Ways of the Hand: Maybe Forever

Maybe Forever–Meg Stuart/Philipp Gehmacher
Posted by: Tim DuRoche
“Words I am not afraid of when we think about dance: emotions, excess and narrative.”–Meg Stuart
The opening six minutes of murky, near blackness, lusciously paced with barely discernible movements/forms was the perfect welcome mat to Maybe Forever–Meg Stuart/Philipp Gehmacher‘s suffocatingly lyrical dance-theater work; a work that reaffirms that, yes indeed, breaking up is hard to do.
The evening-length duet is in many ways the perfect introduction to Meg Stuart’s uncompromising and rigorously poetic dance-making world. The piece is stunning and brutal, punctuated by Carveresque What-We-Talk-About-When-We-Talk-About-Lovisms (“remember when I said. . .I take it back) spoken by the performers and the spacious music of Belgian singer-songwriter Niko Hafkenscheid. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Stuart is drawn to emotion and narrative and with this piece has created a story ballet of sorts that is riveted with rupture and grants us a voyeuristic peak into love disintegrating before our eyes.
Stuart is interested in movement that “expresses and incorporates the missing, the failed communication,” dances that, are “constructed from impossible tasks, such as the will to compress time. . .to fully experience the pain of another, to embrace emptiness, to show all perspectives of a complex situation in a single gesture.” In Maybe Forever‘s case the language of gesture comes from the hands and silence. Stuart and collaborator Philipp Gehmacher’s syntax of hand/arm gestures are as varied and descriptive as Inuit words for snow: there is shrug, grief, offering, declarations of space, demarkations, help-me-please, impasse, fragility, shrinking to the fetal, “long arms,” and a desperate clinging–a constant looking to the hands for answers that aren’t there.
Have you ever woken up startled and not recognized your own hand? Maybe it’s asleep or you’re just tired and discombobulated–but you can’t remember how it works, what it does–you do, but in that moment it could be anything? This gets at what Stuart meant earlier in the day when she asked her workshop: “what stories do the hands tell?
Maybe Forever is a work that is discomforting in an unraveling way similar to Cassavetes’ Woman Under the Influence–while set on a vast, minimally appointed stage, it’s claustrophobically intimate. At one point, we hear a voice-over that says “I feel like I’m reading somebody else’s diary and I should be.” That comes close, but there’s a more unseemly feeling that we are bearing witness to something inevitable that is unnerving–hope/comfort only stave loss temporarily–even the emotive language on stage (like urgent, yet futile break-up sex) becomes too close for some.
A dash of Beckett’s Endgame (“…it’s time it ended…and yet I hesitate, I hesitate to…to end”) meets the acrid parts of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. It’s discomforting because we recognize the storyline and because as dance, it’s startling to deal with such a devastating drawn-out arc–it’s like watching two dear friends go through a prolonged divorce, knowing there’s nothing you can do (and seeing in them that it could easily be you too).
And we’re left with, as Ann Lauterbach says in her poem Subject to Change, “a residual, if despondent, bearing.”
Maybe Forever works best when use of spoken language and gesture is elliptical and not didactic or pointed (in this case the second time Stuart talks to the audience she dilutes the potency of the earlier sections and it’s thuddish). Similarly when Hafkenscheid breaks the wall and talks to the audience it severs momentum. When most effective, Niko Hafkenscheid and his music play the Twelfth-Night-like role of a Feste, “the allowed fool. . .equally welcome above and below stairs.” Through the lens of his catchy sad-bastard tunes, he’s licensed to speak the truth and comment laconically on the people around him–and that works.
15 years ago my boss at the time (the wonderfully visionary curator John Killacky) asked me, “what’s with your generation? They’re so preoccupied with formalism, beauty and narrative.” Among the emerging artists in “my generation” at the time were people like Ronald K. Brown , John Moran, Matthew Barney, and a curious ex-pat named Meg Stuart.
The art-world of his generation was one where “Expectations, assumptions, memory, freedom had been tested and pried open. A new world of possibilities for dance, performance, art, had come into being,” (as Sally Banes once said of the dance/performance collective Grand Union).My answer was that after so much prying and rule breaking and willy-nilly freedom, It was up to my generation to put the hinges back on and reshuffle the deck. Reestablish vocabulary, engage fascination and charm (as opposed to alienation and transgression), rules of engagement and discover the various stratum of beauty (from the lyrical to the dense and the discomforting).
For Stuart, part of the fascination and reshuffling is an abiding interest in story. With Appetite (the last work I saw of hers, on which she collaborated with the artist Ann Hamilton and Bill Frisell), story manifested itself through ,”a haptic work in which the space and the body are considered as membranes, which peel, leak and moult. The space and the body mark and absorb each other. . .I wanted to experience what it would feel like to be absorbed by something or someone. It is the ultimate and most frightening form of physical contact.”
In Maybe Forever, it’s about the reverse feeling, because, yes, breaking up is hard to do, and while the song may be familiar, the despair isn’t any easier to swallow. As one critic noted of Stuart’s work, “This is not dance as we used to know it. It is cruder, less abstract and more directly metaphoric.”
Last year, Stuart said, “I like to create work in dialogue, and dance with others in a conceptual way. These meetings help you define yourself but also disrupt you. I enjoy the rupture, collaborating with others leads you to places you wouldn’t dare venture on your own.” In many ways Maybe Forever might be as much about the act and process of collaboration as it is “about” love and loss.