the orange peels that were once yours
the orange peels that were once yours
On good loss, Faye Driscoll, art that lasts, the meaning of things, etc
A few weeks ago a note came in from the Lost Things Email Hotline that questioned the negative implication in the word “loss.”
but really, think of all the trash you've accumulated in your life, all the papers and orange peels that were once yours.
Of course, of course. Good loss. The mandarin skins shed all winter. Hoarding anything just is a backwards destruction.
It is true I enjoy getting rid of things. Cleaning out a closet is almost thrilling, as is using up the last bit of mustard, or ridding the desk of mess, or even excavating the lint from the forgotten trap on a friend’s dryer. Without quite realizing it, however, I had redefined loss as something negative rather than something neutral or even renewing.
The mention of orange peels also reminded me of a moment in Faye Driscoll’s extremely tense and attention-winnowing new performance, Weathering. The show climbs a steady upward trajectory of intensity, and it was almost midway into those 70 minute, as the dancers contorted into torrid tangles, that I noticed one of them sitting cross-legged in the middle of things, peeling and eating and orange, a calm moment of contrast.
Falling apart and exhaustion and destruction and ominous forces beyond anyone’s control are some of the subject of Weathering. I first encountered Driscoll’s work in Paris eight years ago, and as far as I can tell these themes recur in much of her choreography. (You would be wise to go peruse her website, and make sure to attend anything you can.)
Driscoll uses absolutely everything at her disposal to modulate emotional potency—the performers’ movements, speed, slowness, facial expressions, breathing, voices, costume, props, and (in this case) even smell and contact between stage and audience. But anything this relentless depends heavily on moments of reprieve—i.e. the man peeling the orange—because the work speaks a visceral language. A critic for The New York Times called Weathering “a bristling response” to the question of how our human bodies register and respond to events too large to comprehend, and I don’t think someone watching needed to know (as I didn’t know) that this work concerns the Anthropocene.
By now it’s almost a joke to claim that any given painting or performance piece or sound installation is actually a commentary on global warming. One might wonder—while viewing such a work in an air-conditioned building located in an area that could someday (soon-ish) be underwater—why any artist bothers. One might also notice that the stronger the polemic (even if you agree with the point being polemicized) the weaker the art. (It feels likely there could be examples that contradict this idea, but I’ve yet to come across them.)
But Weathering avoids polemic by focusing on the potential art has to briefly articulate feelings which otherwise resist articulation. It’s ordinary magic (which isn’t to say it’s simple or easy to accomplish.) When I saw the first part of Faye Driscoll’s Thank You For Coming trilogy in 2015, I could have said it was a dance about dance, and that would have been a little true but also totally beside the point. The possible interpretations of the perforamance mattered less to me than the physical reaction I had, a knowledge outside language. (Love is another kind of knowledge outside language, as is fear, joy, anxiety, and pleasure.)
Last year I was having a coffee with a choreographer I admire when she told me she no longer felt compelled to stage dances in the traditional way— theaters, rehearsals, ticket sales… When she saw such performances all she could think was, What are you doing??? Why are you doing that???
Her exasperation also had something to do with her evolving aims as an artist, but it was easy to sympathize. Sometimes it feels insane how many books get published in a year. Other times I feel like I am searching and searching for certain kinds of books I only occasionally find.
Yet it also seems clear we look at art and read books and attend live performance not because the outcome will always be unforgettable, but because we want to risk the possibility that it will be.
The art that has meant the most to me has simply lingered. It’s difficult to explain why. A large part of it seems to be in the timing. The passing predicaments of our lives occasionally push us into a creative engagement with what we’ve seen or heard or read. (At best, that’s what criticism can do—find a way to converse with the work rather than dutifully describe and rate it.)
A central predicament of my life at the moment is that no matter what I do, my home keeps moving. What was first a conscious choice—to not have a fixed address for a little while— has now become The Situation. A series of circumstances beyond my control keep arising (with impeccable comedic timing) and every time I come close to setting up a permanent(ish) home somewhere, a new circumstance intervenes which requires me to remain in a state of dislocation.
This is, as you might expect, partially maddening and partially an adventure, but while I watched the mattress-like stage at the center of Weathering spin (then careen) as the performers clung to and slid off of it, I related to them in a way that surprised me. The tension was familiar. The sense of a destabilized home was familiar. When I noticed the performer peeling and eating the orange, the burst of relief was familiar because it was the same feeling I had when my partner handed me a cup of coffee in yet another borrowed bedroom.
Climate crisis is also a destabilization of everyone’s home and regardless of your ability to compartmentalize and carry on with your life, somewhere in your animal body the anxiety of that destabilization is taking root. Weathering brought me into a somatic awareness of this feeling. It wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t supposed to be, but I was seeing and feeling something true, and we don’t forget what’s true. We can avoid truth. We can suppress it. But we don’t entirely forget.
Art allows us to lose something we no longer need by becoming aware of something we didn’t realize we already had. I think this is the only reason we keep going to see things, to read things, to listen to things, despite the fact that it sometimes feels like our ecological disasters make living pointless and our political situation makes living terrifying and our healthcare system makes living extremely dangerous for everyone except those who profit from it. Art creates stability and reprieve in the face of all this large-scale hostility, just as love creates stability when the crisis is on a more minor, personal scale. A morning habit with a loved one. A slowly peeled orange before the stage itself spins out of control.
Good loss 💕