PERFORMANCE - Home the body as place by noemie lafrance

amazing show last nite by noemie lafrance and mare hieronimus. i was nervous about it having read recent reviews including one in vanity fair by a writer who clearly just didn't get it. and i must add that several of the audience members were extremely uncomfortable - one woman literally rushed for the door the minute it was over.

the performance invited the audience to convene around the body, interact with the performer (and each other) and explore the body as a place.

i thought it was brilliant. after being instructed to wash our hands, we entered a gothic, high-ceilinged, darkly lit room with a long wooden table on which a fully pregnant noemie was posed partially naked with a landscape of trees and farms featured on one hairy leg. we took our places around the table and it began. it was equal parts awkward, discomfiting, funny, gorgeous and totally sensual. the participatory nature of the performance was fantastic and at one point we were invited to take photos.

what also struck me as being significant about the performance is that artists will always create even if the economy is uncooperative. noemie lafrance's previous work has always entailed bigger spaces, bigger budgets but in this recessionary time, she was able to create possibly her best work ever on what i imagine is a minimal budget.

genius!!!!

UPDATE:
Schuyler Brown, friend and founder of Skyelab came to the show, too...great writeup! love:

Coming Home

Home is the latest site-specific performance from Brooklyn-based choreographer, Noemi La France. My friend, Irma, and I saw it…or, rather…we were in it last night.

The work is staged in the artist’s home–a typically quirky and wonderfully romantic Williamsburg loft–but the “home” of the title is the actually the body. Several bodies, in fact: Noemi’s eight-months pregnant body, the beautiful body of the dancer, Mare Hieronimus, and unsettinglingly…your own.

Recently I’ve noticed more performers working to break through the fourth wall–a strategic advantage for live theater in a world dominated by the passive escapist fantasies of movies and TV, and the “virtual reality” of video games. Noemi is a master. She plays with something she calls, “spatial participation,” which she describes as “the possibility for the audience to affect and be affected by the performance because of their actual physical presence.”

At the outset of Home, you enter the space as an audience member. You’re doing all the typically audience-y things: you bought your ticket in advance, picked it up and checked your coat, you stand waiting for the performance to start. It becomes clear Noemi has something else in mind for you when all 18 audience members are asked to don a nametag and wash their hands in the kitchen sink before the performance starts. Wash our hands?

Freshly scrubbed, the audience–now participants–is led into a dining room. The arrangement mimics a dinner party, but there in the center of the table is Noemi wearing little more than a set of antlers; her pregnant belly enormous at eye level as we sit around her. As she crawls down the table to take her seat at the head, we are given magnifying glasses to inspect the tiny tableau of animals and plants arranged on her leg from thigh to ankle.

Yes, it’s weird. Yes, it’s Williamsburg. Yes, you must submit to make it wonderful.

Subsequent “acts” involve a muddy strip tease, a messy tea service, Noemi brushing her teeth a little too gleefully, a word game played with crayons on the naked body of her collaborator, and…well, a mummification.

What’s the point of all this? Visceral, sensual, discomfort.

With each scene, the guests are asked to take on more responsibility for the progression of action. We are handed tea, crayons, paper, towels, flashlights and glue. We struggle individually and with the help of those around us to figure out what to do with them. We whisper to each other. Some laugh and play along. Some cross their arms and look like they might cry.

Home is a vivid experience that manages to make reality feel more surreal and more real at the same time. You are forced to have an experience and for every person that experience will be different based on comfort zone, ideas about the body, ideas about group dynamics, and knowledge of the self within a group.

For me one of the most powerful moments was when Noemi commanded us to look at the person opposite us and do exactly what they are doing. I looked across the table at a lovely older woman who was too uncomfortable to meet my gaze. She fidgeted and cast her eyes about. She smiled and smirked, while I did what I was told and imitated her every move. It was a strange feeling, I was just following orders and yet I was suddenly an aggressor, invading this stranger’s space.

Unpredictable and challenging moments like this force you to find comfort within your self, your own home. I watched myself advance and retreat. I watched myself opening and closing. I can only assume the people around me were going through something similarly personal and yet, because we were “in it” together, collective.

When it was all over I felt exhilarated and cleansed. I felt like a victor. I wanted to know more about my companions, celebrate with them. We’d come together–the random lot of us–for an intimate and unpredictable hour and a half. We’d been exposed, and we’d overcome.

But, the show ended as abruptly as it started. We shuffled out of the room, collected our coats and wandered out into the night to go to our respective…homes.

www.skyelab-ny.com
-iz