OR
If you missed Dumb Type at the Museum of Contemporary Art last weekend, you may not have a chance to make up for your folly: the likelihood of seeing this Kyoto-based performance collective in Chicago again is slim. Formed in 1984, Dumb Type has never performed here before and only rarely been seen in the United States. They tour mainly in Europe, where their brand of nonlinear, image-based work is readily sponsored by government-supported theaters that truly value the arts–even art as gloriously enigmatic and useless as Dumb Type’s. Their hypercharged multimedia convolutions–which defy all waking logic, categorization, and easy assimilation–don’t lend themselves to “community outreach” or “at-risk-teen development,” as American performance work must these days to prove its worth to suspicious funders. Dumb Type shows how masterful a troupe of artists can become when beholden only to their own imaginations.
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And rarely will you see imaginations more thoroughly plumbed than in OR, Dumb Type’s 1997 piece about the border between life and death. Although the group created it during a monthlong residency at the Theatre du Manege in Maubeuge, France, they’d been discussing the ideas behind it for a year or so. Teiji Furuhashi, one of the company’s founding members, died of AIDS just as these discussions began, and sudden, untimely endings pervade the work. The piece begins with one such abruptly closed segment. A white-clad woman steps onto a white high-gloss floor and wheels a surgical gurney along the base of a high, curving white wall that sweeps back into the depths of the MCA’s stage. She abandons the gurney at the farthest point from the audience and continues walking along the wall, unhurried, deliberate, full of a mesmerizing nonchalant gravity. We almost hold our breath waiting for her to get offstage, but when she’s just steps from exiting, the lights black out with shocking suddenness. Things in this world end unexpectedly, by whim.
Dumb Type’s assault is also an aesthetic choice: the group eschews conventional theatrical structure in favor of a well-controlled flurry of activity not unlike Goat Island’s passionate but pedestrian movement. There are long, frantic dancelike sections early in the piece, with performers hopping about on one foot, windmilling their arms, spinning while holding white plastic chairs, and collapsing into one another’s arms–all performed under a harsh strobe light to frighteningly loud electronic music. These are counterpointed by even longer static passages of pure contemplation late in the piece: four people lounging in canvas deck chairs staring at nothing, a woman standing motionless before a huge video shot through the window of a car traveling along a highway in winter. Ranging from somber to campy, the piece is a curious hybrid of choreographed humiliations, high-tech pop-culture flourishes, and dance-club score, suggesting an unlikely collaboration between Pina Bausch and Pizzicato Five.
