Air of Claptrap
In his 1819 satirical poem, Don Juan, Lord Byron wrote, ‘I hate all mystery, and that air / Of claptrap, which your recent poets prize.’ Coincidentally, after nearly 60 minutes of sitting through Keren Cytter’s theatre performance, The True Story of John Webber and his Endless Struggle with the Table of Content, I had written only one word in my notes: ‘claptrap’. I don’t even use that word, ever, but something about the nature of this particular performance, or it taking place on an exceptionally chilly Sunday night, made me feel like just the kind of curmudgeon who would roundly declare a piece of theatre ‘claptrap’. However, claptrap – defined as insincere or pretentious language, or, ironically, in its obsolete form as ‘something contrived to elicit applause’ – sums it up pretty well.
For her first feature-length play, Cytter, who was recently nominated for the National Gallery Prize for Young Art here in Berlin, has collaborated with the dance troupe she founded, D.I.E. Now. The work, originally commissioned for ‘If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution’ has been shown in other incarnations at PERFORMA 09 in New York and at Tate Modern, and ran for four nights at the HAU 3 in Berlin. John Webber is ostensibly about a man who wakes up to find that he’s been transformed into a woman, which, according to the programme text, ‘has a domino-effect on society, sexual policy and identity, finally leading to a revolution’ – though these events are, at best, vaguely suggested by what transpires on stage. The five members of D.I.E. Now engaged in a mixture of both acting and dance to convey the story, though it was often hard to tell which was which. More disappointing, though, was the sense that they appear to be neither trained dancers nor actors. I was hoping to see performers who had honed at least one out of the two crafts; instead I got a painfully thin man in saggy jogging shorts and multiple glimpses at the meshy control-top of the lead dancer’s pantyhose.
For John Webber, Cytter mines not just every contemporary cliché of theatre and dance, but also video and installation art: at times, a projection on the stage featured what looked like archival footage of psychological experiments or academics discussing sociological research – the kind of stuff that abounds in current video art. This was, however, the only concrete reference to anything outside the insular and confusing world of the play itself; the rest of the action was concentrated on the mostly bare stage, and the ambiguous love story among several characters of shifting gender. Jammed into that framework, the play also included: shadow play, a smoke machine, minimal props, confessions, voice over, dubbed voice over, fake YouTube clips, barefooted dancers, good posture, bad posture, pointed toes, legwarmers, fractures in the fourth wall, repetition, repetition, self-referentiality, multiple voices, false starts, the death of the author, new age music, pantomime, stage fighting, slow motion, references to Revolution, love triangles. Despite containing all this in its 60 minutes, it had not one of the essential elements that can make a live performance compelling. It had neither comedy, nor drama. It had no spectacle, no depth, nor any traces of authentic emotion. This might be Cytter’s statement on the condition of society today, but in that case, I wish she hadn’t recreated it – again – as artifice.
In his 1819 satirical poem, Don Juan, Lord Byron wrote, ‘I hate all mystery, and that air / Of claptrap, which your recent poets prize.’ Coincidentally, after nearly 60 minutes of sitting through Keren Cytter’s theatre performance, The True Story of John Webber and his Endless Struggle with the Table of Content, I had written only one word in my notes: ‘claptrap’. I don’t even use that word, ever, but something about the nature of this particular performance, or it taking place on an exceptionally chilly Sunday night, made me feel like just the kind of curmudgeon who would roundly declare a piece of theatre ‘claptrap’. However, claptrap – defined as insincere or pretentious language, or, ironically, in its obsolete form as ‘something contrived to elicit applause’ – sums it up pretty well.
For her first feature-length play, Cytter, who was recently nominated for the National Gallery Prize for Young Art here in Berlin, has collaborated with the dance troupe she founded, D.I.E. Now. The work, originally commissioned for ‘If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution’ has been shown in other incarnations at PERFORMA 09 in New York and at Tate Modern, and ran for four nights at the HAU 3 in Berlin. John Webber is ostensibly about a man who wakes up to find that he’s been transformed into a woman, which, according to the programme text, ‘has a domino-effect on society, sexual policy and identity, finally leading to a revolution’ – though these events are, at best, vaguely suggested by what transpires on stage. The five members of D.I.E. Now engaged in a mixture of both acting and dance to convey the story, though it was often hard to tell which was which. More disappointing, though, was the sense that they appear to be neither trained dancers nor actors. I was hoping to see performers who had honed at least one out of the two crafts; instead I got a painfully thin man in saggy jogging shorts and multiple glimpses at the meshy control-top of the lead dancer’s pantyhose.
For John Webber, Cytter mines not just every contemporary cliché of theatre and dance, but also video and installation art: at times, a projection on the stage featured what looked like archival footage of psychological experiments or academics discussing sociological research – the kind of stuff that abounds in current video art. This was, however, the only concrete reference to anything outside the insular and confusing world of the play itself; the rest of the action was concentrated on the mostly bare stage, and the ambiguous love story among several characters of shifting gender. Jammed into that framework, the play also included: shadow play, a smoke machine, minimal props, confessions, voice over, dubbed voice over, fake YouTube clips, barefooted dancers, good posture, bad posture, pointed toes, legwarmers, fractures in the fourth wall, repetition, repetition, self-referentiality, multiple voices, false starts, the death of the author, new age music, pantomime, stage fighting, slow motion, references to Revolution, love triangles. Despite containing all this in its 60 minutes, it had not one of the essential elements that can make a live performance compelling. It had neither comedy, nor drama. It had no spectacle, no depth, nor any traces of authentic emotion. This might be Cytter’s statement on the condition of society today, but in that case, I wish she hadn’t recreated it – again – as artifice.
