ARTS Revisor
Janet Smith
d AT ITS WORLD premiere in Vancouver, Kidd Pivot’s Revisor had enough electricity to blow out the substation at nearby Cathedral Square.
It helped that Crystal Pite and cocreator Jonathon Young had drawn a hugely supportive hometown crowd. Adding to the excitement was a small army of presenters, in town for the first Vancouver International Dance Showcase.
With all the attention came high expectations. Revisor is the first big, full-length follow-up to the hit Betroffenheit, created by Pite and theatre artist Young. Were those expectations met? Yes—and better yet, the hyperstylized creation was uncompromising in challenging those expectations, earning a loud, extended standing O.
First, to be clear, Revisor is not Betroffenheit—nor could it ever be, the latter being such a personal exploration of trauma and grief. But the new work continues Young and Pite’s play with language, and takes it to wildly complex new levels.
The show opens with a sort of warped pantomime of Nikolai Gogol’s classic 1836 satire The Inspector General (also known as The Government Inspector). Actors read Young’s adapted script over the sound system, while the dancers mouth the words and turn the physical language of farce into grotesquely exaggerated movement that falls somewhere close to Jim Carrey channelling Looney Tunes and Tim Burton–brand stop-motion. A pratfall becomes an extended, three-person tumble across the floor; a postmaster who regrets something he’s just said tries maniacally to stuff his words back down his throat.
The set has all the requisite pieces for a farce—a door, a settee, a desk, a chandelier—but something is off, the action arch and unhinged.
Pite and Young have a ball playing with the archetypes of the form: the title character is a woman with a mustache, the mayor’s redheaded wife is a crazed cartoon of a ’30s-film sexpot.
The plot is basically about a lowlevel clerk (in this case, one whose job it is to revise legal texts) whom town officials mistake for a highranking inspector general. Soon the entire community is wining, dining, and bribing him with wads of cash.
But the plot becomes less and less important, as Pite and Young start warping what we’re watching, looping d WEN WEI WANG HAS always and repeating key words and moments had a keen eye for dancers, and with to create something else entirely. his gorgeous new work Ying Yun, The dancers switch their historical he’s recruited a stunning quintet of
Revisor, Inspector General, The Photo by Michael Slobodian
young female talent.
Stéphanie Cyr, Sarah Formosa, Eden Solomon, Eowynn Enquist, and Daria Mikhaylyuk are able to handle his demanding mixture of strength and grace. In this meditative ode to women and his own mother, Wang shifts between beautiful, deep back arches and warriorlike squats, and punctuates balletic turns with high, powerful kicks.
The soundtrack, by Sammy Chien with Wang and the dancers, helps cast the spell, mixing everything from women’s whispers to crashing waves, and ticking clocks to haunting electroacoustic strains. There’s a spellbinding moment when Chinese singing echoes with piano and the sound of children playing in the street. So much of this sequence and other parts of Ying Yun feel like abstracted memories, fading in and out—fragments from Wang’s childhood in Xi’an.
The work begins subtly, the dancers moving in unison, bathed in pure white and breathing together in the quiet, evoking the rhythmic release of qi gong. The women seem aligned in some strange ritual, tapping a collective energy. The movement builds, and so does the soundscape, climaxing in a stylized lunar eclipse projected on the back screen.
Through it all, the women come across as quietly forceful, but somewhat mysterious and unknowable creatures. Wang crafts striking phrases, full of flickering surprise. At times, you feel like you’re in a strange new dimension, where arms bend at odd angles, bodies lean and turn perilously off-axis, and heads glitch back and forth.
By the end, with Ying Yun taking on red light and a hospital-monitorlike red bar working its way up the back screen, it adopts a more unsettling tone. Wang seems to be confronting death—his mother died from ovarian cancer four years ago.
Striking a hypnotic tone, Ying Yun has an appeal that goes beyond the fact that it is just beautiful to watch. It is that nothing is ever literal—memories, imagery, and movement meld into an abstract vision that exists in a place beyond words. And, fortunately, Wang has the talent on hand to take us there. g
VISUAL ARTS
A HANDFUL OF DUST
At the Polygon Gallery until April 28
d ENTER THE FIRST of three galleries in which A Handful of Dust is mounted and you will hear eerie, atonal music. It’s a snippet of the soundtrack, composed by Giovanni Fusco and Georges Delerue, to the 1959 Alain Resnais film Hiroshima Mon Amour. Playing on a video monitor mounted halfway along the room’s north wall, a short excerpt from the film depicts the smooth skin of embracing lovers transforming into glittering and hideous matter. Burn-blistered flesh, it seems, sprinkled with radioactive dust.
The soundtrack conditions our initial encounter with this insightful and engaging exhibition, which is predicated on another cultural artifact altogether. That is Man Ray’s 1920 black-and-white photograph of a Marcel Duchamp work in progress, a dust-covered sheet of glass that would become the protoconceptual work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (also known as The Large Glass). First published as a “view from an aeroplane” in the October 1922 issue of the French avant-garde journal Littérature and subsequently incorporated into other artists’ designs, it was, decades later, titled Dust Breeding and signed by both Man Ray and Duchamp. In his introductory panel, independent curator David Campany writes that the exhibition is about that photograph’s “life and afterlife”.
“It is a document,” he continues. “It is an artwork. It is a document of an artwork. It is realist and abstract. It is a still life and a landscape, a forensic image and a performance.” It has “haunted” contemporary culture and is linked, in this show, to a raft of possible narratives. Writer, artist, and lecturer as well as curator, the London, England–based Campany has pulled together a diverse array of photographs from the past hundred years. Old and new, famous and anonymous, moving and still, they spin lines of connection with the Man Ray–duchamp photo and pose the idea of dust as a defining subject of the modern age. At the same time, they alert us to the ways photographic histories may be constructed.
Artists here include Brassaï, Walker Evans, Mona Kuhn, Bruce Nauman, Sophie Ristelhueber, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Wall, and Nick Waplington. Ostensible subjects range from desert wars to the dust-covered car in which Benito Mussolini took his last ride, and from peeling paint, rock surfaces, and Depression-era dust storms to the 2007 implosion of a Kodak film factory.
Campany weaves a number of fascinating connections out of his “speculative history”. Still, the pervasive tone of the show, he said at the opening-night reception, is one of “dread”. Certainly, there is the recurring suggestion here of death and destruction, and beneath many of the images persists the funereal intonation “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”. Photos of the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Resnais film clip, images by Shomei Tomatsu of objects found at the Nagasaki blast site, all speak of people and buildings blasted to dust. Reverberations of this theme are felt in Jeff Mermelstein’s photo of papers and debris surrounding a statue of a seated businessman following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Giorgio Sommer’s 1873 Plaster Cast of a Victim of the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius seems to foretell later images of war and terrorism, even though that disaster was not of human making.
Another soundtrack underscores our reading of the works in the second and third galleries: that of Kirk Palmer’s video installation Murmur. His long, silvery, horizonless shots of a Hiroshima-haunted Japanese landscape are backgrounded by the sounds of birdcalls and a gradually building windstorm. Pliant, supple, almost human, bamboo trees are whipped into intense animation by the roaring wind and then, suddenly, there’s silence. Deathly silence. g