Waterfall by The Theatre of Mistakes (review)

REVIEWS REVIEWS REVIEWS Winston Tong, Nijinskyand Bound Feet. La MaMa ETC (March). The San Francisco performance artist Winston Tong lays claim to the exotic, playing on archetypes and stereotypes, essaying "otherness" like a chameleon, or a charlatan. Last year, he presented three pieces, Wild Boys, Bound Feet, and A Rimbaud. These pieces were astonishing for their refined power. This year, Tong presented two pieces, a "reformed" version of Bound Feet, and Nijinsky . The notion of the exotic should not be dismissed in discussing Tong: the tension of his work derives from the collision of multimedia technology with an aestheticism founded on a fin-de-siecle decadence. As with the punk-rock movement (to which Tong has affinities, as highlighted in Wild Boys), the "datedness' of the sensibility, and the consequent narrowness resulting from the displacement of relevance, are compensated by extremity. The notion of the dandy (pace Baudelaire, Duchamp, Warhol) is accentuated through the direct invocation of the gilded sphere of symbolist art (ergo Rimbaud and Nijinsky), and the iconic presentation of the problematic realm of sexual ambiguity (ergo Wild Boys and Bound Feet). The issues of domination and subjugation, of exemplary madness and enforced role-playing, of license and rigidity, are indicated through a panoply of devices which are designed to veil, to enshroud, to distance. The most impressive piece which Tong has presented has been Bound Feet, a remarkable amalgam of puppetry, mime, and audiotape involving a re-enacted ritual of the ancient custom. In the current version, Tong has added a film to begin and to conclude the piece; however, the considerable achievement of the piece comes from the empathetic imposture of Tong as an old woman crippled by feet-binding. Through the deployment of two dolls, Tong creates an erotic drama which highlights the theses of mastery, servitude , and desire. Attempting to define the attraction of this work, one is forced to reflect on the fascination of detachment. The art of Winston Tong ,does not call for naturalistic involvement; rather, his work derives a powerful impetus from the many ways he distances the audience : through the dissociation of text and action, of puppets, of image and narrative. Significantly, when his work is most "direct," as in Nijinsky, there seems to be a lessening of intensity. By insisting on the discretion of uninvolvement, Tong forces the audience into an active partisanship. Daryl Chin The Theatre of Mistakes, Waterfall. Paula Cooper Gallery (November). Stepping out of an aesthetic time warp, The Theatre of Mistakes, an English collaborative group, presents a wonderfully anachronistic process piece in Waterfall. The work is built around the sixties formalist icon of structure, an attitude in which an idea about structure is both method and subject. The performers, seated on a pyramid of chairs, rhythmically and systematically transfer a bucket of 35 water, cup by cup, from the floor to the top of the stack. When the higher bucket is full, it is poured in a cascade back into the bottom one. Like all such process works, what you see in Waterfall is what you get. There's no development other than the playing out of the system, and no narrative since even the minor suspense of the ending is blunted by a program note which telegraphs the epiphany. Instead, attention is carried by events generated from the structure's functions, such as the continuous rhythm and variations played on it. At a couple of points, the ritualized pouring briefly halts while the performers relax, talk informally, and even drink some of the carefully handled water. From such tinkering with the ongoing machinery emerge Waterfall's small pleasures. Waterfall adheres to the process dictum of a reduced, simple task on which to work systematic permutations. What results is a static composition of mild abstraction with white costumes, de-personalized roles, and repetitive action, all to further emphasize the priority of formal arrangements over any trajectory stemming from subject matter. As a form, this set-up resembles an imagistic poem more than a discursive narrative (a systemic poem is used to time the piece's actions ). Waterfalf's one hour length, however, aspires to the latter's effects and thereby dilutes a strong impressionistic impact...