The Time Between Two Mistakes at the National Theater last weekend was a bizarre, chaotic mess: a head-on collision between theater and dance, storytelling and ... I’m not sure what the hell they were going on about. However, it was delivered with total and tireless commitment by each performer.
It is a show that challenges audiences’ preconceptions about art and performance, and whether you love it, hate it or fall somewhere in-between, it is a show that is hard to get out of your head.
That is usually a good thing. Theater, as with any art form, can be pretty and light and an enjoyable escape, but it is often best when it forces viewers to confront their expectations.
Photo courtesy of Chou Jia-hui
Anyone who took the Taipei MRT to see the show were given fair warning of the Brussels-based Needcompany’s take-no-prisoners approach. The massive wall poster that greeted people entering or leaving the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall Station exit closest to the theater, had the show title’s in huge Chinese characters and smaller English letters, and immediately underneath the phrase: “If Art Is My Lover Then Who The F… Are You?”
Conceived by Needcompany cofounders Jan Lauwers and Grace Ellen Barkey (who was also one of the performers) as a meditation on or response to British director Peter Brooks’ The Empty Space, each production has had a cast that is half local performers, who bring their own training and perspectives, meaning that the show seen in Taipei last weekend was different than the previous incarnations at the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Austria in 2014 and then in Berlin.
The idea is that each cast has to create its own home on the stage. Just like any home, sometimes it was neat and clean, other times it was a disaster zone.
Photo courtesy of Chou Jia-hui
The audience is greeted by a bare, fully exposed stage as they take their seats, the half-raised orchestra pit home to a piano, drum kit, guitar, videocamera and props.
A cacophony of sound erupts from the back of the theater and the cast, attired in a colorful variety of T-shirts, shorts and swimwear bounce down the steps on the left aisle and onto the stage, shouting lyrics like a squad of pumped-up military recruits and proceed to weave back and forth around the stage several times before departing.
In the silence that follows, Maarten Seghers, in a white sequined and satin master of ceremonies outfit, explains the starting point of the show — Brooks’ book — as a translation of his comments is projected onto the back of the stage, and then proceeds to explain where Brooks went wrong, hence the two mistakes in the show’s title.
What follows is a series of vignettes, with no particular rhyme or reason and very little connecting them except a full-on assault on the eyes — and often the ears — of the watchers. Some are fun, while others are in need of editing.
A swirl of bright hoop-clad dancers bob and weave around the stage as others push a variety of props and lighting and sound equipment. It looks like fun — and then it devolves into a bacchanalia of sexual couplings or individual onanism, sometimes with props, as a large white clown figure wanders around asking questions and growing increasingly distressed.
If this part is supposed to demonstrate the questions of what is right or wrong or good, it is hard to tell. What is does demonstrate is that the segment needs to be cut by several minutes.
Other segments are more successful, including the video recordings, both live and recorded that a projected above the heads of the performers.
The cast come together to build a house of cards out of white sparkly flats and other props and have a house-warming party at the same time, but there are fights and furtitive kisses — captured by the camera — while some sing about “here and now we do the best we can.”
However, no sooner is everything lined up then a rough-looking tent structure appears from the right of the stage and proceeds to devour everything and everyone as it moves across the floor, while a black-and-white projection above the action gives a Blair Witch Project feel to the proceedings. When the tent comes to a stop, clothing begins to spew from the hole in the roof.
As the tent retreats from where it came, it leaves the detritus of the party behind, along with a row of bodies, stripped down to black briefs and bras. Four men appear and begin to move the still jerking bodies to front and center of the stage, carefully piling them one on top of the other, while the video above shows decapitated fish heads at a market stall, one quite animatedly flopping about in a pool of red.
It made me think of how German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder always seemed to incorporate a butcher’s shop or abettoir in his films so he could compare his human subjects to meat.
The show climaxes with a group dance, with time for individual solos and then the cast retreats to the far, far back of the stage, circling the large white clown figure on a revolving platform, as they make individual runs to the front to shout a word or slogan or just give a thumbs-up as the audience hears the refrain that “all things are good.”
To that, I would have to add: sometimes.
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