EXHIBIT B: Just posted by Cole Verhoeven an EXHIBIT B performer from Amsterdam: Hi Everyone, I was a performer in Exhibit B in Amsterdam and Wroclaw and I just wanted to send you these words. Peace, Cole Exhibit B encompasses several disciplines at once; Butoh, performance art, sculpture, mime, cinema of attractions, museum systems and best practices, musical intertextuality.... this list goes on! There is a Butoh like concentration and meditation required of the performers. We nod to Marina Abramovic. We evoke Duane Hanson sculptures but then with agency! The work is for me impossible to do without being clear and in constant contact with my intention. I absolutely could not have participated in this piece had I not been an activist. I remember hearing people condemn the film La Vita e bella (1997) in advance because it was ‘making fun of the holocaust’. It is the height of ignorance to condemn books, films, plays whatever without having opened them, seen them, read them at least in part. I understand the concern. I for one would love to have met the actors who appeared in the offensive Duyvis peanut snack commercial and ask them what f*$@! were they thinking?! I am an activist. I hate racism. Daily micro-aggressions add up and I’m irritated and angry a lot of the time. Tired of being seen as a subspecies, feral, ‘naturally’ less intelligent, less... So I couldn’t imagine drumming up any compassion for the spectator. The individual communion with the audience changed that. We were evoking real pain. Hearts that have spent years balled up in a tight fist, unclench. My ignoble need for a kind of emotional revenge morphed into compassion. I remember one evening three elderly women in the audience who looked like they could have been family members; aunts or great aunts. They moved slowly through the piece with the posture long suffering. Then they came and sat with me and commiserated for a while. (They hugged me and thanked me after the show) I really felt like I was giving them a gift. The gift of recognition of long suffering. I’ve been to countless improv shows and performances and with few exceptions, it’s always felt as if the performers on stage were having more fun that the audience. In the case of Exhibit B I was aware of being willing to put up with any physical and emotional discomfort in order to give and to alleviate pain. I felt at times like the ‘empath’ in that Star Trek episode and at other times like one of sculptor Cai Guo-Qiang’s Tigers! Exhibit B is monumental. Period. As far as Brett and the lens of a white South African director... There was an audience member in Amsterdam who got down on his knees and prayed before some of us, seemingly for forgiveness. He stayed on his knees for at least ten minutes at a time. I think of Ang Lee and his film Brokeback Mountain. That film brought me to my knees. Does it matter that Lee was born in Taiwan? Brett orchestrates a rupture in the spectators causing them to interrogate their own fixed paradigms on race and privilege and representation. As far as Brett’s character is concerned, he hates racism point blank. Hes battling aginst racism and the contructed hierarchy based on race. One can critique his aesthetic but not his intention. We cant dictate how he expresses his intention just as we cant tell Marlene Dumas whom to paint.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 09:09:04 +0000
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