Actually Existed a Certain
This polished hour-long dance-theater piece lies before us like a beautiful stone, deflecting interpretation yet inviting our projections. Everything in it, from the old-fashioned furnishings of the set–satiny couches and chairs, a desk, two oriental rugs, and a couple of battered lamps–to the cool, precise dancing of Sabine Fabie and Mark Schulze, works together to create stasis, a timelessness at the heart of this mysterious narrative.
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Fabie and Schulze based the piece on images from Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the musings of an existentialist (according to the two artists in a discussion after the performance) who’s obsessed with the idea of his impending death. The two main sections of text from the novel–one delivered onstage by a man, the other recorded in voice-over by a woman–both have to do with the speaker’s affinity for decay, but decay that stands as a kind of monument. In one section the speaker describes a wall not yet demolished that shows the tracks of worms and exudes the smells of poverty; with a combination of regret and pride, he says he recognizes this wall. In the other section the speaker describes encountering on the street an old, poor woman with reddened eyes filled with pus. She offers him a pencil, which he pretends not to notice, but he can’t help thinking of it as a “sign for the initiated”: “I could not rid myself of the feeling that there actually existed a certain compact to which this sign belonged, and that this scene was in truth something I should have expected.”
But as I thought about it later, I wondered whether “confusion” may not be built into the concept of the piece. Fabie and Schulze spoke of Rilke’s novel as a springboard for Actually Existed a Certain, which does not reproduce the book’s story. Yet the texts chosen were of a piece, all of them dark, detached, or both. Discussing their methods afterward, the artists mentioned the private languages they made up–one spoken, the other choreographed–each of whose signs corresponded to one of the novel’s images. Using private languages and using text from a novel in a manner “divorced” from it–these are risky ways to communicate. Perhaps because I’m an editor as well as a writer I’m hyperaware of the rules of language, the need to conform one’s wordless message to words, to grammar, if the message is to be understood. At the same time, puzzlement has its value. Sometimes departing from the rules–of coherence, of logic, of language itself–is what makes us stop and pay attention. Fabie and Schulze made me pay attention, close attention. And in the end it may not matter that their Actually Existed a Certain wasn’t mine.
