The Whole Beast: strangers in the forest
As the tiny, hanging bulbs began to dim their way to darkness, Lee Su-Feh stood simply at the microphone and thanked us for choosing to spend our Friday night with her.
She suggested that we take time to clear our minds, to “arrive in this place”, and to relax the back of our throats. “Know, as you do so, that I will be doing the same,” she told us as we arrived in the pitch dark. Her oddly child-like voice and the disappearing light were mesmerizing indeed.
I rarely feel urgency about seeing a contemporary dance piece. But I needed to see The Whole Beast because of something dancer/choreographer Lee had written in the most recent Dance Current: “Even if the impossible happens and EVERYBODY loved me, I would be filled with disgust and self-loathing over the whole thing because I have allowed myself to want the love of strangers.” (Sept/Oct 2008, p. 5)
Honesty like that must lead to interesting work, and I certainly understand the pursuit of art being accompanied by self-loathing. I also liked Lee’s concern over her relationship with the audience. Sure enough, in those first moments of The Whole Beast, she connected directly with each of us, as audience and dancer merged in the dark.
Thank god for the modern dancer who allows a spoken narrative to help us into the work, for, as much as we might like to think otherwise, movement is not necessarily a direct form of communication. Lee Su-Feh’s more kindly approach told us (maybe) three separate stories: about a young woman who slays a dragon and loses a friend, an older woman who loses her grandmother, and a third woman (largely Lee herself), who loses her martial arts teacher. The passageway Lee used to travel between each story is that moment of loss in each, as well as the ritual power of food. In the end, the three stories are merged as the dragon is killed, and the woman eats its heart, and herself.
Experiencing the mixture of text and movement became a slowly-paced process of answering my own questions about the work, or at least some of them. For example, two repeated gestures mystified me at first. In one of these, she dropped into a steeply-raked, sideways lunge, her right arm pointing sharply in the direction of her body’s tilt. It didn’t look like anything recognizable to me, except perhaps a yoga pose. Later, she narrated the two gestures as (something like) “And so I stabbed the dragon (with a sword). And cut off its head.” Having not spent a lot of time lately around either swords or dragons, I was grateful for the elucidation.
At another point, when the grandmother dies, the character moved through exaggerated gestures of weeping. As I watched Lee tilt her head up and down with a widely gaping mouth, I wondered if this looked more like grief, or like someone catching rain in an up-tilted mouth. As the gesture ended, with Lee’s head slanted up and her mouth open, the soundscape changed to the music of dripping water. Meant to be ambiguous, then.
My last question remained unanswered, however, because the dance ended. Having killed the dragon, the dancer ate its heart, in a gesture of violent sexuality that had Lee fist her own mouth while long strings of saliva fell to the floor and over her bare feet. How was this final image intended to bring the three stories and her emotional journey to a close? And if no narrative close was intended, then what else did she hope to achieve by it? I believe the gesture in her mouth was meant to evoke a different orifice. But either way I understood only a portion of her meaning. Her post-show explanation that she was born in the year of the dragon still didn’t complete the experience for me.
While angsting over this review, I stumbled upon a Gordon Smith exhibit at the Equinox Gallery the next morning. Coming into the gallery happy, on a sunny day of unbelievable beauty, within five minutes I found myself fighting back tears. Smith’s subject matter and composition were not challenging: he had produced several, relatively undifferentiated, scenes of a forest under heavy snow. Still, I felt immediately that I was witnessing an artist at his absolute peak, with so much experience and skill that he couldn’t be bothered to shock anyone anymore (and I’d be surprised if shock were ever a focus of his work). Nor did he need to aim for complicated. In canvas after canvas, I felt the simple confidence and clear vision of each stroke.
At Smith’s exhibit I found one of the things I seem to seek in art: coming into the presence of a spirit that momentarily feels greater than my own, because it is larger than the artist’s too. Perversely, being in that presence somehow tells me that we are all actually the same where it matters most.
Creating art that speaks of a presence greater than her audience’s does not appear to be Lee Su-Feh’s goal. In the post-show talk, she spoke (and I roughly paraphrase here) of dancing as a way to explore the internal processes of the body: “shitting and fucking” as she called it, but also, in this case, grieving, eating and killing animals for food – the processes we all share (except the killing) and therefore the processes that make the dancer no different from the audience. In this way, her artistic vision is more democratic than my search for art that moves me. I was almost disappointed in myself, therefore, in a quasi-political way, that I responded more strongly to less challenging work – even given the mastery of its execution.
Unfortunately, I too often leave the theatre after viewing contemporary works unsure of what the artist hoped to communicate to me. Surely communication is attempted in contemporary performing arts, or else there would be no reason for me to attend. Lee Su-Feh tried to cover that gap to some extent. Her work is strong, partly because of her honesty. She also said afterwards that she tries to respond to the different audience each night, gauging “the invitation of the gaze”, as she put it. And still I return to her comment about wanting the love of strangers. We were not strangers in the audience on Friday night. Many of the people there seemed to know each other, or were connected to someone in the production in some way. The audience for contemporary dance is small. I wonder what kind of dance we would see if, every night, the theatres were filled, really filled, with a company of strangers.
The Whole Beast, presented by battery opera in association with The Dance Centre. Choreography and performance, Su-Feh Lee. Dramaturgy, David McIntosh. No remaining performances.