Nothing in its eight-year existence prepared the experimental performance troupe Goat Island for the reception it received in Croatia two months ago. Known for its eccentric, oddly structured pieces, the ensemble had performed its relentlessly nonlinear work How Dear to Me the Hour When Daylight Dies for the Eurokaz Festival.
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What they got was a typical Goat Island pastiche of found texts, scenes taken directly from movies, and highly stylized movement pieces. The work–a dark meditation on war, loss, and the fragility of human life–began, according to the troupe’s videographer, Adrian Blundell, with a “minimalist endurance section in which Matthew stands and rubs a place on his hand for five or ten minutes. Then all four ensemble members begin hopping up and down in patterns based on the stations of the cross for 25 or so minutes.”
The show may have also hit too close to home. “At the end [Karen] Christopher plays a person who goes off to war, and Goulish plays a mother preparing a last meal before she leaves. And the final scene is lifted from Kurosawa’s Dreams, in which a soldier who died comes back to haunt his commanding officer,” says Blundell. Hard scenes to take in a country where everyone knows someone who was killed in Bosnia.
–Jack Helbig
