No No, I Was Sleeping You Know
In its debut performance Lucky Pierre has hit the ground running, proceeding with sure steps through a slippery evening, taking its place at the right hand of one of Chicago’s most influential and benevolent performance goddesses, Lin Hixson of Goat Island. At her left hand sits the Cook County Theater Department, and scrunched in there somewhere is Doorika. All four groups share a love of textual non sequiturs and physical absurdity. You’re likely to see these performers scuttling across the floor on their stomachs, reading instruction manuals, shoving their fingers down one another’s throats, or rolling across the ceiling in ski boots–and in so doing making you want to cry at the inexplicable beauty. Fundamentally, all four groups build pieces out of mundane, poetic tasks. Like their spiritual counterparts the Neo-Futurists, they don’t do much acting, at least not in the conventional sense: people pretending to be someone else somewhere they’re not. Instead you’ll find people doing real, unfakeable tasks–filing papers, submerging their heads in tanks of water, giving each other rides on a rolling sofa, describing the lights above their heads–and in the process unlocking the transcendence of the actual.
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For an hour this four-person deadpan drill team executes enigmatic, inane, meticulously choreographed routines. They first recite a transcribed scene from Cops, in which an officer questions a handcuffed woman about her husband’s stab wounds. The words suggest a horribly private yet sensationally lurid situation. This haunting, tawdry text comes and goes during the evening, at times the lines splintered and shared among all the performers, who recite overlapping fragments as though singing madrigals.
In glaring contrast is the slide projected on a screen during the last third of the piece: “Corel photodisk image number IA2306: ‘American Landscape.’” The photograph shows a prototypical midwestern farm-house atop a field and surrounded by a well-groomed copse. This authentic picture (it is, after all, a real place) mimics a generic, idyllic American landscape that exists more in our collective cultural mythology than in reality. The image stands in for an America we nostalgically refuse to stop believing in, miring us in a past that never existed.
