Robert Wilson | John Cage's Lecture on Nothing / 2013

nothing on a lecture

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Wilson (director and performer) John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing, music by Arno Kraehahn / the performance was presented by the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA at Royce Hall, Tuesday, October 15, 2013 (world premiere)

 

Given his penchant in Einstein on the Beach and other operas and performances for repetition and long, slow movements, one might well comprehend Robert Wilson’s attraction to John Cage. Cascading the Royce Hall stage with long white scrolls on which various words and phrases of Cage had been written, Wilson himself dressed in white with white face, his performance promised to be interesting. But almost from the beginning, with a piercingly loud electronic blast lasting for seven minutes, during which an actor with a telescope appeared scanning the horizon, presumably searching for “something” as opposed for the promised “nothing,” much seemed amiss. I immediately perceived in these theatrical tricks the vast difference between Wilson and Cage, bringing me to increasingly wonder, as the performance moved on, why Wilson had chosen to reinterpret Cage’s famous piece.   

     I did not ever hear Cage perform in own work, but having known Cage I can imagine how he might perform it and others have attested to the fact that when the author read the work it was spoken quietly, honoring the spacial pauses of the written text—which I republished in my From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990. Wilson, at first, seemed also determined to honor these tactics. Much of the Cage work is memorable and quotable, and, for a few moments I settled back to simply take in the pleasure of Cage’s talk, “Slowly, as the talk goes on, we are getting nowhere and that is a pleasure.” At one point Cage indicates the whole structure of his talk: “We need the glass and we need the milk.” As Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed, pointed out, however, it is neither the glass nor the milk on which Cage focuses, but the pouring, the process of creating this piece—which, in fact, is the “something” the text itself seems to deny.

     As always with Cage’s pieces, there is also significant interchange between the speaker and listeners. Early on in Lecture on Nothing Cage notes “If anyone is sleepy, let him go to sleep,” repeating it from time to time, as if encouraging those disinterested in his pursuit of silence and nothing to remain silent and accept the work as “nothing.” But for Wilson, quite obviously, desperate, so it seems, to make it clear that Cage was indeed saying an important “something,” one of these repeated phrases leads him into a theatrical and outright corny gesture where he stands up and moves to a bed, crawling into bed and pretending to fall sleep. A visual of the Russian poet Mayakovsky appeared, smoking a cigarette while, as, for a short period, we heard Cage’s gentle and probing voice instead of Wilson’s (Thank heaven!).

      When Wilson did return to the table, articulating Cage’s fascination with the process of his speech, naming its various parts and sections as if it were a work of music with various movements (which, in some senses, it is), he soon seemed to become frustrated by this naming and framing process, moving in the text faster and faster while continuing to raise his pitch until he ended in a kind of angry scream not unlike the beginning of the work—something so unCagean that it seemed to come from different planet.

      I am no purist, and I truly don’t mind different and, in this case, a far more theatrical reading of one of my favorite texts. But I cannot comprehend what Wilson was attempting to do in his interpretation of Cage’s work, unless he was suggesting his own personal dissatisfaction with it proposed “nothingness.” The marvel of Cage’s Lecture on Nothing is that in its silences, pauses, self-conscious statements of its own structure, and denials of grand ideas, it truly becomes a beautiful something. If you search too hard, without bothering to listen, you will not find it. Wilson’s personal interactions do just that, distracting us from the text, leaving us with much less, almost nothing.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2013).

Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, Lucinda Childs, Christopher Knowles and Samuel M. Johnson | Einstein on the Beach / 2013

this one has been being very american

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Wilson (direction, set and light design), Philip Glass (music and lyrics), Lucinda Childs (choreography), Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs (spoken texts) Einstein on the Beach / 1976 / The performance I saw was at The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the LA Opera performance, the matinee of Sunday, October 13, 2013

 

With great anticipation I attended the now legendary Einstein on the Beach on Sunday, a work which I had missed for almost four decades, a performance likely to be its last American showing overseen by its original creators, Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, and Lucinda Childs. I was willing, I was wanting to be wowed!

      Unfortunately, I was not. When asked by my friend Marjorie Perloff about my reactions, I could only comment that they were very contradictory, some positive, others not so; but generally, unlike so many of my acquaintances who had seen it, I was simply not in awe!

      My feelings about this are not based, as anyone who has read my essays would perceive, on the work’s impenetrability, on my not being able to—as critic Tim Page had described it in his lecture before the performance—find my own “gate” into the work. Indeed, the work seemed quite wide open to me. Its structure, vaguely suggested by writer Christopher Knowles around the motifs of “trials, jails, communication, and transportation,” almost all in some way loosely relating to elements of Einstein’s thinking and life. In the broadest sense, we might comprehend Einstein on the Beach as a vague, disconnected skein of events occurring during what we might call “The Age of Einstein,” from the earliest days of Einstein’s theories to the time of his death in 1955—although the work extends also beyond that period to Patty Hearst’s kidnapping and joining of The Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. While the events of this “opera” are not presented historically, there is a sort of chronological rhythm, beginning with the simple idea (in the first of the remarkable Knee Plays) of counting, as the figures of the chorus and dancers move forward and backwards in rhythmic motions and spoken patterns, with the first long scene moving on to the inevitable train, recalling Einstein’s experience in a still train that, when passed by a moving train, gave the impression that he too was moving—ideas which led to his Theory of Relativity. Throughout the work also we are introduced to images of the sea, a place beloved by the scientist, and we are presented in several beautiful instances with Einstein’s own love of playing the violin, as Jennifer Koh, her head topped in an Einstein-like hairdo, stunningly executes some of the work’s most inspiring passages of music.

      In between are various scenes about love, failed and fulfilled, and an almost random selection of social and political events of the era, from racism, women’s liberation, political revolution, to gay liberation (suggested by Child’s “Dance 2”), and provocative and disturbing international events such as the rocket sequence and, almost as an aftermath, the atomic bomb—also related, of course, to Einstein’s theories. Some of these, in particular the “Night Train” sequence, the “Building” sequence, the “First Dance,” and the final Knee Play, are quite lyrical and intimate. Others, such as the first and second “Trials” are, at least to me—my companion Howard and others of my friends were not so taken with the language of either—filled with remarkably comic poetry. The first “Trial’s” “Mr. Bojangles” harangue, written by Christopher Knowles, is almost Steinian in its delicious illogic and repetitions argued by the court lawyer (Patrick John O’Neill):

 JUDGES

 

This court of common pleas is now in session.

 

 

LAWYER : MR BOJANGLES

 

If you see any of those baggy pants it was huge

 

Mr Bojangles

 

If you see any of those baggy pants it was huge chuck the hills

 

If you know it was a violin to be answer the telephone and if

 

any one asks you please it was trees it it it is like that

 

Mr Bojangles, Mr Bojangles, I reach you

 

So this is about the things on the table so this one could he counting up.

 

The scarf of where in Black and White

 

Mr Bojangles If you see any of those baggy pants chuck the hills

 

it was huge If you know it was a violin to be answer the

 

telephone and if anyone asks you please it was trees it it it is like that.

 

Mr Bojangles Mr Bojangles Mr Bojangles I reach you

 

The scarf of where in Black and White

 

This about the things on the table.

 

This one could be counting up.

 

This one has been being very American.

 

The scarf of where in Black and White.

 

If you see any of those baggy pants it was huge chuck the hills

 

If you know it was a violin to be answer the telephone and if

 

any one asks you please it was trees it it it it it it it it it it

 

is like that

 

………………

 

This about the gun gun gun gun gun...

       In this remarkable piece American stereotypes are called up from the roles played by Black dancer Bill Robinson to the Bob Dylan composition referring to a white street dancer in baggy pants, while simultaneously suggesting the American cultural history of the minstrel shows, all resulting in the kind of sophistic logic of sentences such as “if you knew it was the violin to be….answer the telephone” and the wonderful closing “if any one asks you please…it was trees,” all ending in the stutter of “it it it it it it it it it,” repeated in the final result of this aspect of the American experience  (“This one has been being very American”), in the violence expressed in “gun gun gun gun gun.”

          Similarly, in the second Trial—also memorable simply because it is repeated almost 40 times—Lucinda Child’s Patty Hearst speech, performed from a large bed, is equally poetic in its effects, calling up, as it does, Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California,” and expressing the wacky consumerism of a woman in “a prematurely air-conditioned super market” attracted to bathing caps despite the fact that she has been avoiding the beach:

I was in this prematurely air-conditioned super market

and there were all these aisles

and there were all these bathing caps that you could buy

which had these kind of Fourth of July plumes on them

they were red and yellow and blue

I wasn't tempted to buy one

but I was reminded of the fact that I had been avoiding

the beach.

 

Other texts are first embedded in nonsense phrases that gradually become rhythmic units that slowly turn into recognizable phrases and ultimately sentences:

 

      Would would it. Would it get. Would it get some. Would it get some wind.

      Would it get some wind for. Would it get some wind for the. Would it get

      some wind for the sailboat?

 

Or the earlier, What does he want? series of repetitions.

     Visually things move slowly in time and space back and forth, from horizontality to vertical positions. All is relative. But also all these create narrative links, often repeated in the intermittent Knee Plays.   

      Underneath, or perhaps one should say, on top of these scenes, is the continuously pulsing beauty of Glass’ music, like the texts, shifting in their endless repetition from simple pulses to widening layers of melody.

     So what is my problem, you might ask? Haven’t I just described an incredible piece of art? Yes and no. For the problem is that this work, which so purposefully resists all narrative structures, is, as I argue, extremely narrative. Admittedly, I see narrative (as opposed to story) in practically everything, and have long been convinced that we inherently think in narrative patterns (at least I do). But the work’s very resistance to those narrative threads inevitably creates a search for deeper links between the “opera’s” parts, which is insistently and sometimes meaninglessly denied. Had the creators of this piece been willing to simply describe their work as a kind of Cagean “circus,” we might have all been able to simply sit back and enjoy its various parts; but by portentously tying it to Einstein, and purposely toying with ideas that are vaguely Einsteinian, they merely frustrate all efforts to penetrate, while seemingly demanding that we still attempt to make a whole of the pieces.

     Why choose these certain elements of American cultural history in the Age of Einstein, and not others? Was it merely that the creators had already worn us and themselves out in the 4 ½ hours they had arbitrarily determined? (it was, originally, even longer). I am not asking for a fluid narrative rise and fall of action, nor even a kind of coherent and binding structure, but, I’m afraid, the creators seem to be, and that transforms the work from being an enjoyable series of musical, visual, theatrical, and terpsichorean episodes into an often frustrating endurance test.

      Finally, the work does not today seem as radical as its creators and faithful admirers describe it to be. Throughout, a great deal of the work is simply sentimental in both its images and language: a half moon gradually turns into a full moon as the silent lovers on a slowly moving train briefly come together in a gentle touch. The mellow jazz tenor saxophone solo of Andrew Sterman justifiably haunts all the urban street walkers—as well as the audience. Although the judge of the first Trial (the excellent Charles Williams) brilliantly imitates a feminist from Kalamazoo who, tired of bearing babies, wants all her kisses back, the final scene ends with an oscillation of a kiss between park bench lovers. All right, I want love and peace as well, as I’m sure Einstein did. But I think I might never describe the depth of my feelings, in the clichéd language of a lover, as containing more than the grains of sand on the seashore or stars in the sky. The work seems to have much more fun when it simply counts. And in counting it matters more than its simple-minded solutions proffered by a bus driver in the dark.

     Surely, if nothing else, this is not radical thinking, as Tim Page argued for it beforehand. The theater of language by writers of a decade or two later, like Mac Wellman (in Terminal Hip and The Great Magoo, the later also with music), Len Jenkin, Richard Foreman and Eric Overmyer, for example, are, to my way of thinking, far more radical. Let us just agree, that in its mix of forms and thematic arches, Einstein on the Beach is, in fact, “being very American,” at moments profoundly complex, at others, entertainingly hollow.                                   

    

Los Angeles, October 16, 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2013).                       

Rudolf Nureyev | L'Aprés-midi d'un faune (Afternoon of the Faun) / 1979

sexual illusions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vaslav Nijinsky (choreographer), L'Aprés-midi d'un Faune (Afternoon of the Faun) [performance by Rudolf Nureyev with the Joffrey Ballet] / 1979

 

Although we do have a 3-minute tape of Nijinsky’s original performance of the Claude Debussy-based Afternoon of a Faun, it is so badly filmed, with missing segments, that it is hard to know what his performance really looked like. But fortunately we have a full video/CD performance of Rudolf Nureyev’s 1979 performance, based on Nijinsky’s original choreography, that I couldn’t imagine being less sensuous that the original 1912 original.

    This ballet is not at all “gay” in its substance; but the focus on the faun’s body, with his constantly erect tale and seeming half-nude ballet costume with piebald shapes to suggest the faun’s skin is most certainly homoerotic, particularly since in ends in a kind of festishized frotting of one of the nymph’s shawl, dropped in her escape from the faun.

      The work was purposely archaic, the movements meant to looked like the figures on Greek urns. Yet the work was also represented a radical shift from traditional ballet, taking it in new directions that would lead to modern dance companies like the Joffrey (where I studied for a few months).

       And the gay dancer Nureyev does everything he can to eroticize the role, twisting his torso in ways that feature his groin and erect tail. Even his arm gestures early in the ballet, as the fawn awakens become somewhat sexual.

       The fawn, even if he is attracted to the six nymphs, particularly their leader (danced by Charlene Gehm in this production), acts as a king of narcissism, and it is his body upon which the dance focuses, as the nymphs merely move laterally across the stage in posed positions, hands high in the air as on the Greek statuary.

        Even after the departure of the nymphs, Nureyev draws attention to his movements as he performs a series of astonishing relevés as he moves up to stony cliff to his original sleeping spot.

       And his final fetishizing of the lost shawl upon which he rubs his full body is truly sexual. If it might symbolize the woman who wore it, it is his sexual act to which we are witness rather than intercourse with a woman. And, after all, the faun is left with only a shawl, not with a nymph. Even in Mallarme’s far more heterosexual original poem, we realize that the sexual encounters of the faun were just an illusion.

     Is it any wonder that this ballet both delighted and scandalized Paris audiences upon its premier? It also a parting of the ways between the Ballet Russes and choreographer Michel Fokine, Fokine jealous of Nijinsky and director Sergei Diaghilev’s attentions, both on and off-stage, to him.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 26, 2025).

Jorge Dunn | Bolero / 1982

call to sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jorge Dunn (performer) Bolero / 1982

 

I have never been a fan of Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, and apparently he wasn’t either, responding when a woman, after hearing it, told him he was mad, that she was absolutely right. It is and endlessly repetitive piece of about 15 minutes if you follow the rhythms he prescribed, which the great conductor Toscanini refused to play (his version was 12 minutes), causing a break between the composer and conductor.

     But when I saw Argentine dancer Jorge Dunn’s sensual performance I realized truly how  homoerotic this piece was. Dancing bare-chested Dunn uses his entire body to lure the viewer in, even, at times, gesturing with what appear be kisses thrown at the observers. Dunn’s body thrusts forward and backward as if in an orgasm of sex. Meanwhile a group of men sit behind him, a couple joining him as he performs on a raised red circular structure; and then, gradually, others follow as the rhythms of the piece continue and obviously their attraction to this sexual object of desire grows. Slowly more and more of the seated men join in on the sexual orgy, until finally by dance’s end all of the have joined him.

     One might describe this as the male version of Salome’s dance of the seven veils, without any veils, and with an invitation for the observers to join in.

     This work is clearly and almost entirely a homoerotic invitation into the frenzy of dance, a wild call to his male friends to venture out of their voyeurism and join him in his sexual balletic maneuvers. It is the most sexual ballet, perhaps, ever created. It is a gesture for others not only to take notice of his body, but to join in the sexual frenzy of the 15-minute dance.

     I truly can’t imagine what Dunn’s performance is but an expression of gay sexuality, calling forth the lust of all the men watching him perform.

     Dunn danced with the Maurice Béjart's Ballet of the 20th Century, appearing in at least 4 films, one directed by his filmmaker nephew, Aliocha Itovich. He died of AIDS in 1992 in Lausanne, Switzerland.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (April 2025).

Norman McLaren | Narcissus / 1983

the closeted narcissus

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fernand Nault (choreographer), Norman McLaren (director) Narcissus / 1983

 

For years Canadian film director/animator Norman McLaren, a gay man long living a semi-closeted life through years of public homophobia, had struggled to find a way to express in his films his homoerotic concerns, but felt that his conceptions would not be acceptable for his productions distributed through the National Film Board of Canada. I discuss some of his animations and films with coded images elsewhere in these volumes; but in the 1970s, when he was working on early sketches for a piece on the Narcissus legend, McLaren came upon a different version from the standard Echo-centered presentation of Narcissus. As McLaren writes:

 

“Around 1970, when I was making a 35mm b & w rough sketch of the film with Vincent Warren... I came across a version of the [Narcissus] legend that contained the homo episode (in fact it recounted that Narcissus was besieged by hosts of girls and young boys). The three or four other versions I had read until then had mentioned only Echo... When I discovered the encounter with Ameneius, I got very excited and dead set on including both the girl and youth encounters, as they would not only throw Narcissus’ auto-philia into even greater relief but would give me a very justifiable opportunity to portray a homosexual relationship on the screen. A thing I had often wished to do. I am not sure if at that time (1971) stirrings of gay lib had filtered into the backwoods of my secluded life!”

 

     Other projects intervened, however. And even though McLaren was now ready to finally come out, announcing his homosexuality to the world, he resisted due to the wishes of his partner NFB producer Guy Glover, with whom he had lived for 45 years.

      When in 1979 he returned to the Narcissus project, things had radically changed given the various gay liberation movements, and he felt not only emboldened to include the long scene of gay love between Amenieus and Narcissus, but believed that he would have been a traitor if he had deleted it from his work. McLaren, however, notes that the scene might have been even gayer had he had more control over the project:

 

“Choreographer, Fernand Nault [b. 1921] who is one of us [gay], handled that sequence of the film very gently. I would have wished for him to have done it a bit more boldly, but I didn’t see his choreography until the first days of rehearsal and it was impossible to ask for any radical changes, since we were so pressed for time...”

 

     The final result is a narrative of potential possibilities of love in three parts, two romantic pas de deux danced by Narcissus (Jean-Louis Morin), first with a nymph (Sylvie Kinal) and then with what the program describes as a “hunting partner,” Narcissus’ friend (Sylvain Lafortune). Although both are traditional representations of sexual possibilities, ending with the hero sadly rejecting both heterosexual and homosexual love, there are clearly important differences:  “the male duet,” as MediaQueer commentator Thomas Waugh puts it, “has a stunning effect as an unprecedented representation [in film dance] of gay male sexuality.”

      To the music of Maurice Blackburn, Narcissus awakes very much in the manner of Nijinsky’s L'Après-midi d'un faune, lying flat upon the floor, gradually lifting himself up into a sitting position to reveal his beautiful face and chest, the latter of which he clearly takes self-adorating pleasure,  stroking his nipples and upper chest. Suddenly the nymph appears behind him, at first almost blocking her own vision apparently in the shock of the boy’s beauty, but gradually peeking out of him through her fingers, obviously intrigued. She quietly tiptoes toward him, reaching out to touch  his hair. For a moment Narcissus pulls her toward as if inspecting this new being, but immediately thrusts her away. She continues to try to entice him, pulling him again toward her, a gesture he pulls away from as she gracefully dances about him, he leaning back while still registering a look of curiosity.

     Finally pulling him into an upright position, she leans back to bring him forward, while he, in counter-turn, leans away, she pulling him again toward her, and he leaning away as they were playing a childish game of pull and drag. When she touches his face he shakes her hand off. Through gentle leg lifts and turns she eventually allures him into to mimicking her as they move into the more traditional holding and lifting motions of the standard pas de deux. Yet when they finally reach a moment of a face to face in which she ends a position a sitting on his lower stomach, he quickly pulls away, making it clear that he is disinterested in the traditional male-female position symbolizing sexual ecstasy.

      The nymph backs off, putting her hand to her face in both bewilderment and an expression of shame, much like the Renaissance painters portrayed Eve as she was expelled from the Garden. With a seeming mix of regret and sorrow she sadly drifts off only five minutes and thirty seconds into the ballet.

      Narcissus returns to his seated position, once more stroking his own breast. But at that very moment his friend leaps it a bit like a naughty Puck. This time Narcissus seems delighted and gladly takes his hand as they almost immediately leap into an erotic duo, imitating and mocking each other’s moves as they twist and turn—the camera sometimes alternating between fast and stop motion. This time Narcissus gladly moves toward his friend, taking his arm and joyfully moving into some of the similarly erotic positions of traditional male and female dance movements. Yet their duet is far more playful, involving imitation rather than sexually assigned movements.

      Narcissus allows his friend to stroke his breast and hair, turning shyly away momentarily, only to allow him to repeat the gesture. Narcissus even allows, quivering with pleasure, as his friend runs his hands completely down the length of his body, springing away only when he reaches his feet, perhaps suddenly registering the fact of what has just happened.

      As the friend leaps back to continue his gestures of touch, Narcissus rejects them. Yet when the friend leaps into his arms, putting himself precisely in the same position as the nymph had, hanging on Narcissus’ waist just above his crotch, Narcissus allows him to remain in position undergoing what is quite clearly a moment of intense pleasure from coitus. When completed, however, he pushes the other away, and the friend soon after disappears.

      As if almost proud of his rejection of the other, Narcissus brushes his hand through his own hair and discovers his reflection in a nearby pool, peering into it what might almost be described as an intense gaze of lust, an erotic attention to the self that unlike all other depictions does not end there, but is expanded in McLaren’s work into an extravaganza of a male solo played out through mirrors and bifocal lens as an intense interchange of two images of the same self, challenging one another to athletic displays of various balletic positions, leaps, twists, spins, and imaginary lifts that last for about 10 minutes, about the same length of time that the other two duets added together. To the now electronically-inspired score, the two images of the Morin not only appear horizontally in tandem and in simultaneity, but are projected vertically in space that represents cinematic reversals of the dancer’s movements.

     This delightful portion of the work is, given the beauty of Morin’s body, obviously also highly homoerotic, but is missing almost all sexuality since the two parts of the same image can never truly touch except as they cross electronically through each other’s bodies.

     When finally Narcissus attempts to kiss the other, he discovers that he has given up his heart to a brick wall which, which, as turns toward us, is revealed to be the other side of a prison cell wherein he has locked himself away from all human communication. I cannot imagine a more potent visualization of Vito Russo’s celluloid closet.

     Waugh brilliantly summarizes McLaren’s work: 

      

 “It would be too easy to dismiss this film as yet another arty piece of closet beefcake, and to see  McLaren's lavish stylization as yet another mechanism of avoidance. Still the prison‑bar ending comes across as an image not so much of the tragedy of self‑absorption but of sexual repression, even of the thwarted self‑realization of the closet. As tragic as it is beautiful, Narcissus stands up well as the testament and the yearning of the shy Scottish‑Canadian civil servant who was one of the more isolated queer contemporaries of Visconti, Cadmus, and Burroughs.”

 

Los Angeles, March 17, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).