Apoplectic Fit by Daryl Chin, Larry Qualls (review)

KAROLE ARMITAGE with Torr talking and Harrison limply serving as sample body. Two fine prime movers in a free-for-all, unpretentious and formally fairly tight. Margaret Eginton Daryl Chin and Larry Qualls, Apoplectic Fit. Theatre for the New City, July. For better or for worse, performance art practice has become virtually synonymous with presenting autobiographical elements in a performer's life. Although external elements do intrude upon the performance matrix, they are filtered through a subjective consciousness -reality is denied its autonomy in the melt-down process activated vis-a-vis personal mannerisms and one's own being in the world. The same was true of Daryl Chin's earlier performance pieces, culled as they were from a highly personalized mythology. In Apoplectic Fit, however, the reliance on subject matter shifts to a plane of objectivity-so much so that the authors of this quixotic piece relegate their presence to the sidelines as directors-with texts lifted verbatim from Djuna Barnes's Nightwood and Yasunari Kawabata's Beauty and Sadness. (The objective nature of the presentation springs from the fact that any other text or texts could easily have been substituted for the above two, and one is never made to feel that the choice of these particular texts adds either to the ongoing myth about both Chin and Qualls, or to a pleasurable encounter with the uses to which the texts are put within the piece itself.) On stage, five performers in various stages of languidness make slender attempts to dramatize the texts as they painfully (and reluctantly) act out half-hearted gestures and engage in conversations riddled with quotes from Sontag, Weil, Michaux, and Cioran. Enclosed in a chic Madison Avenue setting, this heavily-weighted symposium, by what appears to be a bunch of precocious grads, lumbers through without the slightest hint of parody or any attempt to impose a cohesive structure on the proceedings. ApoplecticFit is photo-realism of the Soho variety with its mise-en-scene suggestive of a cold wintry evening at a loft peopled with the NYRB crowd. But only if the performers had the glan and mannerisms of the NYRB intellectual mafia (or of those French actors who appear so often in Duras's films, to which Apoplectic Fit seems closest to), then perhaps the evening may have had more going for it. Unfortunately, the performers seemed bewildered by their lines, and the event was burdened by a total lack of energy or commitment. Nonetheless, the attempt to create live art out of found objects , without the imposition of either self or a structuring consciousness was in itself an interesting notion-and one that, as the performance proved, may always have a failure mechanism built into it. Gautam Dasgupta 40 SUBSCRIPTION/ORDER FORM See Last Page. ...