May 14, 2009

These are some crazy times we live in, yet we can’t escape the fact that art goes on much as it has before. Belgian performance artist Jan Fabre, whose work Orgy of Tolerance was performed at On the Board’s last weekend, is trying hard to right this state of affairs. As the world is transformed by global market forces that seek to extract as much profit as possible from an increasingly impoverished and exploited underclass, we in the developed world find ourselves partaking in the addictive, morally depraved consumer culture that fuels it. Add to this the correlating realities of an invading army, violent occupations, suspension of the rule of law, indeterminate incarcerations, and the legacy of torture and you’ve got some serious subject matter to address.

To get his point across, Fabre wisely chooses to examine this set of circumstances through an allegorical prism of human sexual behavior, both deviant and mundane. But despite his emphasis on action and movement, his key instrument is – for better or worse - language. Orgy may have all the trappings of a contemporary avant-garde performance work, but Fabre is essentially a Brechtian comic of the old school who combines politics with the absurdism of cruelty to create social critique and boisterous song.

Our good-looking cast of actors – most from the European continent - assembles on the stage in chic paramilitary garb (complete with rifles and berets) smoking cigars and drinking scotch on leather couches that would be right at home in the parlor of an exclusive men’s club. Suddenly the ladies, in black patent leather high heels, begin to give their male counterparts hand-jobs in business-like fashion. The men, undeterred by this interruption, continue to smoke and drink while bragging of the “breeds” they’d like to acquire for their respective “collections” – this one seeks an Italian, that one wants a Jew, etc.

I quickly got the idea at the heart of this scene, but wondered what our response was meant to be. Without any tension between competing impulses to laugh at the irony of the set up (it to obvious to be funny) and be disgusted by the tragic human predicament it hoped to conjure (we’ve already seen it on TV), the lines simply land on the stage floor with repeated thuds.

A series of similar scenes followed for the show’s subsequent hour and forty-five minutes in which consumerism and exploitation were dramatized as sexual acts and even human/product hybrid reproduction. The actors, donning dildos strapped to their faces, shop and make love to handbags and sofas. Grotesquely pregnant women straddle grocery carts while giving birth to full cans of beer, bulging bags of M&Ms, and elongated bottles of Coca-Cola. As soon as any event begins to unfold on stage we find ourselves ascertaining its significance too quickly and impatiently watch as the scenes play out. By the time a haggard Jesus appears on stage dragging a weighty cross behind him, we are not surprised when a gaggle of fashionistas give him a hipster makeover unless it is from the fact that Fabre’s choice was so damn obvious.

Late in the game, we are treated to some lively, if incoherent, musical numbers and the work’s general sense of tedium is mitigated by a bit of welcome exuberant chaos. But this does not make up for the fact that Fabre’s scenes never establish enough interest or curiosity to allow for any actual exploration of his subject. Instead, he is content to simply restate his premise over and over again.

In what appears to be an eleventh-hour effort to create some badly-needed ambiguity, the cast proceeds to denounce a litany of people and institutions – art festivals, actors, critics, producers, even Fabre himself – with a chorus of “fuck yous.”  As you might expect, it feels predictable, forced, and – like the rest of the work – hopelessly out of date.

A compelling performance piece, regardless of the chosen medium, must lead us willingly to some place both new and familiar. This is more effectively done through suggesting experience than baldly acting out situations and ideas.

A few months ago I saw a one night only dance performance at the Moore Theater by locust, the dance group led by choreographer/dancer Amy O’Neal. The work, entitled Crushed, was breathtakingly brilliant. Its intensely physical movement left me at a loss for words, but I left the theater convinced that I had witnessed a profoundly accurate representation of the overwhelming pressures of contemporary life. The degree of tension escalated and drew me in as the dance gained momentum over the course of the performance. However abstract it was, it embodied something I could recognize but not readily explain.

Fabre, so eager to reinvigorate performance art by incorporating the realities of current global predicaments, could have learned a thing or two from watching this weird and wonderful dance piece. Keats once said “Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity,” and what’s true for poetry is also true for orgies.