Come Like Shadows…
Dexter Bullard is a contrarian. While almost everyone else in Chicago has been busy coddling viewers with safer and safer shows–revivals of the classics, productions by the same old playwrights (Shepard, Albee, McNally, Shanley), and toothless new plays that are a lot like the old ones–Bullard and his physical theater company, Plasticene, have been putting together relentlessly original, aggressively nonlinear pieces. Come Like Shadows… is the latest from this four-year-old troupe, a roughly hour-long work for seven performers that defies description: it tells no story, develops no characters, and contains no long dialogues (the only monologue is blurted out in a half-incoherent babble). Bullard’s actors don’t dance, nor do they sing.
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They do, however, move. Making theatrical entrances in full costume, they vigorously interact with one another and with simple props: scrims, batons, chairs, chains, candles. In one sequence Guy Van Swearingen and Sharon Gopfert play a very abstract territorial game with two armchairs that starts out funny, turns rather dark and oppressive, then lightens again. He drapes one leg over an arm of his chair, she drapes two legs over the arm of hers; while he stands and pretends to ignore his chair, she makes a lunge for it–and gets it. But in the meantime he’s made an end run around her and taken her seat. Later in the piece, in what seems a continuation of the game, Van Swearingen grabs the arms of a chair as it’s being lifted upside down into the flies and somersaults into the seat, “sitting” nonchalantly as the chair rises higher and higher. Has his character’s world been turned upside down? Or does the feat demonstrate his mastery of an extraordinary situation?
Bullard and Plasticene go to the opposite extreme in Come Like Shadows…, which they created together under Bullard’s direction: they put as much effort into keeping interpretation at arm’s length as advertisers do into making sure you yearn for their product by the end of a 30-second spot. In that sense the piece resembles not only Goat Island’s work but the strikingly visual performances Michael Kalmes Meyers used to present at MoMing Dance & Arts Center in the 80s. Eventually such works all come together, maybe near the end–as Meyers’s did–or maybe weeks later, which happened to me once after a Goat Island show while I was walking down the street thinking about something else. And if the viewer never experiences the blinding satori that brings order out of chaos, at least the fragments can be savored.
