Cabane: meandering surrealism

Putting ideas ahead of aesthetics when making art can be an interesting exercise. This kind of conceptual art tends to provoke questions about the nature of art, about what makes for good art, and about the boundaries of form and genre. But, if the resulting artwork doesn’t come up with many good answers to the questions it asks, then one has to ask what the point of the exercise is. If an artist isn’t in it for the aesthetics, and doesn’t do a great job of addressing the big questions either, then what is the value of such art? This is what I was left wondering after watching *Cabane* by "Fortier Danse-Création":http://www.fortier-danse.com/.

The show opened with multidisciplinary artist Rober Racine sitting atop the surreal shack, the cabane, that was the centerpiece of the performance. Megaphone in hand, he uttered a series of nonsensical crows and cries that ranged from pure gibberish to imitation of a rooster on its morning alarm clock duty. And this was funny. It had the kind of surreal absurdity that evoked a feeling of benign dislocation. Moreover, the set was clever and the lighting that made use of a good deal of shadow play was entertaining and at times, beautiful. As the show progressed, however, my initial engagement with it wained; I simply could not find enough of a narrative, an aesthetic sensibility, or an idea that I could grasp onto.

After his virtuosic turn on the megaphone, Racine is joined by Paul-André Fortier who emerges from inside the cabane and joins him in a somewhat formless duet. I say duet, but perhaps that’s an overstatement for what was going on onstage. There was a lot of meandering around the stage, a great deal of going in and out of the cabane and emerging with various props, mostly bulky tripods, and a whole lot of climbing up to the roof of the cabane, coming back down, and then moving around the stage some more. In other words, I felt that there was little real interaction that led to a worthwhile dynamic between the two performers, but more to the point, I felt that the entire show just never came together. I could decipher no narrative, and by narrative I don’t mean to suggest that all performance needs a beginning, middle and end. More to the point, there was no momentum, no pacing; the show felt like a series of randomly enacted vignettes, none of which seemed to have its own internal logic.

I must sound awfully conservative here, so let me say that I have seen a great deal of surreal art that I’ve really liked, even loved. But just because a piece of art calls itself surreal, doesn’t mean that it is going to do a good job of evoking the unconscious mind or the dreamlike state in which nonsense makes its own kind of sense. What Cabane lacked was everything from clever moments of humour or illumination on a small scale, and on a larger scale it lacked an overarching idea or message that tied together all of the roaming around that Racine and Fortier do.

To its credit, the set of Cabane was quite well designed. The large shack that took up much of the stage was complete with skylight, a fully functioning window and door and walls that could open up entirely on a counterweight system that uses water bottles. All of this, along with the cleverly-designed lighting, made for some aesthetically pleasing moments. However, there were other aspects of the staging that I simply did not get. Fortier wanted to reveal everything to the audience, so there were technicians walking around on stage with lights, for example, but I can’t say that this added to my appreciation of the art of Cabane or to my understanding of the show as a concept.

While I think it is worthwhile for artists to make conceptual art in the hopes of reaching for something beyond the usual forms and genres, I simply did not feel convinced that Cabane added anything that valuable to the world of art that asks, and with any luck, answers the big questions about art, and neither did it provide enough of an aesthetic cohesiveness to convince me that there was something intellectual or simply enjoyable to be gotten out of this show.

_Cabane by Paul-André Fortier with Rober Racine, produced by Fortier Danse-Création was presented at the Scotiabank Dance Centre in Vancouver, June 11-13_