Being One Being Living
Gertrude Stein believed that plays should be landscapes, visual journeys for audiences with the curiosity and detachment of tourists, attentive to the alien details of another culture. Only then, she felt, could she keep up with the complexities of the playwright’s story, creating in essence her own snapshot of a place distant from the familiar world.
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The combination of the abstract and the specific is what makes these performances so evocative. The fluid “set” enhances the effect. Royd Climenhaga’s projections layer quotes from Stein over scenes from nature, brightly colored backdrops, or the uneven white surface of the theater’s back wall. Short films and black-and-white slides of the performers are also projected to create an imaginary past; most of these scenes simply show the same dances we see onstage but performed against the bleak backdrop of a factory landscape. The repetition without explanation mirrors Stein’s use of language, which is more like painting with words than conventional storytelling.
The collage of text, dance, music, and slides in Being One Being Living moves dreamlike through several phases that end in a sense of joy and completion, of escape from constriction. Throughout, the performance is surprisingly still, as if the dancers were moving in their sleep, their eyes focused on some middle distance or on each other, their thoughts turned inward. When they speak they seem to wake, and the piece would flow, perhaps from a moment of obsessive play (one woman pulling a ragged brown string, the other miming the same motion) to a moment of almost comic seriousness (reciting Stein’s meditation on disillusionment: “This then makes an old man or an old woman out of you”).
