Audience and Affect

This past few days, I saw an interesting sequence of events: on Saturday, the full screening of David Wojnarowicz's A Fire in My Belly (the 13-minute sequence plus the 7-minute reel, at Gallery Aferro in Newark -- I'd never seen it before; then, on Sunday afternoon, at La Mama, John Kelly's Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte (his meditation on Egon Schiele); then on Tuesday, Sondheim's A Little Night Music, with Bernadette Peters.  I don't usually go to so many cultural events in a row, but it was just happenstance that they all fell together (I even had to pass up a chance to go to A Free Man of Color on Thursday -- sometimes a person just has to get a little work done).  But the interesting and rare occasion of seeing those particular things in a row got me to thinking about audience and affect. It's something I've thought about a lot in the past, in relation to my favorite performers -- John Kelly is one, so is Justin Bond.
    A Fire in My Belly was a revelation: it's from 1986-87, so I was worried it wouldn't hold up, but it packs the punch of a steam plough.  I don't want to speculate why the Catholic League hates it so much; that can only stem from an utter misunderstanding of what the film is trying to do.  But we can thank them for making so many of us able to see this film -- and the whole thing, which many galleries are now screening, rather than just the 4-minute excerpt that the Smithsonian censored; but parts are now available on YouTube, which is great, and the New York Times ran an excellent article on the front page on Saturday, December 10 (by Holland Cotter, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/arts/design/11ants.html?src=twr).  The film is hard to watch: it's about the violence people inflict on each other and on animals, about the brutality of everyday life and the way we block ourselves from feeling anything about what we see in order to just keep on going on our mechanical round of daily life.  Anyone who saw it in the late 1980s, with their friends or themselves dying of AIDS, must have found it unbearable -- it completely captures that strange tension between the heavy inertia of mundane daily routine and the flaring intensity of pain and suffering that punctuates it (if you ever let it in).  It reminds you how much work we all do just to keep feeling out of our lives.  And if you couldn't keep the pain of AIDS out of your life when this film was made, then the deliberately built carapace of indifference that the rest of the world chose to put on was a form of torture.  There's a shot of some ancient plaza where ritual sacrifices took place, and a herd of modern tourists filming it: perfect -- pain and suffering tolerated only at a far remove.  But this film, paradoxically, doesn't allow the viewer that remove: we have to watch, and see pain, and see indifference, and see co-optation and complicity.  We have to know.
    The very next day, still pondering that intense 20 minutes of disturbing brilliance, I went to see Kelly's Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte.  I remember the first Kelly performance I saw: Constant Stranger, at the Joyce Theater.  I remember where, because the experience was so upsetting: there was Kelly on the stage, performing a piece that made me weep, and there around me in the audience were a bunch of people who had season subscriptions, who didn't know or care anything about Kelly, and who were laughing because he put on a tutu: surely you're allowed to laugh at a man in a tutu? (even if he's dancing in a circle of skulls in the middle of the AIDS crisis?)  I loved his Joni Mitchell shows and his performances at Wigstock, and even performances that I thought didn't quite come together, like The Paradise Project.  But that night got me thinking about the ways that the audience defines the performance, despite the best intentions of some spectators and the artist.  Performance is an experience, so the audience shapes the experience for all who are there.
    Pass the Blutwurst is different; it's from the same period as A Fire in My Belly -- the original performance was 1986 -- and it's about the death of artist Egon Schiele in the flu pandemic of 1918, when he was only 28.  Everything Kelly does is beautiful: the way he moves, the music he chooses, the colors, the film projected behind the stage.  I have no way of knowing what this felt like to watch when it was first performed, but it didn't make me feel the way the Wojnarovicz film did -- I could see and appreciate, even wonder at what Kelly was doing, and yet not be utterly moved: the pieces stayed separate, and didn't coalesce into a whole that swept me away. I puzzled over that for a while, till surprisingly my next event, the Sondheim, clarified things a little.
    I am no way a Broadway queen, but I went to A Little Night Music because my girlfriend loves Bernadette Peters (the only other show she's managed to drag me to is Gypsy).  So I tried to appreciate the wooden acting of much of the cast, the dated heteronormativity of the seventies lyrics, the supposed daring of a whiff of sexual liberation (only represented by stereotypical actress characters and servant girls: we might as well be in an 18th-century farce).  I have to say it was pretty interesting to see Peters (who is totally wonderful) sing "Send in the Clowns."  But since many audience members were willing to share their thoughts during the performance, I feel able to comment on how they were affected: from behind me, "Oh, isn't that sad!"  "How funny!"  etc. etc.  Apparently, most of the audience saw the play as a series of set pieces, each to be appreciated in itself rather than as part of a flowing whole (luckily, since there is no flowing coherent narrative in this play).  And seeing it that way helped me to retrospectively appreciate Kelly's Pass the Blutwurst better: as a series of tableaux (tableaux vivants).  Odd that Sondheim could help me see Kelly more clearly, but there you are.  I have a tendency to want things to build step by step, to carry me along; so the gaps between set-piece tableaux bother me and let me fall through, lose my spectatorly momentum.  But if I think about Kelly as a series of aesthetic fragments, if I lose my desire for emotional plot, maybe I could be swirled away on a different momentum, a less rational one.