on credit
by Douglas Messerli
Eleanor
Antin Before the Revolution, Hammer
Museum, Los Angeles, January 29, 2012 / I saw the matinee performance of this
work
Of all of artist Eleanor Antin's
numerous personae, Eleanora Antinova, the Black American dancer attempting to
be a leading ballerina in Diaghilev's famed Ballets Russes, is the most
endearing. Somehow the very idea of the somewhat short, dark complexioned
Antin—a woman who makes no claim to being able to dance in "real"
life, and certainly has not trained for ballet—joining the tall "all-white
machine" of Diaghilev's company goes beyond absurdity into the world of a
touching fantasy, when Antin as Antinova plays out again and again her several Eleanora Antinova Plays, performances
enacted by the artist from the mid-1970s through the next decade, works that my
own Sun & Moon Press collected into a book of 1994.
Of these works, perhaps the most significant was the 1979 Before the Revolution, in which,
performing numerous characters—from Antinova, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Nijinsky,
to balletic beings such has Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI—Antin develops her
"Historical Prophecy and an Interlude and an Interruption." Although
I have seen most of Antin's performances when they first appeared, I did not
witness the 1979 premier of Before the
Revolution at The Kitchen in New York and its later manifestation at the
Santa Barbara Museum of Art. So I was delighted to be able to attend what she
has described as a
"re-performance" of the piece, this with several actors, on
January 29, 2012.
The work is divided into six sections: I. The Lesson, II. The Argument,
III. The Vision, IV. The Rehearsal, V. The Interruption, and VI. The Truth,
each loosely connected with the actions conveyed in their titles. The overall
arc of this disjunctive narrative is Antinova's insistence that she dance a
major role in the Ballet Russes instead of playing merely ancillary and exotic
figures such as Pocahontas, etc., her arguments with Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and
others about permitting her these roles, her insistence on choreographing her
own ballet—wherein she plays a ridiculously overstated Marie Antoinette—her
rehearsals for that performance, and her personal relationships with other
figures of the company, particularly the disturbed Nijinsky.
At the heart of this work, however, is Antin's personal
"Interruption," wherein Antin states the major themes of her piece,
and argues for an art that not only "borrows" or builds upon the
past, but, in a Brechtian manner, creates a space between the artist and the
figure she portrays, that must be joined through the imaginations of the audience.
Beginning with a discussion of Diaghilev, accused by several as being a
borrower, Antin brings several of these issues together in a monologue that
might almost be stated as a kind of manifesto of her art:
And who is not a borrower? Didn't we get
our face and our name from our parents, the words in our mouths from our
country, the way we say them from the children on our block, our dreams and
images from the books and pictures other people wrote, painted, filmed? We take
from here, from there and give back—whatever we give back. And we cover what we
give back with our name: John Smith, Eleanora Antinova, Tamara Karasavina,
Sergei Pavlovitch Diaghilev, and somewhere each one of us stands behind that
name, sort of.
Sometimes there is a space between a person and her name. I can't always
reach my name. Between me and Eleanor Antin sometimes there is a space. No,
that's not true. Between me and Eleanor Antin there is always a space. I act as
if there isn't. I make believe it isn't there. Recently, the Bank of America
refused to cash one of my checks. My signature was unreadable, the bank manager
said. "It is the signature of an important person," I shouted.
"You do not read the signature of an important person, you recognize
it." That's as close as I can get to my name. And I was right, too.
Because the bank continues to cash my checks. That idiosyncratic and illegible
scrawl has credit there. This space between me and my name has to be filled
with credit.
What of me and Antinova? I borrow her dark skin, her reputation, her
name, which is very much like mine anyway. She borrowed the name from the
Russians, from Diaghilev. I borrow her aspirations to be a classical ballerina.
She wants to dance the white ballets. What an impossible eccentric! A Black
ballerina dancing Les Sylphides, Giselle, Swan Lake. She would be a "black
face in a snow bank!" The classical ballet is a white machine. Nobody must
be noticed out of turn. The slightest eccentricity stands out and Grigoriev
hands out stiff fines to the luckless leg higher than the rest. So Antinova
designs her own classical ballet. She will dance the white queen
Marie-Antoinette. She invests the space between herself and the white queen
with faith...."
This profound statement of the separation of art and
artist who must be given credit by both the artist herself and the viewer to
make meaning, is at the heart of Antin's oeuvre,
which, like a Kiekegaardian leap into faith, transforms simple desire into an
almost sacramental act.
The "Interruption" was even more poignant at the Hammer Museum
performance I witnessed because Antin read these words on a small I-pad whose
images disappeared as she spoke them, forcing her to ask her son Blaise to help
her recover the message she was attempting to repeat.
It was also interesting to have Eleanor
Antinova played throughout by a Black actress (Daniele Watts), who certainly
frees Antin from being seen as a white actress in Black face which some critics
accused her of being the first time round.
Actor Jonathan Le Billion was also very effective as the slightly mad
Nijinsky railing against Diaghilev, as
the great dancer did in real life. But overall, the acting was mixed, with some
figures unable to completely realize their roles. In part, that is simply due
to the fact that in life these personalities were exaggerated and that Antin's
work is not, at heart, a drama. To say what Before
the Revolution is, exactly, is difficult. Perhaps it is easier to say what
it isn't: it is not truly a play, an historical performance, a monological
statement, a ballet-in-the-making, a personal encounter with a Black ballerina.
It is all of these, but in its radical genre-bending elements, it is so much
more!
Although, as I mentioned previously, I did
not see the original, it seems to me it is essentially a work for one person.
Eleanor may not have been a greatest of actresses in that original, but given
the "credit" we must grant to bring her art into life, the slightly
mad ramblings of a single person, sometimes hiding behind cut-outs of her
characters, seems the most appropriate rendering of this fascinating
performance. Despite the separation of name and character, Antin becomes Antinova, becomes even the figures inhabiting Antinova's imagination in the
original, and that, it seems to me, is the true miracle of this art. What we
witness is a kind of madness, a madness, like Nijinsky's, that becomes
transformed into something of significance. The artist in this work is almost
like a child, a child so intent upon imagining other existences, that she truly
creates them, bringing viable others into that envelope between the creator and
the creation. If that act demands credit, it reflects back upon the audience
for their commitment to the creative act, coming as a kind of unexpected reward
for their faith. Art, for Antin, is almost always—despite its seeming focus on
the various aspects of self—a communal act. Her King of Solana Beach could
never have been a king without willing (even if unknowing) subjects. Antin's
Nurse Eleanor Nightingale could not have survived the Crimean War without her
imaginary patients, just as Eleanora Antinova is nothing without her willing
claque. So too did the audience of Before
the Revolution enthusiastically applaud this dramatic presentation of the
dilemmas of Antinova's life.
I was at Eleanor Antin's side after the 1981 performance, Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev
at the Museum of Modern Art, when an enthusiastic attendee, with great
reverence and respect, gushed, "Tell me, being so close to Diaghilev, what
was it really like?" Eleanor was a bit abashed; she would have had to be
in her mid-70s (she was currently in her 40s) to have actually performed with
Diaghilev's company. Yet I perceived that never before had "credit"
been so innocently and completely proffered!
Los
Angeles, March 15, 2012
Reprinted from USTheater (March 2012).
No comments:
Post a Comment