IN A CORNER THE SKY SURRENDERS . . .
Though Orlin is largely unknown in this country, she was a well known presence in South Africa, where she taught, performed, and choreographed for over 20 years. Because of apartheid, she–and many other visual and performing artists–were unable to bring their work out of the country. (This performance was offered in conjunction with Northwestern’s exhibit of visual art, “Displacements: South African Works on Paper, 1984-1994.”) The political climate there seems to have created a claustrophobic sense of loneliness, isolation, and fear, represented in much of Orlin’s work.
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In a Corner the Sky Surrenders . . . is her fourth solo here. This piece is a departure for Orlin (who moved to New York a scant three weeks ago), with a leaner feel, less excruciatingly perfect lighting (which in the past has reminded me of Hitchcock), and a meager set: a continually evolving folded and flattened cardboard box, sort of a collapsible house, illuminated by clamp lights she herself attaches and rearranges to accommodate various stages of her performance. She’s accompanied by a wonderfully imaginative sound track edited and orchestrated by Eric Leonardson, a compilation of ambient sounds as well as Miriam Makeba singing and breathing percussively.
A small mechanical plush elephant seems to appear out of nowhere center stage making a strange sound less like trumpeting than like the noise of battery-operated gears grinding. Not unlike the little mechanical train puffing its way across the stage, the elephant paws the stage and its trunk rises up and down. Orlin has opened a window in the cardboard box and crawled inside, and she reclines inside this glowing house clutching the stuffed elephant in both hands. Its trunk rises and falls, and she lets the tip of it touch her face, then lowers it to her chest and continues to gaze at it. The elephant’s trunk suggests a tiny yet willful penis–there’s a sense of impotence and futility in her relationship with it, perhaps a metaphor for her position as one of South Africa’s “privileged” yet disenfranchised artists, or for the endangerment of the elephant in Africa, or for the difficulty of life whenever one’s home is a cardboard box.
