La Mélancholie Des Dragons by Phillipe Quesne, and: Gardens Speak by Tania El Khoury, and: Top Secret International (State 1) by Rimini Protokoll (review)

Each year, the Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival introduces New York audiences to cuttingedge international theatre-makers. Although several of the 2017 festival's headliners were anything but obscure, their work powerfully challenged mainstream (American) definitions of theatre, suggesting an expanded performance frame and questioning the efficacy of live theatre engagement. Variously pointing to the audience's role as co-creators of the event, the potential of hybrid embodied/digital technologies to facilitate intersubjective experience, and the inherent theatricality of seemingly objective cultural spaces, the three shows I attended injected a decidedly postdramatic and anti-consumerist aesthetic into the city's season.

Touring since 2008, Phillipe Quesne's La Mélancholie des Dragonsinterrogated the limits and processes of theatrical spectacle, asking viewers to marvel at the mundane and to notice their own role in the processes of creating meaning. Situational rather than plot-driven, the piece centered on seven metalheads, broken down in a snowy parking lot, where they inventoried the low-tech attractions of their mobile theme park for a mechanic friend, Isabelle. Largely devoid of spoken language, her name became a beckoning refrain evocative of childhood wonder as the "artists" eagerly rehearsed their eventual park opening. While it seemed that we were to accept the realistic circumstances of their predicament, it was not long before the stranded rockers were peeling back cotton batting (snow) to get at electrical cables and dragging props on from offstage, thereby undermining any sense of realism and highlighting the multiple frames of theatre at work in this performance about a deferred performance.

The simplicity of their amateur "theatre"—a bubble machine, wigs "dancing" in the wind, a fountain made from a tiny pump and a Rubbermaid container—initially inspired chuckles. However, by the end of the performance/demonstration (if one accepted their invitation to imagine, to play), there was no denying the force of their aesthetic as they recreated the rhythms and scale of their production research (showcased in their park "library") through increasingly grand theatrical gestures. Romantic paintings, Artaud's theatre theory, and an Appian vision of mass and light took form against a backdrop of ordinary people playing with simplistic techniques. Seduced by the performers' earnestness and led by Isabelle's wonder, viewers entered a park of the mind in which their own associations operated creatively, placing their active gazes at the center of the theatrical event. In this potent state of disarmed curiosity and mutual effort, simple acts like a Scorpions' song on acoustic guitar and recorder or a Chinese New Year-style parade with inflated tarp-dragons, became incredibly moving performances while also remaining rather funny.

Both actor and audience herself, Isabelle functioned throughout as our surrogate in the process of immersion and participation that the park hoped to stage. Her sincerity challenged us to suspend judgment as she modeled a new ideal of spectation. And when she climbed a ladder amid a stream of smoke and bubbles to reproduce Wanderer above the Sea of Fogby Caspar David Friedrich, she appeared as co-(re)creator and primary spectator of the work, provoking our spectatorial/imaginative experience and drawing audience and performer together in perceptual solidarity. Her simultaneous insider/outsider status overturned easy assumptions about audience passivity and our role in creating spectacle; her easy naiveté encouraged us to follow her into the possibility of profundity as we watched her being swept away by the world she had both created and imagined. Putting his audience onstage, Quesne deconstructed illusion and conditioned expectations, finally evoking theatre in its simplest and most beautiful terms. Stemming from a desire to overcome a kind of existential melancholy (embodied in the...