Pueblo Abroad: Journal Entry #3

Part 3 – Cuvilliés Theater

Bear with me:

Squirreled away in the middle of the Residenz Palace complex in Munich, the Cuvilliés Theater was built by Elector of Bavaria Maximilian III Joseph after the former theater burned down. The theater is famous for its rococo style decorations, with golden frieze-work and carving jumping out against their red background. It’s a fabulous looking room and I imagine that watching plays must be sort of difficult with the impressive architecture looming in the near darkness.

View from the stage of the Cuvilliés Theater; via muenchenmusik.de 

Occupying my attention as much as the decoration, however, was what was happening on the stage. Onstage, a group of people was assembling the set for an upcoming play. I was enthralled: relaxed, absorbed, utterly conscious of the mini-dramas occurring onstage. Judging from the groups of people sitting down in seats watching the spectacle the same as Kayla, Adam, and myself, I think they felt the same way. Cameras and sightseeing were momentarily set aside and we watched them construct the stage.

Why this experience was so cleansing, it’s hard to say. It might have been the collective ache of our too-touristy feet; it might have been the plush velvet of the theater seats; it might have been the just-recently consumed liters of Hofbräuhaus beer—as I mentioned, it’s hard to say.

~

It goes without saying that theater can be pretty darn experimental. I’m thinking in particular of performance artists such as Jack Smith and Yvonne Rainer, among others, who took the motions and rhythms of everyday life and transferred them into dance and acting routines. Normal movements—walking across a room or fixing a lamp (I am hypothesizing—not referencing actual works)—become, paradoxically, frustratingly, the stuff of art.

It occurred to me while sitting in the Cuvilliés Theater that this random episode of stagehand-observation could, indeed, be a piece of post-modern performance art. It’s not too hard to imagine. Think about it: you enter the theater to an empty stage, take your reserved seat, and wait for the show to start. Some announcer goes through the traditional rigmarole of telling the audience to turn off their cell phones, etc., etc. and then the show begins. Stagehands crowd the area—setting up for a play that won’t happen. The walls of rooms go up and sinks are installed; a piano is dragged onto the stage; heavier objects are dangled from the rafters above the stage; the lighting designers flash lights on and off.

As I voiced this thought, Kayla sagely opined that the audience would naturally hunt out drama on the stage no matter what was happening there. “If that heavy partition fell,” she said, pointing to one of the room’s walls being shifted into place, “then everyone would gasp.” I think she was right. If that partition had fallen, the entire room would have been startled beyond reason.

~

The entire experience in the theater reminded me of a film that I watched this past semester for my American Avant-Garde Film course; the following is a few thoughts about that film, Sharon Lockhart’s Double Tide. The film consists of two still 45-minutes shots—one at sunrise and the other at sunset—of a muddy flat. In both shots, a woman walks past the camera and begins mucking for clams. For the 45 minutes of each shot, she wanders across the camera’s frame, collecting clams. I’ll dig deep into my film journal and provide an excerpt. Think about Jen Casad’s work in relation to the hypothetical stagework done in my imaginary theater piece:

“The central experience for most of the audience (I imagine) centers…on the process of Jen Casad digging for clams. The work being done by Casad effectively mirrors the work that the audience must do to engage with the film. However, upon further thought, the notion that those two forms of “work” are congruent with one another seems preposterous. Is it sensible to draw parallels between the backbreaking labor that Casad engages in and the comparably luxurious work of sitting that we, as the audience, are doing? Sure, they have an established parallel in terms of length, but certainly have no parallel in terms of either back pain or blisters.

A shot from Sharon Lockhart's film Double Tide; via wholo.blogspot.com

So is viewing a film like this “work”? In some sense, I’ve already addressed that question. Yes—of course it is…but it’s mental work. A comparison between Casad and the audience is, in that sense, futile (overlooking, that is, my use of the comparison as merely a starting point). The journey, as an audience, towards an exploration of and a meditation upon this film is simply not the equivalent of Casad’s consistent manual labor. They are different engagements.

Double Tide dives headlong into murky waters once the notion of Casad’s work as performance art emerges in the film. Once it becomes clear that Casad is keeping her clam digging confined to the frame of the camera, her work is casually reduced to an act. Taking cues from the early dance work of Yvonne Rainer dealing with everyday movements, Lockhart crafts a performance that is somewhat more than performance and somewhat less than actual labor. The close-up audio—replete with sucking noises and Casad’s coughing—reinforces the reality of the labor she is engaging in. Although Lockhart is mediating how Casad does her work, in terms of where she works and when she pauses, Lockhart doesn’t—or at least doesn’t fundamentally seem to—change the nature of the work itself.