Written by Carla Harryman, and collaboratively developed with visual artist Amy Trachtenberg and director Jim Cave, with music by composer Erling Wold, Performing Objects portrays a world that is always under construction. Situated between the sliding borders of city and suburb and between commonplace existence and fantasy, the play celebrates gatherings, encounters, collisions, and accidental meetings of words, objects, and personae that are exclusively perceptible within the Sub World.
>SEE PICTURES OF THE PERFORMANCE AT THE LAB IN SANFRANCISCO
All photos by Donald Swearingen
REVIEW FROM SF GATE:In Carla Harryman's "Performing Objects Stationed in the Sub World," a shoe becomes a pocketknife, a girl names her dolls Cathy 1, Cathy 1.5 and Cathy 3.7, and a character known only as "a new person" suffers from the ultimate indecision, pondering questions such as "Should I fall in love?" "Do I want to be a pet owner?" "Do my clothes fit?" Under the direction of Jim Cave, Harryman's collaboration with visual artist Amy Trachtenberg starts off the LAB's 20th Anniversary Season with an artistic bang. This self-referential show gives voice to a chorus of poets who recreate the meaning of all-night poker and chatter incessantly about Allen Ginsberg showing himself on the Internet. Harryman explores the nature of imagination, ponders the existence of bedroom communities and toys with perceptions of reality amidst a set of art objects navigated by skillful performers who, with song, movement and language, become art in themselves. -- Anna Mantzaris, special to SF Gate
COMMENTS
I think it was clear how much I loved the play. YES, loved. I was completely enthralled -- the goofy complex poetic abstract hilarious moments were nearly unceasing. The acting was terrific, the props, costumes, set completely integrated into the experience, the direction brilliant, and the writing a surreal musing that expelled something very real about thought, memory, life. Everyone was elated -- what better testimony is that? ––Summer Brenner
The actors and the things are all initially objects; the actors/persons leave object status and establisth subjectivity whenever they attach/connect themselves to another object or person. They have subjectivity as long as they are attached and when they sever the attachment/connection they are objects again. What we witness as the audience at the play are games of attachment/connection, games of becoming a subject. The variety of ways one (an object) can become a subject are infinite, they are funny touching sad productive political but never vicarious. –Lyn Hejinian
I especially appreciated all of the the wild range of inner and outer behaviors, the contrast between the sometimes physically absurd (such as the giant tongue, the emptying and recycling of meaning from words in the poet's card game) and your particular mode of making the mind concrete, a questioning dwelling, or perhaps I should say a sense of probing which feels solid. Begging to have one's legs buried in dirt in a treatment center was a moment I particularly loved, and also the musical interludes- the asking to spare some power. . I could go on, perhaps not very articulately. This work continues to resonate. ––Laynie Brown
"Under The Bridge" (1980) was formative for me, an essential moment in my piecing together a structural, linguistic and emotive map of the contours of contemporary prose poetry. [Carla] has always been a pioneer in the evolution of transformational combining of formal structures in all genres of writing, yes, but more interesting, the connections and connotations not only seem true but ring true. The play. it seemed clear to me, is out to put us ringside of as many emotive and ontological soundings as are contained in experience, often in their raw form, or nascent form, and keep us there. Yes, things clash, they have to. As we listen, we can understand why, and appreciate that transformations occur constantly, and learn to enjoy that process, not have to back away from it so much or repress it. This play, and so much of Carla's work, is unafraid to reveal how much we take pleasure in the way sides of reality clash against each other, like wave forms, how the storms and resolutions may appear arbitrary, but are yet necessary. Things on a page won't stay put any more than they do in life; categories leap out at each other and dance with each other on their own, they won't passively remain in place they way we expect them to, any more than the erotic aspect of experience will give way to our moral and philosophical demands, customs and expectations exactly the way we order it to. This play will use the interrelationships between sense experiences, will produce synaesthesias at the very nexus point where sound becomes meaning and meaning returns to its componant sounds. Carla shows us how we never stop reading, just as we can never stop hearing (though we can permit ourselves to stop listening), that reading and writing themselves are a metaphor for the way we make noise and life makes noise, we and life constantly fighting and celebrating each other. If we haven't understood, we will yet understand, the stream of life's repetitive clashings in sound and meaning is constant, and there is reassurance in that, and laughter too! Annie Kunjappy's acting and movement was discussed so interestingly at one point I was tempted to recommend that at least one discussion with the director be worked into the play itself! Jim Cave has such interesting things to say and oh, this is not all typical Mamet- like understatement at all. At one point, Ken picks up a huge barrel of various objects and drops them on the stage. Objects, as in Carla's poetry, are not subordinated to any other category of experience.They are right out in front as characters on the stage just the way they are in life. What is evoked? Berg and Bartok at least, but also Ernst and Duchamp and Beckett and Strindberg combined with Schwitters, Webern, Stein and Sofia Gubaidulina. ––Nick Piombino, from his blog