monodramas in New York

Monodramas!

Antonin Artaud’s drawings mesmerize you. Astonishingly, at the City Opera, one of them: La Machine de l’être – the Machine of Being – is presented in a breathtaking ten-minute scene.  All the bodies on stage are draped entirely in black, and it is the job of the two persons who appear in each of the three monodramas to undrape them as needed: a man in red, a singer in black, and a man levitating above the stage. No text, no plot, but a sort of building anxiety through the three acts of the music by John Zorn, composed in the year 2000.

In Schoenberg’s Erwartung,  from 1909, the anxiety is that of the woman in the forest, who loves and hates the man recumbent on the floor of the stage, and it is communicated to the audience throughout the 30 minutes of the presentation.

But REAL anxiety shows through Morton Feldman’s brilliant piece of 1976, “Neither,” on a libretto by Samuel Beckett, beginning with shadows inner and outer, making its way “from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither” and ending with an ultra Beckettian lament – or then recognition:

then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither

unspeakable home

Quite a lot of business: strobe lights, appearing and disappearing figures, cubes descending from the ceiling and – touchingly, if oddly – on the  horizon, a small house.

Unspeakable, yes, but the music comes through as doing its own saying. Not that we could figure out or pass on, were we asked to elucidate. The light, that unfading light, takes us far, our self on the way on the unself. Beckett’s negatives work with no busyness to them, they simply are.

doing things backwards

I loved today, which made itself a perfect example of doing things backwards: very. The 6 train didn't feel like making local stops, so 645 people and me left the 96th street station (local) with a choice to WALK to 86th street (express) or take the bus. It was 13 degrees, so the walking option seemed sort of unappealing to me. I climbed, with about 643 of us into the bus and had a fine time reading Unica Zurn, for whom I have to write a catalogue text for the Drawing Center. Never mind that I  have it in French and will have to quote it in English -- from the German, ooof -- I was riveted. 

Arrived VERY late for an exam we were giving, brilliant Haitian student, then made my way to the Ginger Man for a winter ale with a delightful student now living in France, then (brrrr) over to the bus to get to the oh so terribly cute Alice's Tea Cup on 73rd, West Side, to meet two historian friends. Loved it, ginger tea and ginger molasses cookie, so dry that I had to drench it in milk to consume it sensibly. Did that. 

Freezing bus home, we warmed up a stew I made last week, doused it with Thai sauce, tried making blackberry cabernet sauvignon sherbet (well, the truth will out: Boyce made it, I just licked the dashers), and now I get to read the newspapers from yesterday and today. 

Children here this morning, and yesterday morning -- joy be -- and friends last night. 

Tomorrow morning, after my Pilates class, we meet Susan Salm, my favorite friend cellist, and Frieder her painter husband in the Greek and Roman galleries of the Met Museum.

Life in New York.