There are moments in Meg Stuart and Philip Gehmacher’s “Maybe Forever” that you may never forget. The slow spread of Gehmacher’s arms, sunward, as a soft guitar crescendoes. A wrenchingly expressive duet between the dancers that bubbles with a darkly sexual subtext.
Then there’s the other 80 impenetrable minutes of this show.
The question is whether you’re willing to stomach the long stretches of herky-jerky movement, tinkling softcore guitar—with unintellegiable lyrics sung on top (Niko Hafkenscheid, electric guitar/singer)—and pretentious pseudo-monologues that comprise the majority of this interminably long performance. I longed for a curtain to drop right around the 50-minute mark (I know because I checked my iPhone). My seat-mate dozed off 60 minutes in. At 70 minutes, the young men in front of us started giggling uncontrollably. The applause at the performance’s end was likely the most tepid I’ve heard yet at TBA (and – OMG! – there were at least two lusty “boo’s” in the mix).
It’s a shame that Stuart and Gehmacher’s show goes skidding off the rails, because both are valuable artists. Stuart is an exquisite pixie with a shock of auburn hair and sinewy arms; Gehmacher – tall, lean and handsome in a very Portland way – specializes in understated eloquence. Their best dancing together had real crackle and heat. A series of modern-dress, modern-twisted-romance tableux halfway through was especially striking, ending with Gehmacher opening a window out into the world beyond. It was an extraordinary and deeply involving few minutes of dance.
It could have stopped there. It did not.
Meg Stuart + Philip Gehmacher with Damaged Goods and Mumbling Fish play one final performance Saturday, Sept 5 @ PCPA: Newmark Theatre. Photo courtesy TBA Festival.
They should watch more youtube. Brevity, man.
Thanks for not outing me as your sleeping seatmate, SMB, but since I already tweeted about it, I guess there’s no need to be coy.
This show didn’t do much for me. I thought there were a few really beautiful moments, overlaid by a lot of impenetrable and repetitive ones, with a dash of bad poetry and trite fourth wall manipulation thrown in. It felt too literal—now they’re fighting, now they’re reconciling, now he needs something that she’s not giving, now she’s running away. It got tiresome. Thus, the falling asleep.
I’d really like to hear from someone who got more out of it.
This show was a ponderous, pretentious waste of a lot of hard earned money.
On Saturday night, people left the upper seating area early and the remainder could no longer contain their laughter by the last monologue. We applauded obligingly but begrudgingly.
Complete. Fucking. Joke.
Wow, how did you get an iPhone?
I didn’t find Hafkenscheid’s lyrics “unintellegiable;” nor did the show go skidding off the rails—rather it experienced the entropic, screeching slow burn of a relationship you know should end but just can’t bring yourself to cut bait. If you called Stuart an exquisite pixie to her face, she’d head-butt you with a shock of auburn hair and sucker-punch you with her “sinewy arms;” Gehmacher, while tall, lean and handsome in a very Portland way, is far from having “understated eloquence”—instead he awkwardly stumbles through a man-child haze in a very Portland indie-boy way. Their best dancing is not about “crackle and heat” but about suffocating lyric desperation and resignation. A more ennui version of the Brazilian concept of “saudade”—the “vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist.”
I think it’s a stunning piece that falls flat with the second bout of talking-dancer, when Niko breaks the wall, and is about 12 minutes too long. What’s hard for people perhaps isn’t the pacing it’s bearing witness to the agonizing disintegration of love, expectation—it hits far too close for home for most—we’ve all been there. From a gestural standpoint, the intricacies of hands, arms, and self-preservational reflexes they employ are fascinating. The work is brimming with despair, not pretension. Ponderous, sure perhaps. It’s Endgame meets Scenes from a Marriage. Not for everyone, but I’m glad it was here.