Happiness
They are present in their tiny studio performance space as the audience gathers, tying their shoes, checking their props, offering wine to their guests. Once the piece starts (which seems to happen almost as an afterthought), they don’t adopt personae or don costumes in an attempt to transport us to a fictional land or a distant time. Rather, they clip themselves to straps screwed into the rafters and simply dangle, staring patiently and smiling at friends in the audience, content to do nothing for a god-awful long time.
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In other words, this is work as beguiling as it is demanding. For every moment of transcendent beauty there is a moment of frustrating opacity. And the performers never tip their hands. Right from the start, hanging from the ceiling in the middle of their windowless room, which is painted a surreal robin’s-egg blue from top to bottom, they seem at once committed and blase, as fond of precise gestures as empty pauses. The lavish Broadway-style overture that plays from a boom box one of them holds as he dangles only reinforces the complete lack of build in this opening “scene.” The performers are an uncrackable enigma, a crashing bore, a mischievous insult to theatrical good taste everywhere.
The central images in this piece constellate around traditional signifiers of happiness: leaping into the air over and over, playing childhood games, singing “la la la la la.” But these signs have been yanked out of context and scattered almost haphazardly throughout the evening. They no longer instill joy in the performers (perhaps they never did), who end up barking “Smile!” at one another over and over. Even dancing about in homemade bear costumes seems about as enjoyable as making out a grocery list.
In the piece’s most striking moment, Zerkel stands atop a stool, illuminated by a square of light from an overhead projector, her left leg out to the side and her arms spread wide above her head in a pose reminiscent of the Michael Jordan silhouette used to promote Nike Air. (Jordan, as the men have informed us earlier in the piece, appears happy because “he really gets off the ground.”)
