Judging by Ben Brantley's breathless review in the NY Times
(http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/10/arts/theater/10ANGE.html) of the Lincoln
Center Festival's scavenger hunt, NY is way ahead of old Europe in audience
exploitation.  Deborah Warner (an otherwise greatly talented director) makes
people walk, and they pay $95 for the privilege; at the Edinburgh Fringe
Festival, I had a similar "installation art" experience...  while at rest,
and for pennies on the dollar.

   EDINBURGH [8/2002] - "Iinnovation" is still the favorite guise of the
   untalented, the clueless.  There is so much talk at the festival about
   French choreographer and elderly enfant terrible Boris Charmatz that
   I decided to make up for my lamentable lack of knowledge.  When I
   arrived at the performance of his "heatre-elevision," at one side of
   the Hub (the glorious old church that serves as festival headquarters),
   hundreds queued for tickets of the day's events, and where I ended
   up, there was only a solitary usher.

   "Here is THE audience," I quipped cleverly and was somewhat taken
   back when the usher successfully fought the urge to laugh or, at
   least, smile.  Yes, he said, please come this way.  Into the church's
   high-ceilinged library we marched, and when I mentioned the singularity
   of audience again, he pointed to the ticket - whose small print I did
   not read - and the explanation there: "this is a pseudo-performance
   for an audience of one." In retrospect, I wish I turned myself into
   a pseudo-audience.

   Instead, I followed directions and laid down on the thick plastic
   cover over a piano (it might have been a pseudo-piano), a TV screen
   at an uncomfortable angle near my head, stereo speakers uncomfortably
   close to my ears.  Given a hospital-type alarm button to push "in
   case you don't feel well," I began my journey through Charmatz's mind.
   Fighting the temptation to use the button, I spent 50 minutes with
   possibly the most idiotic waste of time I (a weary veteran of
   "performance art") have experienced.

   The tape being shown had a bunch of rather unattractive people in
   leotards jumping around, imitating monkeys.  For 50 minutes.  Most
   of them had their tongues hanging out and there was a very pregnant
   woman sitting among them, looking morose.

   What was this then?  Reading Charmatz' notes much too late, I came
   to realize that "it is a kind of decoction, perhaps a suicide of live
   performance: what will be left of the smell of the work of the dancers
   after the anaesthesia of the screen and the pixels?" The gentleman
   asking the question is regarded as a significant creator of contemporary
   dance.

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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