Boxing Joseph Cornell
Rachel Rosenthal Company
In Boxing Joseph Cornell, performer-directors Greg Allen and Connor Kalista use references to Cornell’s life and work as a frame for their own experiences. The result is a kaleidoscopic series of theatrical boxes that physically and metaphorically shrink even as they’re stuffed with stories, images, and theories about the relationship between art and memory. It’s not surprising that they retell the story of Pandora’s box in the program notes–twice–since what flies out of their box of improvisational games and scripted narratives is entirely unpredictable.
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The opening-night performance began as the audience was filing in. Allen and Kalista were securing a large open-sided wooden cube at center stage by tying ropes to chairs. A few audience members were recruited to hold the ropes taut, eventually suspending the large box over the stage. This is a piece where there are few secrets; as in other Neo-Futurist works, the illusion is that the performers are simply accomplishing set tasks. Certainly Allen and Kalista are very good at performing themselves: Allen’s clownish sense of irony is an intriguing contrast to Kalista’s almost somber bluntness, particularly as they progress from scripted dialogue to exercises designed to call up incidents and images from their personal lives.
Boxing Joseph Cornell grows out of the Neo-Futurists’ vital aesthetic, still in progress. Though it has the potential for producing coy, self-conscious performance, the Neo-Futurists’ aim is to push artists into a state of vulnerability that provokes an honest experience for audience and actor alike. The results are entertainingly uneven in Too Much Light, but this production shows the aesthetic’s philosophical potential. Allen and Kalista quote Francis Bacon in the program: “I believe in deeply ordered chaos.” Boxing Joseph Cornell creates the sort of carefully framed, neatly boxed experience of chaos and randomness Cornell would probably have admired. After all, he once wrote, “Anyone who has shown any concern with my work and has not been moved or inspired to become involved…with the humanities in a down-to-earth context…has not understood its basic import.” The Neo-Futurists have obviously been moved, combining the experience of memory and the memory of experience in a down-to-earth collage that reconfigures Cornell’s eccentric, brilliant vision.
Such contrasts are instructive, demonstrating the ways that a performer can be both corrupted and bolstered by habits developed over many years. Rosenthal’s narrative is a roller coaster of emotional storytelling and coy intellectuality, but at moments her choreography gives the journey a visual and physical power that transcends the limitations of her blunt ideologies. Her dancers throw themselves into each scene, from the graphic, flirtatious gestures of a drag “office whore” to a threatening, dreamlike dance lit only by bulbs on their foreheads and wrists. Contrasting images and tones create uneven but lively tableaux: Kali-like orgies give way to haunting abstract scenes of rape and violation, while playful children’s gestures mutate into hypersexual scenarios.
