TQW Magazin
Iris Raffetseder on I’m Gonna Need Another One by Jen Rosenblit

“What do you like?”, Jen asks.

 

“What do you like?”, Jen asks.

I like lemons, plants, things that taste bitter, and I like to spend time with another person in the morning. I like the time that goes by when you forget about it. I like knowing the salient points about people and situations that l’m being told about. I like cycling, even though I often forget about it. And I like it when things surprise me to such an extent that my horizons of thought and experience are briefly shaken. Since I’m gonna need another one, I’ve been puzzling over why it’s easier for me to think of the things I don’t like than the things I like.

Jen Rosenblit is on stage right from the beginning of the performance, amid somehow indefinable materials, including roughly brick-sized, light green blocks which she sorts, arranges and organises. I remember arranging flowers in such floral foam with my mother when I was a child, and half a year later we decided to dispose of the decorative, dusty lifelessness. I like Jen’s hands, kneading and picking these indistinct blocks to pieces, and that the movement of her fingers, as they rid themselves of the green dust, “chirps” just like the soundscore. A distant urban soundscape, which, as I see later, Gérald Kurdian generates live, independently and yet in tandem with the action onstage.

I like that a curtain in the theatre can still surprise me. Later, when Jen speaks, the words are crystal clear, the gaze straight ahead, only the images are clashing. And while she constantly addresses me with the “you” in her text, I change the characters to the rhythm of the sentences: from the compulsive furniture arranger to Chiron, to the sous chef, or to the cowardly lion from the Wizard of Oz. “To adjust to being lost as a valid location.” Just as the material crumbles, the identities, the arrangements and formations by which we define ourselves dissolve. I realise that there is a kind of freedom in playing with the flow of thoughts; the mass of individual attributions means that my “I” doesn’t have to commit itself. I may be contradictory to the many parts of my self.

“What do you like?”, Jen asks selected people in the audience. It’s nice to think about a liking that is free of contradictions. Free of automatic implications and criteria such as “very” or “a little”. As Jen begins to find positions with her body for each letter of the alphabet, I like the pause after the G. I like how Jen dispenses with the horizontal line for the letter L. I like the one leg that marks the difference between M and N. The extended foot for the Q. I like how she turns her knees inwards to create the V and rests her hand on the buttocks for the O, and several times later as well, which leaves white fingerprints on her skin for a moment. Jen speaks of organising. Instead of composing, for example. And, to me, that’s concrete and practical. Just as concrete as cutting stalk celery or taking a straw broom apart.

Elegantly and naturally, Jen alternates between performer, gaze partner and conversation partner. Elegant and powerful the movement of Gérald’s fists when he dances. Slowly. To the sound of the celery crunching in Jen’s mouth. For a brief, dreamlike moment, the two of them seem to have switched roles – dance and sound. As if they meant to shout at us: it’s so easy for arrangements to change!

We evolve from a straw broom to a wheat field. Meanwhile, one of the green blocks has been decorated with straw cut from the broom as a proxy for Jen’s proposed collective dream of standing in a wheat field. I cannot recall whether things move from the whole to the parts or from the parts to the whole. And I wonder if it’s important. Jen offers a different kind of answer: “Parts of things that are separated from other things, in fact, are in the painful process of becoming whole things themselves.” But for how long?

According to Jen, it’s the aching that reminds us that all things might break. Perhaps even must break unequivocally. Entirety exists, but if it does, it’s only temporary. It’s a matter of time before one gap or another opens up again. Is the “classic” pursuit of the whole a necessity, in spite of this? And isn’t the reason for our pursuit that the missing parts fascinate us more than the whole?

A battlefield. Everything is wonderfully destroyed at the end, only the wheat field, the dream remains intact in the hands of the audience. All the individual parts are lying on the stage, ready for something new. The former pieces of foam, arranged one last time by Jen with the chainmail cloak – including those that slip through, that remain lying on the floor – make for a beautiful, abandoned and speculative landscape alongside the shared memory of the swaying wheat field and its own little acute sensation of being freer.

 

Iris Raffetseder is a dramaturg for the Wiener Festwochen.

 

[1] Jen Rosenblit in I’m gonna need another one

 

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