Antony and the Johnsons

(I will be thinking of this performance for a very long time).
On Sunday I felt I was veering towards sensory overload. Given that it was only the second day of TBA, I felt nervous about keeping up my momentum, but perhaps a tension between being overwhelmed by sensory stimuli (visual art and performance) and being distant enough to reflect on it. And perhaps the festival opener, Anthony and the Johnsons, is a good start to rethinking absorption and distraction as different modes of viewing, and how those ideas need to be re-conceptualized to fit contemporary experience (addressed in the Hot Mess chat also, but more on that latter).
Oddly, two of the most momentous moments of the show depended on our senses being deprived and its resulting recognition of collective experience. The show opened with each performer and audience member cloaked in darkness. Nothing to see, only to listen; it may be that each one of us there shared a sense of uncertainty about what was to follow. The second literally breath-taking moment occurred as the backdrop that served as a barrier was slowly lifted. The silence was so all encompassing that it seemed that those on stage as well as the audience were all holding a collective breath. During the previous songs I had become so enrapt in my own emotional and intellectual responses to the performances, that it was so uplifting to be able to connect to everyone in the theatre at that moment, and yet as a result of complete silence.
Rarely have I felt such a synthesis of being present with myself and with the performance at the same time. This feeling is so different from absorption, the sense that one’s capacity for reflection is negated by what one is watching (like being under the spell of reality tv) and I think it perfectly hits on Jerome Bel’s description of the ontology of performance as presence or “the here and now.”
Marisa White