Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods & Philipp Gehmacher/Mumbling Fish
Maybe Forever
Friday, September 4th 8:30 PM Newmark Theatre
By Eve Connell
Rainy Saturday afternoon, and I can’t shake the dregs of Meg Stuart’s melancholy study in mood and movement from last night’s performance at the Newmark. Depressing, perhaps. Rough, a little. Peripatetic, yes. Reminiscent of time-lapse photography or a film played backwards. Insect-like hand gestures. Alien arm movements. Blank expressions.
The opening piece sets the tone. Two performers subtly move with pops and fits that result in minute, jerky gestures all while staying prone on the floor. They sometimes slowly writhe to music and sounds that span clicks, wings in motion, droning. Their heavy bodies pile atop one another, pausing before twitching again. They appear to be in pain or nearly dead. The dimly lit scene is a challenge to describe, and it did initially grab and hold my attention. It approached the eerie. I like eerie. I wanted it to make my heart ache. But it didn’t.
Next came the first of a few guitar pieces, welcome contributions to the overall air of melancholy, longing, and perhaps dread. Mid show, guitarist-singer-songwriter, Niko Hafkenscheid, asked his audience how we were doing. At that point, I think we were alright. Doing just fine. He remarked how nice it was to be on stage performing, rather than holed up in his small apartment in Brussels, playing for no one in particular. After the performance, however, I felt like I had just emerged from a cramped, dreary Belgian apartment, too. Maybe that was a goal.
The rest of the performance is a march through spoken word (Remember when? I’d take it back!), with some guitar accompaniment, but mostly the nearly expressionless faces and jerky, repetitive movements of Stuart and her lost counterpart, Gehmacher.
The themes communicated through Maybe Forever – and its music, its language, its physicality – range from the obvious disintegration and demise of a terrible, complicated relationship to faint whiffs of rape, murder, and even suicide. Not so uplifting by any stretch, which I don’t mind, but I’m uncertain as to what Stuart would like us to do with this experience. It didn’t feel tragic. It didn’t feel powerful. It didn’t impact me in anyway, except left me feeling a little grimy. And today, again perhaps mostly because of the rain and the light, I can’t shake off that moldy film silently charged with emptiness.
The best bet is to head into a performance sans expectation. When I read that “Stuart and Germacher offer themselves as a reluctant template for the contradictions of modern love, conjuring potent images of a relationship on the verge” I was primed to leap into something provocative. Broken relationships – one of my favorite themes! But the entire performance didn’t enable an ebb or flow, offer a jolt, or provoke a shift, for that matter – it hovered at the same volume for me, didn’t push me toward any strong reaction or emotion. The doomed couple seemed already done. Not teetering, not on the verge of anything colossal. I tried hard (that’s a clue right there) to concentrate on the performers’ deliberate movements – their muscles and postures and poses and flittings and sparse expressions, which was interesting most of the time, I admit. But I wasn’t moved. More was what I wanted.
The intensity both performers seemed to create for themselves was acknowledged by most of the audience. The guy next to me booed. While exiting the theatre, a woman on his heels asked if he was the boo-er. She then offered that it was the best PICA show she’d seen. Ever. To each her own.
