Anything less is less than a reckless act Teaser1.mov

Anything less is less than reckless act

JUNE 15 / 7 PM / PETA Theater Center




To go to the theater or to go shopping, to watch a dance performance or to watch the latest John Lloyd Cruz movie: before one goes thru an aesthetic experience, s/he must 1st of all make the decision to experience it. (Even a supposedly 'accidental' aesthetic experience must be distinguished as such to be experienced as such, in cases where, for example, one opts to consider the supermarket as a vast theatrical space, or the commercial movie as a kind of dance.) The decision to do so, however, means deciding not to do something else; a possibility is always foreclosed.

Donna Miranda's Anything less is less than a reckless act calls attention to this decision-making process as constitutive of the aesthetic experience itself. Choreographing more than just moving bodies but the conditions w/in w/c these bodies move, Miranda pursues in this performance work what she has called "an exercise in disclosure & transparency." But transparency about what, the disclosure of what exactly?

Possibly the modes of production in a work of dance, possibly the theatrical machinery one subjects him/herself to in the very act of watching. Dubbed as a "research-performance project," Anything less is less than a reckless act may as well be called "a dance-lecture in two rooms," confronting its spectators w/ the inevitability of making choices: Faced w/ the fact that thruout the duration of the work they can only endure what transpires in 1 of 2 available rooms—that they cannot simultaneously endure both—the audience is bullied into picking w/c 1 to be in: the room where a video that features 2 dancers enacting a duet is being played where the audience knows nothing of its context or mode of production, or the room in w/c the video is absent but where Miranda talks in a lecture-type set-up about the unseen video's motivation & mode of production.

But knowing that even such forms of choice or participation (the term in vogue these days is "interactivity") only reasserts the active-performer/passive-audience micro-political structure of theater—theater, after all, can only thrive w/ this a-priori distinction; theater is kept safe, kept from being reckless, by this very distinction; theater by virtue of being theater will always fail to be reckless—Miranda exposes the sick humor of participation, of this seeming democratization of performance: just as the oppressed classes in a democracy in an electoral context get to eagerly vote for w/c leaders will oppress them next, passive audience members in this work of dance are given the chance to eagerly vote for the means w/ w/c they will be further made passive.

There is, of course, always the option not to watch Anything less is less than a reckless act. But who among us finds no pleasure in occasionally being subjugated, especially when subjugation comes minus the threat of authentic recklessness?


*Anything less is less than reckless act is an independent production by The Lovegangsters presented in cooperation with the French Embassy in Manila and Rimbun Dahan (Malaysia). Watch out for the KL premiere!

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Donna Miranda
• The Lovegangsters