Karola Luttringhaus
Reflections about a live performance by Slater Penney that was entitled “The Other Show” 
Performed, April 12th, 2019
at UC Davis Arena Theatre

BEFORE THE SHOW
Slater Penney is dressed in work overalls. His demeanor is serious, rude.
We are waiting in the hallway to be let into the theatre. Slater comes around and takes people's names down.
As he comes to me, I ask him: 'Why are you so unfriendly?' His grumpily rambled answer involves reasoning around if I wanted to get paid for the job I needed to give him that info.

AFTER THE SHOW
After seeing the performance, another answer to that question forms in my head: He is rude because we don't deserve niceties any more. Each of us is
implicated. We are guilty of contributing to the way the world is stuck amidst of an environmental crisis, global warming, garbage everywhere, violence, consumerism and 'trashism'.

We don't deserve pleasantries or conveniences. We are here to work and clean up the mess that we made.
And, in the end, after seeing the show, and looking at the audience's response, my response: I'm not able to conclude that there is any real hope, either.

EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN
A human wearing a helmet with a long stick protruding forward and away from his body, as long as he is tall. At the far end, a small light is dangling off a string. It is the only light in the dark, but it illuminates the scene: cardboard boxes, black trashbags, cardboard tubes and the sound of flies, hundreds of flies.

​As he chases the light, tries to catch it. I think about how we follow thoughts that can't lead to anything, that can't be gotten unless we look way down, further down into ourselves, until our neck's bend so far that it hurts and the long stick attached to our heads finally touches our toes.
Slater evolves in this scene from utterly stupid to smart enough to do this, to bend his head down, to look down, bow and then step on the light and pause the Sysiphian chase. He can take the light and examine it: And we can realize that the answer lies in our own hands. Our actions, always
close to us, attached to us.

​I was disappointed in the audience. The highly sensitive, educated audience that had fun and laughed playing with turtles made from disposable one time use aluminum catering trays, with trash, with jellyfish made from plastic, with cardboard boxes and other items that right or wastefulness. He kept it pretty safe for us, maybe too safe. There were sounds of flies, but there was no real disgusting trash. But there was new trash mixed in. New plastic, new gloves, for those that honestly feared
to get too dirty. Sad. I was disappointed that nobody cried or just stopped having fun. This isn't fucking entertainment, people!

It was so in your face that it made the denial we all live in all the more obvious and depressing.
Yes we are stuck.
We can't change. We can't save the fish, or ourselves.
We are chasing something that is unattainable, like Slater chasing his own light on a stick, an image at the very beginning of the piece, that was reminiscent of a lantern Fish.

OUR OWN TRASH
I recognized some of the 'trash' to be materials from previous shows. It wasn't hard to get all that junk together to fill a stage and create a scene that simulated drowning. Drowning in our own crap. But still everyone was having fun.
We were recruited to clean up the great Pacific garbage patch. We PLAYED.
We didn't DO. We should have DONE. We should have felt bad, not good.
Why is he having us, the audience, clean up? We don't represent anyone outside ourselves, no politicians, no 'people', none other but us. Exactly.

Fucking hell. Plastic is the material we interact with the most. And all this started in the middle of the last century, only roughly 70 years ago. And nobody can imagine ever having lived any other way. Do we really need the convenience of nitrile gloves for cleaning our homes, or for cutting onions?
There is no hope, not from us, consumers. That's what we are. We consume things, ideas, beings, lives, bodies, the world. We poison the 'resources' (a terrible word that indicates our relationship to nature) we need to live because all we see is that little light and the little space it illuminates in front of us. There is more beyond that!

CHANGE
Slater opened the big stage door and a massive wind, imagined, simulated, came in and blew him all around the room. He managed to close the door and shut out the danger. But it is lurking behind the wall, ready to blow down the building, to destroy us, to level all.
Nobody really WATCHED this tragedy. Everyone seems too busy playing with plastic. But I think I remember applause at the end. Bravo, for incorporating something physical and so well done. The reactions of the audience did not lead me to believe that they felt threatened.

A reflection by Karola Lüttringhaus about a live performance by Ekaterina Zharinova (March 12th, 2019, Davis, CA, USA)



          CONSTELLATIONS
Lab A. The room is dark. Ekaterina is setting up for her performance entitled “Multiple Selfie in the Dark”. From what I can see, she has several capture and playback devices positioned on stage, including a video projector, laptop, and cell phone. She invites us to come onto the stage to sit or stand along the back-wall of the theatre. We are facing the audience space, which is empty. Ekaterina and all of the technical equipment are to our right and the projector is positioned to throw images onto the black wall to our left. The equipment is positioned on the floor, wires exposed: everything is very simple, and driven by functionality; process is revealed.
She is wearing a black high-cut and long sleeve dress and black stockings, which highlights her pale skin and sandy-blonde hair. The outfit is a sort of signature uniform for her; like what black suits are for me, a 'go-to' outfit of relative neutrality with a hint of character and theatricality.


Her set-up seamlessly merges into the performance. The informality of the event and her pedestrian but focused presence make me feel like I am observing Ekaterina as she is completely absorbed into some private inquiry. It feels a bit like stepping into a scientists lab. She doesn't seem overly concerned with formally 'presenting' something to us, but she appears mesmerized with her current task of setting up, aligning, organizing, experimenting, and finding something out. Everything in the room: people, equipment, air, light, materials, time, and even temperature are part of a constellation that will have to be calibrated to produce a particular outcome.


          LAYERING REALITIES
Ekaterina positions herself into a light so that it is illuminating her face. She picks up a cellphone and takes a selfie. She goes to her laptop, connects the cellphone to it and we wait and watch her stare at the screen as the image is uploading slowly and then gets projected onto the wall of the theatre. Due to the small size of the space, I am not able to see everything at the same time and for a while I have to look left and right like at a tennis match to keep track of the projections and Ekaterina's actions.


The projected image is slightly distorted and about 5 times as large as Ekaterina's real face. It appears pale from the stark lighting source and the image overall is translucent a bit, illuminating the details of the rough theatre wall revealing nails, holes, tape, different textures of paint, and various scuff-marks. Later in the talk-back she tells us that she finds these details beautiful. I am curious to ask her more about beauty at a later point in time.


Ekaterina steps into the projector's light. Parts of her projected face illuminate her real face and torso. She moves back and forth a bit between the lens and the projection surface until her face appears as big as the projection and she has the arrangement of images she wants to capture in this 'selfie with self'. She pushes the capture button and moves to her tech station, enters the image into her laptop, feeds it to the projector and projects that image onto the wall, replacing the first image. The result is a layering of faces, of shadows and light, one face affecting the other, and both affected by the texture of the wall.


          INQUIRY INTO THE FACE
She repeats this process multiple times, and each time the image becomes more and more estranged, grainy, and confusing. Each image is an assemblage and defamiliarized copy of the previous arrangements of faces. The level of complexity increases exponentially.
What does a face do, what does it reveal, what stories does it, can it, tell? Ekaterina's features remain neutral throughout the entire performance. This performance is not about emotion. It is not about a narrative in the literal sense. Rather, the unfolding and layering of morphing images evokes contemplation about a philosophy of 'faceness'.


A projection of the face is not the face itself, as a matter of fact it is quite different if looked at in detail. We witnessed how the image was extracted from the human original. In those few seconds, between taking the photo and projecting it onto the wall, it was altered many times, more so than we are aware of at first: by the lighting, the camera taking the first image, the translation from 3 dimensional to 2 dimensional, the pixelation caused by the projector, the translation of color and depth from phone to laptop to projector, the darkness of the projection surface (which adds to the washed out effect and the merging with the details of the environment), the distance between the projector and the wall, the angle with which it is projected (which distorts the face and emphasizes the flatness of the photo and the thinness of the image; how thick is a projected image?), and by the translations that our eyes and brains do.

The thinness of the image, even though we readily accept it as a representation of the original, creates a virtuality of the projected original and the image that is surreal and actually quite incomprehensible.


 

          ARTICULATING PHILOSOPHY
In this performance I don't get the impression that we are investigating an identity. I feel more that I am drawn to contemplate how the gaze of the viewer onto the face changes the meaning of that which is viewed. I am drawn to contemplating more conceptual ideas about the layering of surfaces, and the resulting changes in the face of the performer. I am fascinated with the ease with which something changes, and not so much with what it has changed from or into. However, simply speaking: the center of inquiry is the face in general, a specific person's face, and the idea of a face. 


Articulating. The word contains many associations and meanings: I am thinking of articulations, words, expressions, joints that facilitate movement. Articulating entails the ability to respond, to adjust to changes. The images keep changing, each affecting one another, they articulate with one another and thereby create something new. The projections begin to distort Ekaterina's actual face, adding shadows, shapes, darkness or light in places that are not congruent with her features; de-familiarizing, de-territorializing, articulating it in new ways. Soon, her face with the many overlays has become a scramble, or a 'mangle', as Andrew Pickering might say: a multiplicity that is complex beyond our understanding and outside of our ability to construct and control. 


The images express. But more so, the witnessing of the creation of the images, the process, is what evokes thought. We see how far, in an instant, the image becomes something else than merely a representation, a copy, of its original. The copy has its own face, is only a representation, a reminder. And the copy is once again changed by the actual face it is projected on.


          SUBJECTIVITY
“Dismantling the face is the same as breaking through the wall of the signifier and getting out of the black hole of subjectivity.” (1) So reads a quote by Deleuze and Guattari. What can we deduct about subjectivity in this performance? 
By zooming in, by familiarizing, by shadowing and reproducing, Ekaterina dismantles the face. We look at the face, and similarly to repeating a word over and over again and it eventually losing its meaning, her face morphs into something that demands reevaluation. Subjectivity is the somatic experience. My experience watching her. My experience of her face changing. Becoming illegible. Whose subjectivity is questioned? She is changing her subjectivity by seeing and capturing her image. But who says that subjectivity is stable? Or that it should be stable to be considered as that? Subjectivity can only disappear if the experience of subjectivity disappears, the sense of self. Is Ekaterina experiencing anything like this as she looks into the screen of the phone and sees her face with the layers of faces behind and on top of her skin?


The images articulate a contemplation on the origin and the copy, on the layering of layers, of skins and the nature of skins, of features, and the arbitrariness of their expressiveness. How quickly something becomes illegible, incomprehensible is mind boggling.
But is Ekaterina questioning subjectivity? In my opinion, this performance is not exploring the dismantling of subjectivity but the mechanisms of subjectivity and the stickiness of its attraction. 


         STABLE CHANGE/CHANGING            STABILITY 
Ekaterina does not change, does she? Her attitude toward her images does not change. Or does it? She does not become confused. It is an experiment that speaks of change and unsettling, while she remains stable and unchanged? 


At this point in the performance, Ekaterina begins a second chapter. She abandons this idea and moves on to another investigation where she projects the images onto her body, playing with them and the shadow of her body on the wall in the theatre piercing the images of her previously generated layered faces. Is the body reclaiming its territory? If I imagine the various layers of familiarization/defamiliarization: the audience, Ekaterina's body, the first selfie, the second, the third, etc. The reversal, the change happens in the abstract, the change happens in the defamiliarized layers of the self first. It is a slow emergence, as for now the body remains clothed in black and the focus is still the face. With each layer eventually reclaimed, perhaps the body will be uncovered, freed to express itself fully and equally to the face.

​By Karola Luettringhaus
www.karolaluettringhaus.com/
                           ***
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(0,1,2) Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1987), p.181. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-1402-8.
(3) Andrew Pickering, 'The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science”, The University of Chicago Press, 1995, ISBN-13: 978-0226668031 

The performance and thematics explored in this essay came out of a UC Davis Course:
CRI 200C “Faciality” 
with professor: Kriss Ravetto Biagioli


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