was asleep and nobody seemed to mind our whispers. The conversations I had that night were probably the nicest, most sincere ones I’ve had since starting at this university. Eventually the performance apparently started again and a man snapped at us to shut up. We left shortly after.
In the end, it was the mixture of so many different things that made Mobile such a wholesome experience. The changing moods in the music. The changing lights, which would sometimes only be a sudden burst of bright light and at other times would leave the place almost completely dark. The performance of the poet Afra, whose poem on her identity I had already heard twice before, but who was still perhaps the most amazing surprise of the night. And perhaps most importantly, the challenge of staying entertained in a “please turn off your phone” space for over 6 hours. It was certainly an experience that took me through a myriad of moods. Although ironically my fondest memory of the night was that of being able to engage in deep conversation with my friend, who was not a part of the intended performance. This may as well be evidence that when watching any spectacle, the people with you could have as much of an influence on your experience as the performance itself.
Dear Carlos,
ReplyDeleteI have a question about writing style in this post. Your second paragraph is a very very long runon paragraph. Is this intentional? Were you trying to imitate the "inside" experience of "Mobile," the sense of distraction, engagement, boredom, concentration and confusion? If you were trying to model that, frame the effort with a sentence that abstracts and maps out what you are attempting. And then you can write in that manner using thick description of the experience.
But it seems to me that you are grappling here with how Mobile was an experience that couldn't fit easily into a genre for you, that it both organized and allowed behaviors that you usually don't associate with performance and yet it didn't have the usual markers of performance (including a clear dramatic arc). What you write about is what the performance let you experience of yourself - and even the kinds of behaviors you value (extended time to connect with friends) and the ones that seems to undermine those values (distracting technology). How you write imitates the challenge of meditation where you allow what's around you to move through your body and become unattached to the outcome -- and especially that you don't control the outcome. The writing seems to indicate that - and your surprise and pleasure in being open to that. That peformance can open you up to experience - but it doesn't necessarily have to direct you to the meaning of the experience or even determine what the actual experience might be.