"Hey Girl" by Societas Raffaello Sanzalo on January 18, 2008 at the Museum of Contemporry Art

"Hey Girl" is the kind of piece that performance art groups strive to achieve. It is a true combination of theater and visual art, with non-narrative movement through time and technically dazzling design elements that work together to create a coherent piece. At a time when experimental theater is striving to break away from realism and art is a mixture of media, the Italian theater company Societas Raffaelo Sanzlo achieves what others are experimenting with. 

One walks into a theater that is humid and foggy and dark. The lights come up to show a table with a large blob of melting flesh in which one recognizes a foot hanging off the side of the metal table and a woman's head on top. With loud, arresting music that seems to be announcing the arrival of something while also marking the passing of time, the flesh-colored blob melts and falls off the table, revealing the naked body of woman who slowly sits up on the table and slowly walks up stage, her back to us. Upon getting off the table, the female figure still has no head but slowly a hear appears, then hair.  She looks at herself in a mirror and stumbles across the stage where she bangs on a drum and puts on some clothes. We witness her birth, rising out of a primordial blob, and see her develop into a recognizable human being. The image is fascinating, a technical feat (what is that blob made out of, one wonders), and meaningful (we recognize what is happening). It is an artifact (the blob is sculpture) and a performance (the birth of this creature).

The rest of the performance is no less astounding. Some of my favorite images include an attack upon the girl when a couple dozen young men, mostly in black, attack the girl with black pillows. The stage is dark and the lighting and sound design are such that it almost seems like a video piece. Another is of a naked and headless black woman with metallic paint on her body (creating the image of an armor) walking through broken glass with high heels wielding a large sword, an oversized girlish head with blond hair that once once her head, now upside down on the floor as though it's been lopped off.

There is no story here. No narrative about what has happened to this girl, raised up out of a primordial blob. But we witness a series of tableaus/images as she develops as a being and a person, learning about and reacting to the world, experiencing conflict and taking up her own coat of arms as a response. It manages to cohere, as successful art does. It is a combination of art forms and none at the same time. As a viewer, we are compelled by the way the piece works. We take in the beautiful images and we also work to create meaning. In the scene of the black woman walking among the shattered glass in high heels, a kind of armor on, wielding a sword, we are presented with a collection of visually and conceptually striking images and we are work hard, are compelled even, to make sense of it. We have images of Joan of Arc, the danger of walking on broken glass, the protection of high heels but also their counter-feminist associations, the presence of a black female body in itself trying to hide itself, etc. They somehow seem related and we have to bring our associations and imagination to make meaning of it. The piece is given to us but means more when we, as audience members, work to make something of it, using associations borne out of history and our own ideas to complete it as a thought piece. It's an amazing accomplishment.

Maybe this is where theater and art are right now, or at least one of the places. It takes some of its shape from the visual arts (painting, sculpture, and video) and theater and literature, each contributing what its discipline has traditionally offered but interacting with us in a way that none of the disciplines have accomplished in their individual histories.