Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land
For the past few years, Los Angeles-based
Catherine Sullivan, 36, has created works that combine performance, video installation and traditional theater techniques.
In both her live and filmed performances, the dramatic processes employed by the actors to re-create a scene is itself the subject of the work.
Sullivan's enigmatic, multiscreen epic
Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land, currently on view at the
2004 Whitney Biennial, is based upon the Russian musical
Nord Ost -- adapted from the classic Russian novel,
Two Captains, about the real-life search for a lost expedition in the Russian Arctic -- that was being performed when Chechen terrorists burst into a Moscow theater in October 2002.
"This event struck me as a very brutal example of the real confronting the ideal, and a system of combat (terrorism) which appropriates the desires of the dominant class and uses the surpluses of these desires against it," says Sullivan. "Insofar as we can consider all of the individuals involved as representative," this event drew together participants of a very different order: the Moscow leisure class seeking pleasure and entertainment, and the Chechens using this same spectacle to assert their political demands. The encounter ultimately created a new spectacle which would transcend the occasion of the musical
Nord Ost and simultaneously feed the theater of terrorism which currently enjoys a global audience."
The theatrical artificiality of the actors (from Chicago's Trap Door theater company) is as jumpily powerful as that found in Expressionist film of the 1920s -- which
Ice Floes, shot in B&W with Russian dialogue and projected without subtitles -- consciously emulates.
"The installation creates a kind of strange visual echo with our own time," wrote one critic," as if the past were observing the horrors of the present -- or the play were watching the audience."
As in the work of playwright Richard Foreman or the films of Kira Muratova, Sullivan also uses juxtaposition, fragmentation, dislocation and repeated appearances in varying guises to emphasize the distinction between performer and the part he or she plays.
For the installation, Sullivan generated 50 pantomime-like actions based on the novel
Two Captains. "The hope here was to create a system of representational impulses found in musical theater without having to make a musical.... The pantomimes were either combined into large ensemble scenes or broken into small individual scenes and were then considered as shots which could be distributed throughout the location."
"The footage plays out over five screens. One screen of a larger size depicts more didactic interpretations of the material from
Two Captains. The other four smaller screens depict a series of spin-offs from the large screen in different locations, or suggest the development of the 'narrative' of an intervention into a theatrical scene. The roughly 50 actions or pantomimes culled from
Two Captains are repeated and re-contextualized through change in setting and recombination of actor and character. Finally, they are moved outside and set within a mise-en-scene which does not support their theatricality -- a cornfield, and the exterior of an abandoned nightclub near Chicago called Moscow Nights. The total footage plays out through a forty minute loop on the large screen and twenty minute loops on the four smaller screens."
In Sullivan's earlier installation,
Gold Standards (hysteric, melancholic, degraded, refined) (2001), two variations on a performance of
The Miracle Worker, are juxtaposed on adjacent screens. On one screen Patty Duke's Helen Keller is recast as a mustachioed man and Anne Bancroft's Annie Sullivan as a black woman -- who teaches "Helen," kicking and flailing, to eat. On the facing screen, a male "Annie" is cast alongside an adult female "Helen" -- whose gestures of rebellion have now morphed into stylized movements resembling modern dance.
"In
'Tis a Pity She's A Fluxus Whore (2003), excerpts from a 1943 production of John Ford's Jacobean drama at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut and a 1964 Fluxus performance festival at the Technical Academy in Aachen, Germany, are ripped from their original contexts and juxtaposed.
"On side by-side projections, the same actor re-creates Wadsworth's then-director 'Chick' Austin's star turn as Ford's protagonist on one screen and a host of Fluxus artists on the other. Although Sullivan's work was filmed in the very theaters where the original productions had been mounted, tellingly the relationship of action to site is reversed: The Fluxus segments occur in the Avery Memorial Theater in Hartford, while the Ford play is performed at Aachen's Audimax. In Sullivan's hands, these seemingly Brechtian acts of fissure result not in a heightened awareness of historical forces but in the loosening of her characters from the temporal flow of history."
Sullivan's 2002 installation,
Five Economies (big hunt/little hunt), is a five-screen video projection spanning the length of a gallery wall. Silent B&W footage of restaged and rechoreographed scenarios based on a variety of sources (
The Miracle Worker, Marat/Sade,
Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?) as well as imagined scenarios from the true story of Birdie Joe Hoaks -- a 25-year-old woman who tried to pass as an orphaned 13-year-old boy to receive welfare benefits -- are juxtaposed.
"The drama is reduced to movement and facial expression and character groupings are arranged according to emotional effects and affectations. This is offset by yet another layer of activity, in this case choreographed movements whose source is antiquated Irish funerary games. The result is baroque, hybrid theater for which the term postmodern is an understatement.
"What Sulllivan's performances reveal through their quirkiness, however, is a fundamental alienation which the craft of acting seeks to dispel, namely the alienation between the body as a vehicle of perception and the body as a vehicle of expression."
# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 3/19/2004 05:15:00 PM
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