The Looking Glass
By Caridad Svich
England
By Tim Crouch
Chelsea Art Museum
(closed)
"Look," the man says. "Look," the woman says.
Their voices echo one another in the clean, white spaces of the Chelsea
Art Museum galleries. The man (Tim Crouch) and the woman (Hannah Ringham)
are our looking-glass guides into a journey through a broken love affair,
a devastating illness, and a life-altering organ transplant that traverses
London, Atlanta, the Netherlands and an un-named country in the Middle
East. The play is England, written by Tim Crouch and presented
as part of the Under the Radar Festival.
England is a clear-eyed dissection of the transient,
metaphorical, complex relationships forged between host bodies and guest
bodies -- art and commerce, love and loss, and First World and Third
World countries and languages. First performed at The Fruitmarket Gallery
in Edinburgh in August 2007, it is a two-hander comprised of two slender
acts that run for an hour without an interval. (There is a very short
"breather," though, as audience moves from one location in the gallery
to another.) In the first half, Crouch and Ringham (of the British troupe
Shunt) act as lively faux-docents leading us through an exhibition of
heartbreak.
The current exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum
is "From Non-Conformism to Feminism: Russian Women Artists from the
Kolodzei Art Foundation." Crouch and Ringham move among the audience
seated there, exchanging voices as if within a single monologue that
charts the relationship between a London woman and her Danish-American
boyfriend, both nameless, over the course of a year when the woman is
diagnosed with a severe heart problem. She will die if she does not
receive a transplant. The couple is presented as upwardly mobile, relatively
comfortable and fairly bourgeois. The boyfriend is an art dealer, and
speculations and reflections on art pepper the opening half-hour as
the monologue moves in and out of different states of consciousness
and considerations of states of joy, ecstasy and suffering.
Are we listening to the musings of the woman
while she is in a possible (inferred but not directly revealed in the
text) coma in the hospital, thinking back on her life in London and
its intimate, quotidian and cherished moments? Or are we witness to
an exteriorization of the internal dialectics of a couple -- in a One
that is really Two? (In the second act, One figuratively embodies Two,
after the woman has received a heart transplanted from a Muslim man.)
Crouch keeps the guessing game alive in the first act as the slippery
but precise strands of narrative fold into and around each other, braced
by the echoing refrains shared by the couple: "Look. Look." Indeed,
again and again, the piece demands of its audience-witnesses, in a genial
but provocative manner: "Look at this story. Look at how it is told.
Look at the space we're in together. What do we look at when we look?"
Bert States in Great Reckonings in Little
Rooms (1985) states: "In the theater, image and object, pretense
and pretender, sign-vehicle and content, draw unusually close. Or as
Peter Handke put it, in the theater light is brightness pretending to
be other brightness, a chair is a chair pretending to be another chair."
In England, the gallery at the Chelsea Art Museum is a gallery
pretending to be another gallery: the gallery of someone's mind and
body. The arteries of feeling that rush through the compact piece are
full. The muscles of its contours are taut. The piece is extraordinarily
moving, and yet Crouch does not beg for empathy. His approach, as in
his previous pieces My Arm and An Oak Tree, is warily
warm, open but distant. His manner is self-effacing and the language
of his work is direct and on the surface, deceptively simple, but the
layers of narrative strands he orchestrates on the page and in performance
are rigorous, complicated, and cut as hard as a diamond. England,
which is co-directed by Karl James and a smith (written that way), radiates
refracted light that comes at us through the opaque face of a self blown
apart by illness and loss, and in the second half by a self unknown
to itself.
As the audience sits down in folding chairs facing
a white wall in a lower-level space of the museum, the play's second
half presents the supposedly recovered woman gone halfway across the
world to meet the wife of the dead man whose heart she now carries.
The English woman (enacted by Crouch) is alone with an interpreter (played
by Ringham). The Muslim woman is unseen and her language is unknown
and heard only in translation. The art-dealer boyfriend is barely mentioned,
but it becomes clear through sly hints in the narrative that the relationship
with him has failed. Illness and perhaps the transplant itself caused
an irreparable rift. The English woman was left with an art piece they
both loved: a DeKooning print, perhaps, although it may also be one
of the other pieces named in the first half of the piece as part of
their jointly held "unofficial" collection. In any case, what we see--and
what we look at in our mind's eye--is a woman who has traveled at great
cost to an unknown city to meet a person from whom she desires spiritual
solace. In effect, the woman believes that if this other person were
to look at her ("Look. Look.") then perhaps a bond of healing and resolution
could be forged. They could understand each other and perhaps even exchange
gifts.
But the transaction that the English woman seeks
is unfulfilled. For the Muslim woman cannot look at her and see her.
She sees only the damage done to her husband, who was "murdered" by
a system that valued his organs more than his life. As language falters
and fails, as translation proves inadequate, the two women are left
inside an unanswered question. "Look." But what do we see? And moreover,
what can we see in a mediatized world where images of Others
are filtered through veils of difference that hinder true understanding
and communication?
Inside a lexicon of failure--failed utterances,
failed bodies, failed and foiled transactions, collapsing words, and
wounded hearts--England questions how a colonizing body wrests
the objectivity of narrative from a subjected Other. The English woman
in the first half leads a quiet, unassuming life of privilege. The DeKooning
print matters to her and her boyfriend because it's beautiful, yes,
but moreover because of what it's worth and what it will be worth over
time. The value of art and the value of life are intertwined as the
woman tries to find meaning in the spiritual gifts that art can offer,
but the society in which she lives offers little space for that meaning
to be revealed.
The co-directors (who also co-directed Crouch's
An Oak Tree) have crafted a singular performance experience
with this site-responsive play for galleries. While the published text
includes references to The Fruitmarket Gallery where the piece originally
premiered, it is clear that each performance must take into account
the history, architecture and sonic reverberations of the new site where
it plays. There are open spaces in the published text for such insertions
and reconsiderations. The spectator is central to the way the piece
operates as theater. Crouch and Ringham are at first interspersed casually
among the standing audience that awaits the piece's beginning. They
speak from the crowd and refer to whatever physical obstructions are
in the space as they welcome the audience to the piece. They are tour
guides of sorts to a tour that has no clear destination. The piece moves
from this genial prologue into four discreet movements where the performers
play alongside pieces currently in the exhibition (in this case artworks
and photographs in the "From Non-Conformism to Feminism" exhibit) and
the audience is surrounded by the art. The spectator is guided gently
but the signs of each movement aren't necessarily obvious.
Each movement corresponds to a shift in the audience's
perspective. There are marked silences in each, and also an undulating,
rippling, sound-scape (designed by Dan Jones) that emanates mysteriously
from the performance space -- at turns ambient and minimal and at others
threateningly loud and ominous. Although Crouch and Ringham are highly
skilled, inviting and compelling performers and act well as "hosts"
to the "guest" bodies of the story -- the spectators -- the narrative
is often quite internalized and thus unsuited to the usual performance
circumstance. This is not an event happening before you, although it
seems to be, because it is a play, after all, but rather an explication
of an event that is past. We as audience are witness to an aftermath
of someone else's experience, and we're left to wrestle with the varying
encounters we've had with it.
Crouch plays both the boyfriend and the girlfriend
at several points in the narrative, and likewise so does Ringham. Identity
therefore is unstable. The borders between the personal narratives bleed.
Whom are we to believe? To whom should we look? Who gets to tell the
story, in other words? And during the second act, as we sit in our folding
chairs as a presumably coherent group, occupying the space where the
Muslim woman is placed, what voice do we have to reply with? And how
do we interpret what we see?
The last words of the piece are, "What's she
saying? What did she say? What did she say?" The English woman is bereft,
struggling and distraught in the inexplicable dilemma which the transplant
-- and the transplantation and re-translation of cultures -- has left
her. As spectators, we too are left to ask, "What did she say?" and
perhaps begin to craft in our own minds the narrative of the Other that
is not privileged in Western storytelling and reportage. What words
do we use to break down the borders between us? What new languages need
to rise up and where do the sites of these new narratives exist in the
fallout of Empire(s)?
Is England Crouch's subtle indictment
of England's blinkered view of the non-Western world? What spaces are
seen as we look? What spaces do we choose not to see when we look? "Who
are we, if not a combinatorial of experiences, information, books we
have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library,
an inventory of objects, a series of styles," states Italo Calvino in
Six Memos for the Next Millennium. The life of a space, of
a body, of a country -- its Here -- speaks, even before a word is spoken.
The living architecture of a space and its history offers visual, aural
and textual information. In England, the woman and the boyfriend
inhabit a constantly flowing transatlantic space of shared values. Their
bodies are joined in a loose inventory of seeing and ways of seeing.
When the woman's body -- her site of action -- unravels, the potentialities
of the inventory which is her life shift radically and force her to
another state of being and another way of thinking about and rendering
culture. The external theater derails and suddenly the internal detailing
of the interior theater emerges. In Crouch's interior theater--both
the amusing, reflective, moving, sharp recollections in the first half
and the inchoate seeking of expressiveness in the second--England is
a torn self that has barely even begun to really look at itself, despite
its insistent demand to be seen.