What remained was as peaceful and cool, and visually almost as pleasing and exciting as sighting a band of lions in repose, whose loping looseness and tilting shifts of weight inspired the final section of the piece.
I took it the work as a statement about the beauty and dignity of the real. The audience, ironically, performed the perfect foil to the genuineness of the dancers. The performers were literally naked but not figuratively. Their warts were exposed but not their personalities. Our own personalities by contrast seemed overweaning, pretentious; and their nakedness may have been there to teach us modesty.
The evening started and ended with two "conversations" between fully dressed dancers and audience. We in the audience were invited to speak our minds, to spend some time conversing with the performers. A heady nervousness overtook the audience as we began, and someone asked brashly, "so, are you going to take off your clothes?"
It was a satirical way to start, and some in the audience, particularly Europeans, who seemed to form half of it, bristled at the sheer American-ness of it all. Meanwhile we in the audience were being set up to participate in the performance as more than just idle spectators. The genius of this method was that we ourselves were on display, softening the peculiar power differential that usually exists between observers and performers. Instead of being safely ensconced in our seats while dancers with well-crafted personalities sweated before us, hoping sufficiently to entertain and make it worth the cost of admission, we never were asked to pay for admission. We were instead confronted with our own character and personality as the audience.
Instead of patiently listening but never heard, we had the chance to shine, and also to shame and embarrass ourselves. We got a little taste of performing. There were many commentators in the audience who tended to judge not only the dance but also the other audience members' comments. One person rebuked the rest of us for joking about nudity, for engaging in "adolescent" banter. Another suggested that the banter might be too performative, as if a more serious inquiry would have been a more appropriate or dignified way to fulfill the task of "having a conversation". One performer astutely remarked that a conversation was always a kind of performance and rendered the distinction moot. One particularly acerbic comment clipped the question mark right off another audience member's question, as if to suggest that the first question did not merit a response.
Many in the audience behaved with excruciating entitlement despite the free admission. As a performer for many years in Boston the experience confirmed a sneaking suspicion I had always had: it wasn't the dance that was to blame for the weakness of our dance communities, it's the audiences.
While the dancers welcomed us into their quiet, peaceful, unselfconscious animal world, the audience, like so many polluting tourists on safari, trod heavily, combatively, self-absorbedly and pretentiously through the delicacy of the environment the dancers had created for us.
