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adfo8:independent_june_26_2008_review [2008/06/27 03:17] – created tomgeeadfo8:independent_june_26_2008_review [2008/06/27 03:18] (current) – tomgee
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 Umwelt by Compagnie Maguy Marin Umwelt by Compagnie Maguy Marin
  
 If Umwelt’s symbolic payload doesn’t exactly sound subtle, that’s because it’s not. The piece was technically brilliant, but made its point much too quickly to justify its excessive length. As it dragged on interminably, it became enervating—which is surely part of the point, that the consumer’s life is interminable and enervating and crushingly repetitive—but still. I do think this piece needed to extend beyond the point of comfort to be powerful, and to draw the audience fully into its strange yet familiar, claustrophobic world. But it went too far. I found myself at first entranced, then wholly submerged, as if the drama being enacted onstage were the only thing in the world. But as the piece dragged on beyond this point of immersion, I came out the other side of that state and became again aware of watching people act out a rather pedantic drama (and judging from the several parties of spectators I noticed bowing out at intervals, I wasn’t alone in this). I have to reiterate that this is a brilliant piece, a don’t-miss performance as long as you’ve a high threshold for existential dread. And its point may seem obvious, but we’ve yet to take it to heart—that you are what you consume is a logical impossibility by any definition of the word “consume,” yet it is the tacit assumption that animates our culture. One simply wishes Umwelt would make that point concisely enough to leave us in that spellbound state of heightened awareness, rather than belaboring it into eventual tedium, and bludgeoning us into the same befogged daze it wants to howl against. —Brian Howe If Umwelt’s symbolic payload doesn’t exactly sound subtle, that’s because it’s not. The piece was technically brilliant, but made its point much too quickly to justify its excessive length. As it dragged on interminably, it became enervating—which is surely part of the point, that the consumer’s life is interminable and enervating and crushingly repetitive—but still. I do think this piece needed to extend beyond the point of comfort to be powerful, and to draw the audience fully into its strange yet familiar, claustrophobic world. But it went too far. I found myself at first entranced, then wholly submerged, as if the drama being enacted onstage were the only thing in the world. But as the piece dragged on beyond this point of immersion, I came out the other side of that state and became again aware of watching people act out a rather pedantic drama (and judging from the several parties of spectators I noticed bowing out at intervals, I wasn’t alone in this). I have to reiterate that this is a brilliant piece, a don’t-miss performance as long as you’ve a high threshold for existential dread. And its point may seem obvious, but we’ve yet to take it to heart—that you are what you consume is a logical impossibility by any definition of the word “consume,” yet it is the tacit assumption that animates our culture. One simply wishes Umwelt would make that point concisely enough to leave us in that spellbound state of heightened awareness, rather than belaboring it into eventual tedium, and bludgeoning us into the same befogged daze it wants to howl against. —Brian Howe
  
adfo8/independent_june_26_2008_review.1214551043.txt.gz · Last modified: 2008/06/27 03:17 by tomgee