Richard Foreman | Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland / 2008

the difficulties of engaging with other cultures

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Foreman Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater, St. Marks Church, New York / the performance I saw was opening night, January 23, 2008

 

     Working through a grant from Japan (and, in this case, England) Foreman this time around incorporated film along with the myriad of ritualistic actions of his on-stage cast. While his actors engage in rites that readily mix the proceedings of a Masonic meeting with those of a highly traditional Jewish ceremony, a troupe of piano playing magicians with the bizarre visions of mediums in mid-séance (a number of the images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art show “The Imperfect Medium [a show I reviewed in My Year 2005] line the walls of the stage set), the figures upon screen take us through equally obscure rituals of behavior in Japanese and English schools.

     Foreman suggests an engagement with Japanese culture, beginning with its first image: the words “GO TO JAPAN.” Indeed, throughout the film we are engaged with various scenes from Japan and England; yet while the Japanese speak English, the English girls say very little and do a great many strange things. At one point the English women all wear paper hats, another English girl wears an eyepatch, several girls pretend to sneeze, “Kachoo.” At one point a male voice sings “Me and my shadow,” while the words on screen proclaim: “English people are afraid.”

      The English-speaking Japanese figures, however, are even more perplexing. Again and again, in heavy and occasionally almost impenetrable Japanese accents, the students of Japan proclaim their ability to be understood by the New York audience:

 

                  Japanese Man: “you understand me immediately when I say, everything is a

                                          Reminding. Knock, knock, knock

 

A short while later:

 

                 Japanese Woman: “I understand you immediately when I say”

 

                     (in letters)   “resonance inside this…..

                                  …..personal belief system”

 

A few minutes later:

 

               Japanese Man: “I understand immediately when you say I too”

 

A short time after that:

 

               Japanese boy: “you understand me immediately when I say this real speaking, 

                                      i.e.What, not what.”

 

A final example:

 

              Japanese girl: “I understand you immediately, when I say tick tock. I am here, 

                                     Tick Tock. Proof. Tick Tock.”

 

      Time and again in Foreman’s world, while we do somewhat comprehend or we get glimmers, at least, of meaning, we very much do not understand what the other precisely means; we recognize that we are leaping to conclusions, desperately attempting to link words and acts that, in truth, do not provide easy access.

      But while we may often laugh or smile at those nearly incomprehensible words and acts, at no time do we perceive these as anything but serious attempts to communicate arising from real—if private or hermetic—systems of belief. Foreman’s scenes are not skits, but references to the impossibility of truly connecting, as the film says, what’s on the screen and what’s on the stage (at one point a male voice declares: “No relationship exists between what happens on stage and what is happening on the illuminated screen….”). Yet any intelligent playgoer/filmgoer can only try to link things, a phenomenon Foreman clearly celebrates: “No relationship exists…but suddenly click….and a profound relationship does now exist click.”

      Rather than the kind of superficial internationalism, Foreman’s complex interweaving of American, English, and Japanese experiences reveals the wonderful element of the unknowable, that which even as we attempt to comprehend, remains inscrutable—the hidden relationships of culture and self. As the words on his screen indicate:

 

ONLY BEING

A TOURIST

CAN ONE

EXPERIENCE

A PLACE

 

—words which might be easily morphed into another aphorism: “Only being a tourist can one experience another.”

        Instead of laughing at cultural or personal differences, all those immutable separations between one another, Foreman encompasses them, joyfully celebrating these differences while enjoining us still to attempt the connect: click! –Not the sound of a camera, in this case, but of the mind coming to terms with the world about.

 

Los Angeles, Easter day 2008

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2008).