Hashirigaki (review)

The performances of Hashirigaki, staged March 19-23 at BAM, were sponsored by the swisspeaks-FESTIVAL, an eight-week celebration designed to acquaint New Yorkers with Swiss culture. At first glance, the luminous Hashirigaki might seem the ideal ambassador of experimental Swiss theatre as it was created at the adventurous Le Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne in 2000. But beneath its veneer of candied Technicolor delight, the production—created by an international team from an eclectic array of source material—proffered a meditation on the pleasures of living in a world unfettered by boundaries, national or otherwise.

In Hashirigaki, Goebbels controlled the collision of three textual forces: traditional Japanese music, Gertrude Stein's epic novel Making of Americans finished in 1911 but not published until 1925, and the music of the Beach Boys from their 1966 album, "Pet Sounds." Though these elements hail from far-flung locales, periods, media, and cultural strata, a complex network of alliances emerged from them by the end of the ninety-minute show, suggesting that the lines demarcating East and West, high art and kitsch, the exotic and the banal, are quickly eroding.

After the dimming of the houselights and the chiming of four bells, the audience was greeted by a mysterious rustling sound—like the wings of a flock of birds—in the dark. Slowly the lights came up on three crouching figures, and it became evident that they were generating this sound by wiggling the papery collars on their black jumpsuits. This playfulness with sound and its slippery metamorphosis in the presence of sight was a trademark characteristic of the production. The performers' bodies eventually unfurled, revealing the scale of statures of the tiny Japanese performer, Yumiko Tanaka, the middle-sized Canadian, Marie Goyette, and the willowy Swede, Charlotte Engelkes. Projected on the wall behind them and on their black-clad bodies was a painted landscape on which a flickering gobo of a bird appeared as if to tease the audience about its initial misperception of the show's opening sounds. The figures became native elements of the landscape until travel commenced with Tanaka exiting right, Goyette left, and Engelkes departing head first through a torso-high trap in the wall. Opening a performance based on the text of Gertrude Stein with a landscape was highly appropriate, as she wanted theatre to be like a landscape: freed from the syncopated nervousness of narrative, embracing instead a pure and immediate interaction of sight and sound. This goal was one realized by Goebbels in this moment and throughout the show.

In next tableau—the show was structured, in a manner Stein would have applauded, around chunks of reverberating image and sound—the landscape disappeared. The title track from "Pet Sounds" underscored the delivery of lines excised from Stein's novel as the performers brought on an assortment of objects—from a framed version of the first scene's projected landscape to a surfboard to a chainsaw to perambulators both toy and life-sized—taking them through the openings in the wall. The sundry items provided a visual analogue for Stein's words. Freed from the search for narrative sense, one could take pleasure in the shape, size, and color of the props and appreciate Stein's language for the musicality of its repetitions and its rhythms that were further enhanced by the French, German, and Japanese accents flavoring the performers' pronunciation. The pop soundscape resonated with the Stein text, rescuing each element from its usual station in the cultural hierarchy. The scene also began to explain the production's title. Hashirigaki means talking while walking or a flowing, cursive script. The first half of the definition was very literally what the performers were doing, but augmenting this rather mundane sense, the production's amalgamation of alien cultures and artistic styles might be imagined as a style of writing characterized by rolling links and multiple connections.

In the thematic center of the production, the performers built...