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Constanza Macras |
Monty Python’s legacy on the dance
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Constanza Macras / Dorky Park
Back to the Present
October 6 – 8, 2006
On the Boards, Seattle, WA –
www.ontheboards.org
By
Roxana Arama
Posted
October 11, 2006
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On Friday, October 6, 2006, the
audience at the On the Boards Theater in Seattle, WA, got up
from the chairs at the intermission with nods and wide smiles. A
woman in the front row started talking on her cell phone in an
excited voice: “Funny as hell,” she said. “You’d like this,” she
continued, “it’s really funny and the audience is just
hysterical.”
It’s hard to describe
Constanza Macras’s show Back to the Present without using
clichés (funny, exhilarating, refreshing) or without falling
into elaborate constructions about the complexity of human
emotions. Her show makes fun of both these approaches. In an
interview with Time Out New York magazine, Macras, 36,
explained: “I wanted to make a piece about the end of affairs.
It’s about the addiction to a person, an addiction for people to
see things that they absolutely know – and how there’s no
progression in life. Everything just happens in the moment. It’s
about the emptiness of everybody’s life.”
To portray the emptiness of everybody’s life, the
Dorky Park dancers flood the stage
with stuffed animals, pieces of furniture, inflatable dolls and
animals, clothes, yellow cardboard pictures, and then dance,
sing and act on that battleground, most of the time oblivious of
one another’s presence. The Theater Heute, a leading German
theater magazine, wrote that the piece reflected "exactly the
scene of Berlin bohemia," yet the details that identify Berlin
are almost nonexistent. Except for a few lines in German, the
show is spoken mostly in English, the lingua franca of Berlin’s
bohemia.
“It was our own history, and it had
a lot to do with the bohemia that was in Berlin after the wall
came down,” Macras said in the same interview. Regardless of the
origins of the show, Macras’s work speaks to the universality of
human feelings and also to the neurosis of today’s global
society. “After breaking up an affair, there’s this urge for the
past – for all this garbage that we accumulate, sentimental
things,” Macras explained. “How important all the objects become
and how we fetishize really cheap objects in the name of love is
what the piece is about.”
A show about a universal subject,
from an Argentine author living in Berlin, with an international
cast that comes from places such as Mexico, Korea or Peru, is
now on tour for the first time in the United States and it
opened in New York last month. "Back to the Present" – alluding
to the movie Back to the Future and the ‘80s pop culture
– is a mix of dance, skits, video, live rock and pop music, a
blend much in the tradition of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
All throughout the show, the
audience fills in the blanks because the material is intimate to
everyone. In the opening scene, a woman dances with no music, as
if the music is supplied by the viewer. Then, here comes the
music, loud and familiar: Bon Jovi, Vivaldi, Dirty Dancing,
Tchaikovsky, Kate Bush and a recurrent Latin lounge remix of the
Beatles’ Yesterday.
There are no arcane symbols at work
here. The message is straightforward and the images speak in an
unembellished language. In one scene, the Dorky Park Ensemble
sits in a semi-circle and each person dressed up in a different
outfit – evening dresses, fur coats, folk costumes, casual gear
– plays a different instrument – a cello, a flute, a balalaika,
drums, castanets, and even a dulcimer. The setting points to how
different people are, and how different each person’s story must
be. The next moment, they open their mouths and burst up in
break-up clichés, things that everyone has said or has been
told: “You remind me of my ex, myself, my mother.”
“Can we still be friends?”
“There’s no chemistry.”
“I need to focus on myself”
“It’s not the right time”
“I still like you as a person.”
It all ends up in shouts of “Bitch”
and “Bastard.” Now, that’s something that everybody has seen
before.
The humor is not only directed
toward the outside world, it’s also self-deprecating. "I can’t
believe this is where the city of Berlin puts its money," says a
tall man in blue overalls complaining about their second-hand
costumes. “Asking people to pay money to watch people fight with
stuffed animals?” he asks. And since the answer is obvious, the
troupe gives the audience its money’s worth in a live
performance of Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer where the
singers chew and spit out rice cakes, covering the first two
rows of spectators in white crumbs.
The dancers become strongly defined
individual personalities as the show progresses. They
act, sing, dance, change costumes
often, push the furniture around and move props in and out of
stage. “I still have an overkill of things going on at
the same time,” Macras explained in her interview. “You have to
make a choice where to look, and that’s really part of the
concept. You don’t see everything, and it’s irritating actually.
I kept that on purpose. You still have to choose what to look
at.”
Of course, there is a lot to show
when trying to cover a subject such as human nature. The show is
about emptiness, memory, fetishes and garbage, but is also about
superficiality, about the need to grab the spotlight, and about
the positivist philosophy of the Western world. A woman lies
crushed under a TV set in the
opening scene. People want to be on TV, they give interviews and
they talk to TV producers.
The dancers lend their own names to
their attention-starved characters. Jared wants to tell the
story of his ordinary life to the entire world. People in a fish
tank, as in the opening scene of Monty Python’s The Meaning
of Life, want to tell their stories, too. “Let me show this
to millions,” Jared pleads. “They will love me and they will
need me. I will be their new addiction.” He ends with hope, “Is
that what you wanted?”
“My name is Jill and I will be good on your show,” a
blonde-haired woman says in a high-pitched voice. “I can handle
gross things.” Later, she comes back on stage to dance and
injures her leg. She continues to dance with a stiff leg.
Falling down and getting up again, she pleads: “I’m good at what
I do,” reiterating the chorus’s chant from a previous scene.
The show uses certain elements over and over again
as reminders and points of reference, symbols that hold the
enterprise together. The ladder shows up again and again: in a
slapstick video of a girl trying to commit suicide only to kill
everybody around her by mistake, around the neck of a man trying
to get through doors and fighting his way through, in another
video of an empty warehouse where a girl, dressed only in a
bathing suit and terrified of her past, tries to hide and gets
attacked by stuffed animals.
Just when everything seems to have
been already covered, just before the final scene, a woman
starts talking about the end of the Earth due to a cataclysm and
about moving to another planet. “We will walk the streets with
golden skin,” she says before returning to the topic of
ladybugs. And, there are casual references to weapons of mass
destruction among the words of a man egging on a stripper. In a
swift moment, that
penultimate scene brings us back, back to the news headlines,
back to the present.
In the final dance scene, people
wear stuffed animals under their clothes, looking deformed and
suffocated. They take off their extra load, and then they take
off their clothes. Free, they run and dance, dance and throw
stuffed animals in the air and at one another. The scene seems
to say “the hell with all that.” Getting back to this present,
where stuffed animals fly in the air and good-looking men and
women get undressed or are being undressed on loud rock music,
brings closure to their hackneyed, yet universal drama
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2006 All content property of European Weekly unless where otherwise
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