ART
Entrance Wounds: Richard Foreman's Deep Trance Behavior in Potato Land
/ Thom Donovan
04.01.08
Foreman’s art is an art of attention and distraction and of the consciousness that plays between attentive and distracted states of awareness. The definitive “dramatic” moments of Foreman’s plays are those where sensation (feeling one’s self a part of the world) and nonsense (feeling one’s self withdrawn from a world of sensual experiences) become suffused, chiasmic (cross-mixed) and indivisible. The provision of this experience is what I consider Foreman’s primary contribution to an ongoing (however stunted) exploration of what the theater can do beyond character development, pathos, and teleological narrative-actions—actions based on cause less than effect, end more than pure means.
Of the more obscure elements of Foreman’s theater are those appropriated from Jewish mysticism, culture and religious practices. These elements are present in Foreman’s Deep Trance through a cabinet on the right side of the stage which is used by the actors as a kind of tabernacle, a covenantal space; likewise through Kabbalistic Gamatria (Jewish mystical numerology), which appears in the video opposing chronos (chronological time). At the risk of trying to pin down these mystical motifs and elements, which are only part of the vast pool of imaginative materials Foreman draws upon, I think these elements point to a larger problem of Foreman’s theater: that he is probing mystical “truths” as they can be explored and experienced through aesthetic facts, materials and phenomena given by theatrical works.
In relation to Gamatria are the videos themselves, which chronicle different actors performing various actions in three different geographic locations: NYC, London, and Japan. Though these actors are geographically and culturally displaced, they correspond through Foreman’s overarching sense of “no place,” that the experience of the theater, of theater as a gestural text both felt and thought through, is of no where [sic] and no body [sic]—without embodiment or place per se. And this is ontological. Which is to say, Foreman’s theater is an experience of what the literary philosopher Walter Benjamin called “non-sensuous similarity.” Semblances that can only be felt in thought, as thought is given by varying degrees of awareness, vision, and illumination. To feel these similarities is to feel the mind itself as it is shaped by sense-experience and deprivations of sense.
Of the more obscure elements of Foreman’s theater are those appropriated from Jewish mysticism, culture and religious practices. These elements are present in Foreman’s Deep Trance through a cabinet on the right side of the stage which is used by the actors as a kind of tabernacle, a covenantal space; likewise through Kabbalistic Gamatria (Jewish mystical numerology), which appears in the video opposing chronos (chronological time). At the risk of trying to pin down these mystical motifs and elements, which are only part of the vast pool of imaginative materials Foreman draws upon, I think these elements point to a larger problem of Foreman’s theater: that he is probing mystical “truths” as they can be explored and experienced through aesthetic facts, materials and phenomena given by theatrical works.
In relation to Gamatria are the videos themselves, which chronicle different actors performing various actions in three different geographic locations: NYC, London, and Japan. Though these actors are geographically and culturally displaced, they correspond through Foreman’s overarching sense of “no place,” that the experience of the theater, of theater as a gestural text both felt and thought through, is of no where [sic] and no body [sic]—without embodiment or place per se. And this is ontological. Which is to say, Foreman’s theater is an experience of what the literary philosopher Walter Benjamin called “non-sensuous similarity.” Semblances that can only be felt in thought, as thought is given by varying degrees of awareness, vision, and illumination. To feel these similarities is to feel the mind itself as it is shaped by sense-experience and deprivations of sense.