dumb type

[OR]

The stage is white like a blank page, edgeless, at once deep and shallow, with its gently curving screen that outlines the upstage rim of the space. In the beginning of [OR] a band of light scans the stage from left to right against the tones and buzzes of sound designer Ryoji Ikeda’s sterile sonic landscape. Immediately the terrain of this contour-less field is illuminated, revealed, presenting a panoramic view without corners, a space that could surround you.

The dumb type website describes [OR] as a “gray humour,” not quite accepting the direct cynicism of a “black comedy” and instead playing off Fredric Jameson’s well-known dictum that the postmodern pastiche is a “blank parody”. It lies somewhere in the no man’s land between the black and the white, between positive and negative. One of the great successes of this masterful production (and here is a performance one should truly term such) is its incredible balance between humor and pathos, a grotesquerie so extensive that the distinctions between one and the other almost disappear. The piece does not furnish its spectators with legible sentiment or comic absurdities, so that even its most humorous segments contain a seed of discomfort.

The piece seems most concerned with the liminal space between life and death, the interaction of the biological and the technological, the psychical and the technical. Thus, fitting the piece within some of the categories of the postmodern, one could read the performance as a pastiche rumination on the post-human, the cyborg body of the actor-patient. We see costumes that function as prosthetic extensions of the body: leashes conjoining two figures into one; the exaggerated supplements of the fetish/BDSM costume; a loudspeaker that amplifies and posits a voice. Meanwhile, the white sheets that cover the supine figures seem to cancel out these bodies of accretion, blocking out the human completely. There is very little of Kantor’s mysterious emballage in these masked bodies. Where the Polish director’s memory-inflected spaces rich with matter speak of a terrible possibility obscured, dumb type’s anti-septic hospital sheets are the clearest delineations of the human form-pure bios.

Meanwhile, dumb type writes of the piece as an experience of “’white-out,’ like in the blizzard where you are deprived of the ability to see…where you don’t know whether you are alive OR dead.” The performance strings together episodic flashes that act as discreet objects in the white landscape of the stage. They present themselves as a contemporary schizo-haiku or tanka of the body, images sculpted within the tight structure of the human body. The grayness of the experience impresses itself upon the spectator in the constant juxtaposition of images, caught between one positivity and something not quite opposite in its disappearance and subsequent inexplicability. One could easily connect this aesthetic to the montage theories of the Russian cinematic and theatrical experimentalists of the early 20^th Century. A similar between-ness is evident in the sudden epiphanic flashes of white light followed by absolute blackness that introduce the piece and reappear in the fashion shoot interludes. These burn themselves into the retina, casting white after-effects into the darkness.

The bodies of the performers assume a distinction against this field, but a particularity rather than a community. In the culmination of the first scene bodies wander around the pure white space, isolated in action, performing solos in a field of whiteness then glancing off one another as their vectors of movement collide. Actors from both sides of the stage run at a woman downstage and send her spinning as they graze off of her body. A man kicks a woman in the back and they separate only to swing back into another point of contact and its immediate break. There are moments of support-the two figures that repeatedly hold one another around the waist before whipping about to face each other in a combative stance-but spatial relations seem to exist only in proximity or movement towards another body. These are free-floating entities and, as in most of the other episodes that follow, the vastness of the white field seems to make the figures lost in its context all the smaller. They stand not in relation to an edge or a place, but in relation to the entire expanse of the plain, a particularity amidst this gray landscape without markers. This is an “or” without alternatives, bracketed off into isolated consideration.