Rouge: What Colour is it?
What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED
Question: Does a deconstructed theatre experience, devoid of narrative and characterization, take away the meaning of a signifier (the vocalisation of a word or gesticulation), or give it a new depth of possibility?
Question: Is one artist’s commitment to an idea enough to engage an audience for over an hour?
Question: is it fair to have to ‘read the essay’ in order to ‘get it’?
'Performance Art productions … offer a theatrical sign-system in chaos, where pleasure for the spectator relies on delighting in the experience of non-sense'. (Aston E & G Savona)
What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED
While watching Julie Andrée T’s piece, Rouge, I did experience non-sense, but for me, it was not pleasure that I found but distress. I was verging on uncomfortable throughout the evening. I wondered what it would feel like night after night to masturbate on stage or eat a surfeit of brain candy. I appreciated the lineage within which the piece positioned itself, seeing echoes of Carolee Schneemann’s Inner Scroll, but was glad to not be wearing a watch, which I would have been checking.
“Postmodern performance relies on opposing the aesthetic – what we believe, understand from reading and through convention to be beautiful or correct, and (through the deconstruction of original meaning) turning the common aesthetic around – offering new angles of interpretation.” (Turirenn Hurstfield)
What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED
Ms. Andree did succeed in offering new angles of interpretation to the colour red…but to what end? I can accept that the piece was a “departure point for various fields of inquiry” but, at what cost? How many sheets of paper night after night found their death on the stage. How many bottles of spray paint and markers emptied themselves so that she could engage in this intellectual exercise and bring us along for the ride?
Rouge is certainly a powerful piece as, despite my discomfort/boredom and the inherent predictability, there was no room in my brain for anything other than the images, objects and the repeated phrase –
What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED What Colour is it? RED
…all I had in my mind and all I uttered for an hour after the show was: what colour is it? Red.
Rouge: A tribute to theoretical inquiry. A performance art piece with a clownish invitation to intimacy. Together, we endured.