Ghost cloud over excavation
Jen Rosenblit’s new production, ElseWhere Rhapsody, is most definitely a text-heavy piece. Rosenblit and co-performers Gærald Kurdian, Li Tavor, Colin Self and Nic Lloyd recite lengthy passages from a complex but wonderfully poetic text written by Rosenblit. Over the duration of the piece, the text spreads a kind of clever, light and cheerful ghost cloud across the events on stage. From this, a new syntax of positions arises, even at this level of the piece: How to handle a microphone? The way the oh-so-important microphone moves around like a fetish, is repositioned, picked up again and carried around, is echoed in the constellation of bodies and figures. This performance shows that all of them together are one body scattered across a space of affects and desire. The queer characters appear archetypal and at the same time monumental in their playful, delicate and truthful presence. The movements are mindful and also fun. As the singing and the music come into the mix, the piece gets intense and moving. The arc spans a moment of in-between, between memory and future, me and us, between genders, and between humans and the entire world. It is a moment of “fence”, both in the sense of barrier and receiver of stolen goods. Rosenblit’s own “phenomenology” may certainly be anchored in Husserl’s idea of the stream of consciousness, which tries to record itself and sinks into groundlessness. The images Rosenblit finds are snapshots of a non-linear narrative that rotates rather than heading towards a goal. “Distributed in time”, Rosenblit writes, and that the narrative is “based on my body”. At one point, there is a brief association with Marina Abramović’s video Earth fucking, but that might just be a coincidence. Because Rosenblit describes the stage as an “unearthed place”, an “excavated place”, which introduces the idea of earth, anyway. The floor is defined as soil and not a stage floor by a stack of pressed straw and a semicircle of potting soil, the smell of which at the beginning of the piece, when it is being diligently raked, permeates the room even more thoroughly. The slightly musty smell of earth in combination with the fancy costumes and the microphone fetish, with the dark pink jelly and the orange horse wig help to focus on the body. But that is not all. The combination turns the whole thing into a medium-sized allegory about an upcoming earth game in the form of sketches of how terrestrials will be able to live in the future and what they will want to leave behind. So you go home full of wonderful ideas.
Elisabeth von Samsonow is an artist and philosopher, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, visiting professor at the Bauhaus University Weimar (2012). Her teaching and research focus on philosophy and history in relation to a theory of collective memory, on the relationship between art, psychology and politics in history and the present, on the theory and history of the image of women and/or female identification. samsonow.net