Jeroen Peeters on Bare Back Lying (01.2006)

Dear Simone,

Do you remember the first time we met? It must have been in Zurich in November 2001 when I came to see Meg Stuart & Damaged Goods’ ALIBI, but I don’t recall our actual meeting – if it happened at all. During the following months I have seen ALIBI another four times in different cities, behaving as a modest yet highly enthusiastic fan – up to the extent that you performers started joking about “that one guy in the audience with his glasses”, as I heard afterwards. Somehow this experience of watching and performing must have forged a connection between us, as if the performance not only mediated a temporary alliance of performer and spectator, but elicited a series of other complicities as well, which were yet to be unveiled.
What must have been our second (or was it our first?) meeting I do remember rather clearly. In the summer of 2002 we were both at the ImPulsTanz festival in Vienna, you teaching and performing Disfigure Study, I performing writerly comments right after the shows in a programme called Afterwords. The audience was walking out of the theatre, I was getting ready to start writing on my laptop, connected with a projection screen in the lobby next doors. As you had seen the show as well, you came up to me and kissed me to say hello. I reacted surprised and confused – because it was only the first time we actually met while you acted as if we knew one another since a long time? Because I was unnerved in my concentration? Because I was in fact performing without you realising it? It must have been an awkward moment, a vivid yet unwitnessed memory. As that moment slipped out of the performance (both the one on stage and the one of daily life), it got entangled in a misty zone that resists clear framing, a forever uncharted territory. And truly genuine in its awkwardness – today I’m still not sure if we actually shared that feeling? In that sense, it was an altogether different experience than us re-enacting together with some friends Gilbert and George’s 1972 video performance Gordon’s Makes Us Drunk on a terrace at the Danube…

When I saw Bare Back Lying this anecdote came back to me, as both the confession of unwitnessed memories and the slippery zone in between artistic media are at stake in your performance to (paradoxically) track down the uncharted territory of the real on stage – perhaps ‘true’, ‘genuine’ or ‘sincere’ are the better terms here. Unwitnessed memories, uncharted territories. The employed media are not quite right, the metaphors used slightly out of place; you find yourself performing bareback, exposed to the failure of make believe in front of an audience, joyously flirting with the edge of losing face. Unexpected exposure, shared awkwardness. The issues remind me of a few films I’m obsessed with since a while, so I took the opportunity to view them over again with all this in mind.

Although fairly unknown, Play it again, Sam (1972) is a remarkable Woody Allen film, initially written as a play and later adapted for the screen. A divorced film critic (performed by Allen himself) tries to get over his depression and date women again with the help of a friendly couple and through phantasmal dialogue with Humphrey Bogart, who feeds him the ‘right’ lines during his conquests. Watching movies (or also advertisement) to rehearse for real life is today an altogether familiar topos; the blunt recycling of romantic Hollywood clichés via the figure of gentleman-macho Bogart not always convincing in what is obviously meant as a parody of Casablanca. What makes Play it again, Sam both particular and peculiar to me is its leap from theatre to film, which stays to some extent unresolved and thereby leaves remarkable traces.
Even for a comedy, Woody Allen’s writing is particularly odd and rambling; moreover it’s theatrical in the sense that some of the writing in Bare Back Lying toys with metaphors that are slightly out of place. Allen’s character is neurotic all the way, protecting himself with a panoply of allegedly ‘normal’ yet ill-fitting self-descriptions that remove him even more from proper social functioning. Similarly, you keep addressing each other with unfit, unflattering and coarse expressions up to embarrassment, not so much due to their content but to the exposure they entail: the exaggerated characterisations don’t stick, so that you performers find yourselves on the spot, as performer and eventually also as a person. Sustaining awkwardness makes the performer’s sincerity surface, and also his or her vulnerability.
How to share this awkwardness with an audience? Does it maybe lead to ‘genuine spectatorship’? Although duration and sustenance can provoke uneasiness in an audience, isn’t the spectator’s role in the theatre clear and comfortable after all? It looks like the ‘in-between-talk’ is a productive way to release confusion in the audience and hence work with that energy. The hierarchies falter, and at least for a moment the dramaturgical safety net seems out of view, which changes perspectives and charges also me as a spectator with a different urgency. Here is another issue: isn’t ‘urgency’ perhaps what our concepts of sincerity thrive upon? It grounds the shared complicity of performer and spectator, maybe even reaches beyond the representational frame of the theatre.
In Play it again, Sam, Allen also explores the relation between awkward behaviour and witnessing. Interestingly, he succeeds in translating the ‘slightly out of place’-feeling of the lines into his physicality as well, which appears as slapstick in the wrong frame. When his friends organise a blind date and come to pick him up at his place, he is literally all over the place. Armed with “a good impression”, sprayed with “Canoe aftershave, Lavoris, Mennen spray deodorant and baby powder”, and oscillating between nervosity and a large dose of relaxation pills he moves about clumsily and frenetically, overthrowing furniture, scratching a record and so on while trying to keep his composure in the presence of his visitors. Afterwards his friends comment that he was trying too hard: “As soon as she came over he went into his act” – theatre persists indeed on several levels. When they go out for dinner in a Chinese restaurant shortly after, things get out of hand when Allen demonstrates the choreography of how to eat a bowl of rice “authentically” with a pair of chopsticks – which is too odd to describe. Transposed to the public area, the presence of other people witnessing the scene and one another pushes embarrassment to a different level – sincere spectatorship through shared awkwardness? Or is the urgency, not to say the ‘reality’ of it, unbearable once outside the closed environment of the living room or the representational frame of the theatre?

To jump from Woody Allen to Federico Fellini and John Cassavetes seems a bit weird at first, but the three films I’m busy with are connected in several ways. An artist (a critic, a theatre director and an actress, to be precise) suffers a depression, which manifests itself in failure on both personal and professional levels. These characters are all three looking for solace by retreating in their own mental world – populated by fantasies and ideals but also clouded by memory –, which collides with their social surroundings and with the artistic frame they’re working in. These people are not able to communicate or share what is most real or urgent to them – nobody believes them, nobody wants to believe them. I sense that they get in the end over it by embracing failure and a process-based artistic approach to develop concepts of sincerity, and thereby renegotiate hard distinctions between truth and illusion. All this seems to connect a mournful energy with a critique of the influential modern, Cartesian illusion that we’re all locked in our own minds, lonely towards one another’s reality and therefore inevitably lost in dishonest communication. (The film scene in the car in Bare Back Lying suddenly comes to my mind: isn’t the car nowadays the ultimate symbol for the safety and sealed nature of our private space – easy to appropriate the world, but sometimes hard to share?) Now, welcome to shared awkwardness and other artistic concepts of sincerity soaked with failure’s urgency!