The cold, hard truth — I didn’t ‘get it’
‘Sphere of Banished Suffering’ raises spectre of incompetence
Thought-provoking. Perplexing. Visually captivating.
It’s a complex narrative with limited dialogue that challenges your imagination while presenting recognizable human dynamics.
Sook-yin Lee’s “Sphere of Banished Suffering” was commissioned by Jen Goodwin and stars Goodwin, Mairi Greig, and 10-year-old Charlie Mcgettigan.
In this show, all three dancers represent Goodwin in different eras of her life. To explore the idea that all versions of Goodwin could co-exist within the same person, all at the same time, Charlie portrays childhood, Greig is Goodwin as a young adult, and Goodwin depicts her current self, a 40something-year-old woman.
I was thrown off. I was looking for connections, for parallels and I couldn’t draw any lines. I was questioning myself questioning the works. Why wasn’t I able to follow this?
Highlighted by various spotlights, the dancers incorporated a number of props — a large elastic band, a pogo stick, flashlights, a blindfold, a toy piano mat, and more.
Vide and audio clips were featured throughout the piece, ranging from young Charlie talking about her beloved dead guinea pig, to sounds of traffic, to chopped-up segments of a home reno instructional video.
The dancers contributed audio to the piece — screaming and yelling, plus nearly intelligible monologues, delivered in a different language or while executing exhausting repetitive motions.
I was thrown off. I was looking for connections, for parallels and I couldn’t draw any lines. I was questioning myself questioning the works. Why wasn’t I able to follow this?
As the house lights came on, I found myself wishing I had more time to process what I’d just witnessed.
I thought about conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, who compared art to electricity, because you cannot define it. “It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition,” Duchamp said.
But here I was, attempting to scribble down my own definition of the artwork I had just seen.
Although I was in a hurry to get home and pour these feelings out, I attended the following artist talk in hope it would help me piece together the halfformed ideas floating around in my head.
This proved to be a good idea. Some of my inklings were confirmed, and it seemed I had picked up on the general theme.
What I did not pick up on, however, was the overarching theme of incompetence, and the fear of being incompetent. To me, these performers were highly competent – they were here, in front of me, making art.
This is one of my nightmares: going to an event, leaving confused, then having to tell my audience the cold, hard truth – that I didn’t “get it.”
But, again, here I am, admitting it, because what else can I do?
My inner child tells me to make something up, to try to pass the test by just filling in all the blanks. My young adult self is telling me to power through it, to pour out something that resembles a review and move on. My older self, who is still yet to arrive in this world, is telling me to own it, to admit
to my faults and hold my head high anyway.
Maybe that’s what Lee and Goodwin were getting at: the importance of giving equal weight to all these inner voices, of continuously valuing every generation of ourselves. Maybe this was unwittingly an exploration in my own incompetence, and overcoming that fear.