56. Game Plans: Movie and book reviews by Cheryl S.
Now that Sandy (my friend and choreographer) and I have completed work on our new dance suite, Visions, we’ll keep it in rehearsal until the new video facilities on the 33rd floor of the Tower are ready and we can record it. Louise Ebersdorf says we might consider putting the video on the internet, or at least using a part of the suite as a teaser toward the day when we can perform it live post-pandemic. It’s been labor-intensive making the work via Zoom sessions, but I believe we have something interesting, and I now feel I am in good performance shape, despite the months of isolation. To thank Sandy, I have introduced him to the movies of Nancy Carroll. He is now a fan of that film actress. And he has responded in kind: Sandy insisted I watch a terrific new American movie on Amazon Prime: The Vast of Night. And he also gave me a new book and insisted I review it: Wendy Perron’s The Grand Union (Wesleyan, 2020).
I should warn readers who have not seen The Vast of Night that I am going to discuss it in some detail, so you have your Spoiler Warning! The plot is fairly simple. A 1950s radio DJ, Everett (played by Jake Horowitz) and his young friend, the local telephone switchboard operator, Fay (played by Sierra McKormick) become fascinated by unusual telephonic sounds and reports of “something in the sky” in and around their small home town of Chayuga, New Mexico. When Everett records and broadcasts the strange sounds over his station, WOTW, two reports eventuate: one from a retired soldier, Billy (voiced by Bruce Davis), who heard similar sounds when helping to build mysterious underground labs for the military; and another response from a local woman, Mabel (played by Gail Cronauer), whose young son disappeared and may have been abducted. An original tape of the sound sample is eventually located, and, when reproduced outdoors via a magnetic recorder, it appears to summon an immense alien mother ship, which may then spirit away Everett, Fay, and her infant sister, Daisy. The end of the film allows the viewer visual evidence to hypothesize a triple abduction.
The director, Andrew Paterson converts his narrative into a bravura demonstration of film style using the digital Big Red mobile camera to cover one night’s busy investigation by Everett and Fay. The opening exposition takes us into a high school gym where a basketball game is about to be played and where Fay allows Everett to activate her primitive 1950s magnetic recorder (“a toy”, he advises her) as they walk back to their places of employment through the emptied streets of the town. The Big Red video camera accompanies them every step of the way. The emphasis throughout the movie is on long takes. (There is one nine-minute monologue that is riveting.) At first you wonder why this emphasis on continuity and on reports from the deep past? Our hero and heroine carry the burdens of yesterday’s anomalies and a possibly momentous present.
The camera has to be mobile because Fay does a great deal of running in this film. (Everett uses automotive transport.) She rushes to find tape recordings in the local library, and she dashes to get her young sister out of harm’s way. And at times, we see the topography of Cayagu from just above street level, for example as the camera travels between Fay’s telephone office and the high school gym. (There is one transition between a window in that gym and the immediate exterior outside that I would love to have explained in technical detail – how did they get the camera through that window?) It is only after you have seen the entire film that you realize that Everett and Fay may have been under observation from above throughout. They are the gatherers and carriers of information that may be of interest to Other Eyes. At times, we in the audience may ourselves watch through those eyes. But we come to this insight only after some time.
We encounter three games in this film: the high school athletic contest on the basketball court, the investigation of Everett and Fay into the mystery of the recorded sounds, and what is ultimately revealed as the larger stratagems of extraterrestrials aware that their covert presence may be exposed via telephone wire and radio wave. And that something can be done to prevent this. (They would thus imitate the squirrel that reportedly chewed its way through a sound system wire at the gym.) I have to admit that I was fascinated by the slow revelation of the E.T. involvement in what we are watching almost from the beginning of the movie. Thanks to Madame Sesostris, I am an avid follower of MUFON reports of 2020 sightings of alien phenomena. One of the repeated motifs today is the presence of orbs or ships at outdoor rock concerts, fireworks displays, or MAGA rallies. The explanation has usually been that the E.T.s are as interested in such spectacles as human beings tend to be. But The Vast of Night suggests another possibility: those eyes in the skies are checking on the presence of large gatherings in order to find suitable occasions when loners (those who have not joined the big crowds) will be especially vulnerable to abduction outside the perimeter. At the end of Vast, we see that high school gym emptied of its audience after another kidnapping has taken place. Perhaps three vanishings. Cayuga’s population has been further reduced following another mass assembly.
We also come to realize that the varying point of view in the film, along with its narrative mobility from site to site and its fluid technology via modern digital filmmaking suggests the more-than-human mind-play of the extraterrestrials themselves. Some indication of their nature has been taken up into the very style and form of the work we are watching: they are “cinematic” beings in their powers. Everett and Fay are thereby in the grip of a kind of mind control as soon as they begin their investigation. The viewer is along for the ride. The ETs may represent an untapped (because unknowable) source of energy and intelligence.
Paterson’s film contains, among other things, a convincing study of current suburban paranoia. (If you live in the middle of nowhere, threat can emerge from any direction, any time – or so some think.) Billy’s testimony about the strange sounds is evidence that the government is in collusion with the extraterrestrials or prefers to lie to its citizens about their presence. Mabel’s story of her infant son’s speaking in a foreign tongue takes Manchurian candidate fears of subliminal influence all the way to Deep Space conspiracy theories. Everett may control the local airwaves as a disc jockey. Fay may keep the telephone callers informed. Both skills are “toys” in comparison with the supernal powers up above. At first, we are surprised that Everett does not respond to Mabel’s offering of a transcription of her son’s oracular babblings. Her ultimate appeal to be taken along so that she can be reunited with her missing son is one of the most moving moments in the film. But there is an irony in Everett’s refusal. Everett has recorded her reading from a slip of paper. He has evidence on tape. That tape will prove consequential.
The Vast of Night deals with a time when trust was possible, even when citizens are suspicious of extraterritorial game plans from afar. (Everett guesses that the Russians are involved.) The 2020 mind hesitates before such nostalgia. Paterson has himself edited his film not for jump shocks but for cumulative suspense over one nighttime. We are racing to keep up, alongside Fay. The cinematography by M. I. Littin-Menz stays close to the faces of the actors. Goodness knows what lies just beyond the trap of the film frame. Three times during Billy’s testimony, the screen fades to black. He is not only a lone voice in the night; he has been rendered invisible before his own testimony. The sound design by David Rosenblad leans on the aural evidence for transitory and suggestive implications. We might be listening to an old-fashioned radio play, with its appeal to the apocalyptic imagination.
The large frame for the movie is a shot of a television set showing an episode of Paradox Theater, a substitute for a Twilight Zone-style series. The adrenalin-rush “play” of Everett and Fay as they race to collect evidence is confirmed by the addition of the child Daisy to Fay’s rescuing arms. The movie is thus held in suspense between a youthful dream of freedom and the eventual heart-stopping fatality of visual confirmation. For Cayuyga’s citizens – so ready to be distracted by high school games – the finding of an abandoned tape recorder will be the main evidence that three youngsters have vanished. The audience is left with a high-altitude overview of the excursions of two would-be reporters, who have been unaware of their roles in another, higher game plan.
Games (the sophisticated type that are made up by the participants before an audience) are also a motif in Wendy Perron’s book on The Grand Union, the loose consortium of downtown performers who introduced ensemble improvisation to the New York scene in the early 1970s. The participants were made up of Judson Church veterans, trained dancers, and theater minds. They were thereby game reporters on the 1960s-1970s Zeitgeist. The group eventually included Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, Nancy Lewis, Yvonne Rainer, Lincoln Scott, and Becky Arnold. Perron’s book is subtitled “Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970-1976”.
When you think today of improvisation, you think of Isadora Duncan and the great jazz soloists. You think of Nichols and May reacting to suggestions from the audience with inspired comedy routines. You think of Peter Sellers, or at least the film and television records that captured some of Sellers’ witty impersonations. The problem with a theatrical group that uses movement is one of traffic control. Too little pre-planning, too little sensitivity to other bodies in space and time could send someone to the hospital. Perhaps this is the reason that there was so much verbal badinage in the Grand Union evenings. Dance movement had to be rationed in the interest of safety.
There is also the West End and New York theatrical tradition of featured performers offering late-night revues for an in-crowd at various clubs. A downtown “experimental” version could function as a way station or laboratory for more conventional work. The graduates of Grand Union went on to careers in concert dance, theater, film, and education. G.U. represented an opportunity to explore the improvisatory aspect of their performing arts, while allowing fans to see each of them in a different arena and style. Perron is thorough in indicating what afterlives became available to all concerned, although she gives minimum space to Steven Paxton’s contribution to contact improvisation.
Perron is generous with information about the individual performers throughout her book. She herself has danced, choreographed, written, edited and taught about downtown and uptown dance, but her actual attendance at the fabled Grand Union performances was limited. She has compensated for this absence of first-hand reportage with viewings of films and videos made of certain G.U. evenings, especially from residencies at universities and arts centers. And she has interviewed the hardy past-members of the ensemble, a number of whom have responded with interesting details and summaries of their experience in the group.
One G.U. inspiration (especially from Rainer) was the Judson Church movement in the 1960s. Since Judson had stressed the re-definition of dance (any movement might be seen as a form of dance), Grand Union was able to use visible signs of process, often work-related, to structure some of its improvisations. Various scenes had the qualities of adult games, although the rules of the sport were to be made up on the spot. I have seen excerpts from some of the G.U. evenings (they can currently be found on YouTube), and what is striking is the amount of time that the various encounters take to play out. Because the group was devoted to a leaderless regimen, we watch various performers waiting for a cue to join an aborning game plan. This takes time.
Perron has avoided imposing any kind of theory or analytical process of her own on her subject. When Douglas Dunn was asked in a Zoom discussion if the group ever repeated improvisatory templates, he replied that there was never a repetition of actions but there was a repetition of ideas that might lead to improvisation. It would have been interesting if he or Perron had specified what constituted an “idea” that might so lead to extemporaneous invention.
And what about the awareness of the group of theoretical or philosophical concepts that were present in the general culture at the time? I was reminded by this book and the videos of a period emphasis on the concepts of “game theory” and “play” and the possibility that such ideas could have informed Grand Union’s aesthetic. (Perron only treats such issues in passing.) Game theory was discussed widely in connection with strategies which the military might entertain during the cold war’s nuclear stand-off between the U.S. and Russia. And play featured in the writings of Jacques Derrida, especially in his discussion of the Rousseau-derived concept of the “supplement”. “[T]he movement of supplementarity,” Derrida wrote, is “the movement of play, permitted by the lack or absence of a center or origin.”
The French-born theorist Jacques Ehrmann imagined a future utopia that would use the freedom of “play” as an alternative to present anomie and tyranny. Here is an extract from his essay “About origin…”: “The only way out, then, would be to step outside the circle which confines us within the circumference of origin and end – a circle whose center is the presence/absence of man. It is not sufficient to think of man as an un-centered subject: this is still a mode of thinking which starts from man. The sole consequence of such an un-centering is that the circumference, i.e. the beginning and the end, is made fainter: it is not erased. Human nature will still be categorically and initially asserted by ‘culture,’ as it is hyposthasized into various concepts such as ‘labor’, language and play.” That prediction certainly sounds like a G.U. evening.
Ehrmann died in the early 1970s. Could the members of Grand Union have been aware of these or equivalent currents of thought? A leaderless performing collective might un-center group guidance and suggest new forms of freedom in ensemble action. Perron traces the G.U. inheritance of formative ideas from contemporary practitioners such as Anna Halprin, John Cage, Simone Forti, and the Judson examples. We do not learn in the Perron book about a wider philosophical matrix.
We do acquire bits of fresh information. David Gordon apparently saw Nicholas and May on Broadway, including their famed climactic on-stage argument whose “realism” was only contradicted by May turning to the audience and saying one word: “Pirandello”. Curtain. Standing ovation. That set-to alone could indeed inspire one to bouts of improvisation. The best prose in Perron’s book is found in her accounts of dancing with Trisha Brown. Could we have more about this choreographer, please? A complete book on Brown’s achievements as both dancer and dance maker would add immensely to our local knowledge of New York culture.
Since finishing Visions, I have been practicing breathing exercises in the mornings after I awake and before I get out of bed. The exercises not only relax and calm one before the day begins but they reveal how much a reserve of energy we build up overnight. There is a reservoir of psychic and physical strength that is available as soon as we arise. (In fact, I think it is the pressure of such strengths that propels us out of bed. As William James wrote, suddenly we find ourselves up on our feet, unconscious of the moment when the decision was made to rise.) Such is the surplus of unconscious impetus we carry with us into our daily lives. Playing each morning with such a vital supplement, all we must do then is invent the rules of the game.
C.S.
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