A little tent allowed to play for sea anemone on dry land, its four legs perky in the air. Actors having a cup of tea and a game of cards. It all looks very innocent. What begins as a wonderful picture novel gradually grows into a rebus of considerable length. "My Private Himalaya" is akin to a walking exhibition, with a wind machine in the role of the great 'curator'. Father Time eventually blows up all the images ONEn great, desolate and indifferent hope.
It was by no means a full house at Quraishi's "My private Himalya" at Springdance on Tuesday night. The tense and expectant atmosphere, which actually belongs to premieres, was missing. As a result, the performance completely breathed the salutary calm of a good museum. Only with Quraishi, the audience does not walk from one framed image to the next, but rather the images pass by the audience.
Sitting on either side of a long white floor, the audience in "My private Himalaya" is separated from the actors on the 'catwalk' only by fluorescent tubes and 'black light'. Actors here are both things and people. From the interaction between the two, the images are built. The audience is on top of them, just like in the museum, watching.
Quraishi told in a recent interview how he was once immensely moved during midnight mass in Salzburg by an elderly woman who knelt down in tears by a plastic doll at the front of the church. What is a cheap thing to one person is holiness itself to another. Men like cars, people like animals, and some English people still mourn Lady Di without ever having shared an intimate moment with her.
In this show, a woman dances with a car door, a boy tries to communicate in sign language with an immense bust of Socrates and I am impressed by a shapely, plush Yorkshire Terrier. Adoration is the superlative of attachment and knows no bounds. Lady Di, the plastic Jesus doll and your own mother, they are at some point interchangeable.
While quite a few scenes certainly have gripping potential, things and people are never blown up into 'real' theatre. The attitude of the actors and the refined pace, in which the scenes are built up and broken down, ensure that any dramatisation is omitted. Even the frankly amazing sound set by s.m. snider and Norscq consists of a succession of subtle understatements.
While Quraishi raises the ingredients for one emblematic situation after another and treats images merely as things, he avoids any sentiment or excitement. He builds, rebuilds, quotes, assembles and carefully tears apart identification. He shows the images without their charge, playing with dimensions, scale, proportion, timing. To simultaneously make clear the importance and absurdity of the process of attachment, he cannot use drama.
What is a person to do with all these things, all these images of ourselves and others, Quraishi seems to wonder quietly. They enable us to communicate with each other, tell great stories, give a place to feelings, but they are also very vicious weapons to undercut and destroy each other.
Once, contemporary art was supposed to be new, but Quraishi shows how ephemeral even that claim is. In fact, everything he puts up can be traced back to others. The images are borrowed, they are clichés or emblems, however refreshing the temporary constellations are. He also quotes other artists. The white floor is reminiscent of the famous performance by Franko B "I miss you". The tent is doing the work of Ola Maciejewska thinking and Aitana Cordero constantly quotes herself in the show in her own performance "Solo...?", where, after an extremely careful composition with things, she smashes things up short. That rage is missing from "My Private Himalaya" for one.
Instead, Quraishi salvages his actors, things and people, in a rustling grave. Everything remains intact, the images are carried on, only the people disappear from view again and again.
More info: http://ibrahimquraishi.org/ and http://www.macba.cat/en/expanded-choreography-situations
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