The Cunt In Me, or, “Sir, you are my property”
Ann Liv Young as George Washington (from The Times)
When the music gets loud, all bets are off. Be afraid.
This is but one of the things you can predict in Ann Liv Young’s latest full-evening piece, now being tolerated at The Kitchen, a venue that has welcomed back Ms. Young’s regard-no-limits performance work for another go around, hoping, I’m sure, for more jam-packed crowds clambering over each other to steal a glimpse of some yet even more daring feat of sexual activity.
Well, they got it. Unfortunately, that’s all they got.
The latest work, “The Bagwell In Me,” a trite portrayal of George Washington’s love affair and siring of a child with one of his and Martha’s slaves, Oney, played by a much abused Isabel Lewis, touches obliquely on various sexual and political themes while offering no real insight and insisting upon petulance and novelty as key modes of theater. And as much as Ms. Young can argue herself out of knee-jerk criticisms of her more outrageous choices, nothing can justify the many moments of “Bagwell” that are simply boring and not thought out.
Still, what struck me as most disappointing about this work was the sheer habit and predictability of its calculation.
When the music gets loud (a nice effect that basically disorients the audience, leaving them vulnerable to attack), you’re going to witness some bad singing; some tits and vaginas wagging. An object will be inserted into Ms. Lewis’s vagina. And Ms. Young will walk up into the audience and rub on them, and you will be scared that she is going to do it to you.
Some of the more strictly theatrical vignettes are entertaining, but these give way too easily to yet more rounds of high decibel orgiastic ritual.
What else, Ms. Young’s trademark laconic demands, the stopping and starting, the real sex content–even Ms. Lewis in black face (bless her heart), having a towel put over her head, a noose around her neck, getting dragged around the floor and then whipped by Ms. Young (as Martha) with a wet cloth–all came off as expected tricks from the Ann Liv Young grab bag, none of them ringing as fresh or daring as they may have in the past. Not only do we expect Ms. Young to do these things, but the familiarity of some of the gestures undermines what I thought to be one of Ms. Young’s strong points: her aesthetics of reality.
The fact that she can literally make the audience feel that they are in physical danger is still something to marvel at, even though I, personally, don’t believe that this falls under the definition of art. It’s real fear, because there is a real possibility that Ms. Young will hurt you physically (I saw one woman take a sharp one to the jaw when Ms. Young thrust her battery-pack clad pelvis into the woman’s face). The fear one experiences, say, riding a roller coaster, is art (or artificial) because there is an understanding that the makers of the roller coaster will not actually let harm come to you. No such understanding is granted to those who attend one of Ms. Young’s performances. You could actually walk out with a black eye. (Or at least a serious case of lockjaw.)
This crisis came to a fore Friday evening, when, apparently, one man in the audience shoved Ms. Young off of his physical person while she was meandering through the aisles, all sweated up and stanky, stopping here or there to grind on some audience members’ laps. When pushed, she immediately ran down to her Macbook, stopped the music, and asked the man if he had a problem, and that if he did, then he should leave.
The man wouldn’t leave, which made me and others feel that this may have been a plant (there were also rumors that the man was an usher at The Kitchen), but the fact that we are even debating the authenticity of the moment shows just how much Ms. Young is able to check our attachment to the real.
At this point, Ms. Young delivered probably one of the most lucid articulations of her philosophy as an artist of performance:
“Sir, you are my property. Like everyone here. Like Isabel,” who presently was wearing a bikini and bending herself over a table that was covered with a ratty plus-sized American flag.
Now, this could have been Ms. Young acting in character as Martha Washington, slave-owning cunt that she may have been. She even exclaimed, “Your talking to Martha fucking Washington!”
Eh, maybe.
But the more probable reality is that Ms. Young felt pressed to articulate her world view to someone who was acting outside of it.
“If you don’t want to be a part of this performance, you can leave,” she demanded, then asking him if he wanted her to perform fellatio on him.
When he declined, and still refused to leave, Ms. Young put the music back on, told him to fuck off, and started booty dancing again, even cutting back over to him, shaking her body in his face and then threatening him not to “punch” her.
Ah, Ann Liv Young! So classy… So genteel…
It should be noted that the audience did not feel inclined to get the guy to leave, nor did they even slightly boo. Neither did anyone really applaud Ms. Young for taking a stand to defend her work. Perhaps feeling similarly abused, we were caught between sympathizing with the guy and not wanting to draw Ms. Young’s wrath.
But what is most disheartening about this incident, is that Ms. Young, by her actions against this gentleman, disproved one of the few arguments I’ve had to defend her work: That perhaps one of her goals is to challenge the complacency of the contemporary audience. A noble cause and one that I would encourage all performers to take up.
But Ms. Young’s motives turn out to be less than altruistic. By trying to eject an audience member who reacted genuinely to her physical aggression, Ms. Young exposes a childish double standard. She wants to engage in out of bounds play but then expects the audience to behave within the boundaries of concert etiquette. More crudely put, she wants to eat her pussy, and live-feed it too. Which, she does.
Whatever, maybe she’ll get away with this for many more years to come. Maybe it enriches the performance scene to have at least one emissary of complete and total creative selfishness.
But with “Bagwell,” Ms. Young has more to worry about than whether or not the audience behaves itself. For starters, how about making work that doesn’t suck.
The last performance is tonight.
UPDATE:
Other verdicts are in.
Here’s Andy Horowitz’s take on Culturebot.
And, of course, Dearest L. Ro for The Times.
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Ryan: I am a steadfast believer in Ann Liv’s work. It’s some of the freshest, most dynamic theater I’ve ever seen. I am amazed at how she is truly able to hold us in the moment, something rarely attained in theater these days. I must admit that the new work was not my favorite piece, but Ann Liv does not stop captivating my imagination. I look forward to discussing the work more with you in person.
Hey Bill-
Thanks so much for commenting! And let’s definitely get together to chat in person.
I will admit that I, too, am fascinating by Ann Liv’s work. That’s no doubt why I’ve devoted so much attention to it. I also have another piece in the works that should come out over the weekend.
But for me, “Bagwell” was a let down, and a let down–I feel–because of the presumably riskier elements of the work. Which is to say, what would seem to distinguish her work, actually weighed it down and sent it into territories that didn’t keep me in the moment; that bored me.
Ann Liv Young “The Bagwell In Me”
Kurt Kren has noted, “No wound ever speaks for itself”
We have Ann Liv Young to speak for the ‘wound”…
When thinking about Ann Liv Young, one must remember the early
actionists in the 50′s in Vienna who moved beyond all social
boundaries with their aggressive performance actions straight from
the Id, shoved the world back at their viewers and defied all social
expectations of decorum . Their torch is carried high by Ann Liv
Young , a force to behold, whose newest production at the Kitchen,
“The Bagwell in Me” is a daring and stellar work. She performs a kind
of exorcism in which she acts as our ‘primal scream’. There are
three major characters in the play whose story centers around George
Washington, his wife Martha and a slave they own whose name is Oney.
Young plays two roles as both George Washington and Martha, Ms.
Isabel Lewis, a dancer and choreographer, portrays the slave ‘Oney and
Michael Guerrero’s laconic character is a Jack of all trades.
The inception of this mind boggling narrative began when Young
discovered her relatives, the Bagwell’s, owned slaves. To explore this
shocking fact further, she created a play revolving around the ever
moral and genteel George Washington, who could not tell a lie when he
chopped down the cherry tree. History lies and conveniently leaves
out the sordid tales of ownership of human beings, objectified as
flesh, traded for money, used for sexual pleasure and then tossed
away. Willing to look the revulsion of owning people straight in the
eye, Young forces the audience to strip down as well, to drop their
guard, to blow open that pristine portrait of George Washington and
all the George Washington’s of the world who speak and live as
hypocritical racists. George Washington’s shiny face is as tarnished
as every other slave-owner and trader of flesh, a fact which still
remains with us today. Not even a week ago we witnessed John McCain
shooting his hand at Obama saying “that one over there.” He never
would have uttered that if he was debating Kerry or any other white
person. That is certain.
In “Bagwell” Young breaks boundaries with the audience. I say break
boundaries, because interacts is too cold and performed. Young moves
from the stage into the audience with livid bold vehemence, fury and
the look of a person obsessed’ . Her jump into the audience it is
yet, it was not gratuitous. This play absolutely called for those
Actions, with a capitol A.
The story line is goes as follows: George Washington is having sex
with his slave Oney, who he believes he loves. Oney has no choice,
she has to have sex with her ‘master’ and Martha Washington wants to
kill Oney. The choreographer, Ms Lewis, who plays the slave Oney,
took great risks herself, while donning black face as a black woman,
her character is bound, gagged, tortured, and literally raped on stage
by the dildo wielding George Washington. She must swear undying love
for George Washington and depicts her desperate survival instinct for
herself and her child. We think we understand the horrors of slavery
from literature and films that depict slavery, yet Young made palpable
the horror of utter vulnerability a slave must endure. The point is
made, showing that our society is still struggling with the “help.”
The ferocious veracity of Young’s message lunges at the audience as
she sharpens her sword on a litany of words and actions, destroying
all dramaturge decorum. In her startling visceral performance she does
not let one complacently sit – we are active participants in this
harrowing tale of lust, betrayal, danger, domination, slave trade, and
lineage which still resonates. One of her trademarks in most of her
performances is to break the narrative movement of the story by
interjecting a different story.
Splitting time apart, she vacillates between the historical scenes
with George Washington and contemporary strip clubs. She unsettles the
audience by blurring the boundaries between the real and the scripted,
mingling impromptu commands into the performance, for instance, at one
moment demanding her sound be fixed, or the music in her computer made
louder. It is a hard act to pull off, but whereas others generally
produce a contrived result, Young succeeds in creating a fusion of the
real, the fictional, the imagined, the constructed, and the
manipulated. By destroying the traditional play format, the audience
is disoriented, our equilibrium overthrown, placing us in a vulnerable
position. She interestingly aligned the stripper disco to slavery,
raising issues of the ‘body’ with regard to who owns it. The girls in
strip clubs are paid to become objectified. Yet, they have a choice in
most instances. The reference to another kind of flesh trade, for
amusement and excitement, is an increasingly complex thread. Did she
shock people, yes, did she titillate, perhaps, did she gross out to
coin a phrase, maybe…did she scare the audience, yes.
I have read the sniggering notes written that imply this is a
superficial and simplistic play that adds nothing to our understanding
of slavery. One would have to wonder what it would take to wake this
unconscious person up, given what was put before him on stage. Young’s
play is a powerful treatise on the horrors of slavery (of all kinds-
if one wants to stretch beyond the obvious) all oppression is
tyranny–and psychological and community oppression, while polite can
also kill the soul. ” Bagwell” exposes the troubles at the heart of
global economies and politics as well as the minutiae of personal
lives. I have also read that she re-use her ‘riffs’. All artists have
a signature style. If they are good, we come back for more.Sam Shepard
does not write like Thomas Pynchon, Scorsese does not direct like Gus
Van Zant, Pina Bauch does not dance like Ann Liv Young. Each of these
aforementioned artists have identifiable strong styles, which is part of why we
like their work and their content is dependent on the delivery. Form
does follow function.
Ms. Young’s aggression was needed to shake the audience and wake them
up. As the band The National have sung in their song “Asleep in the
Fake Empire,” we need to get banged in the head to wake up in our fake
empire. We are all so
inured from genre films of blood and gore and sentimental
documentaries of the horrors of slavery, which distance racism as if
it has dissipated. We are lost in our computers. Ms. Young exposes the
fear that one’s flesh, their being, may be subjected to another’s
whims. At any moment you may be murdered, raped, tortured. We may be
sitting in the safety of our seats, yet, we are not comfortable.
Young, it can be said, lives in the spirit of the great line of
eye-opening humans who make wake up ‘art’ such as Paul McCarthy,
Marina Abramovic,Dieter Roth, Karen Finley, Annie Sprinkle,
Valie Export, Thomas Hirshhorn, or Kurt Kren who collaborated with
the performance artists Günter Brus and Otto Mühl, Kren on a series of
films made between 1964 and 1967 in which they fornicated and shit.
Yes, that is appalling yet- these films were made to expose our
‘shit’. They were a simple, powerful statements of the human
condition.
Young, whose elastic face can within seconds go from rage to
angelic (she is quite beatific when she smiles)
exposes the dirty raw horror of these actions.as she defies good
manners yet she
embodies an enormous amount of vulnerability, which makes the rage so
much more poignant and terrifying. In the last scene of the wild ride
in “Bagwell” Oney sings a Sam Cooke song “Change is Gonna Come.” It
was performed as a lament which brought some of us to tears after the
relentless energy, disorientation and ‘fear’ that Ann so brilliantly
put on stage. To be terrified and mesmerized, hypnotized and
fulfilled, to be on the skin of your flesh and the edge of your
senses- is something quite phenomenal- given how jaded and unperturbed
the art world has become with regard to performance and living on the
edge, along with the world at large that accepts the death filled days
of children and innocent people and only worry that someone who knows
how to read might find their way into their backyards. I am not only
speaking of America here. Polite is everywhere- Ann is not polite.
Polite is boring, Ann is anything but…
And as I digress, I left out mentioning the other stars of the show,
the audience and the tech people without whom Young’s performance
would not be able to be carried back out into the world.
Hi Elyse-
Thanks for this in-depth comment. As soon as I have a chance to sit down and read all of it, I’ll try to respond.
xoxoC.C.
hi, Thank you.. And i would like to exchange the previous text with the text in this email. it has a few corrections… and they should be noted.. the corrected text is as follows:
Kurt Kren has noted, “No wound ever speaks for itself”
We have Ann Liv Young to speak for the ‘wound”…
When thinking about Ann Liv Young, one must remember the early
actionists in the 50′s in Vienna who moved beyond all social
boundaries with their aggressive performance actions straight from
the Id, shoved the world back at their viewers and defied all social
expectations of decorum . Their torch is carried high by Ann
LivYoung , a force to behold, whose newest production at the
Kitchen,”The Bagwell in Me” is a daring and stellar work. She performs
a kind of exorcism in which she acts as our ‘primal scream’. There
arethree major characters in the play whose story centers around
GeorgeWashington, his wife Martha and a slave they own whose name is
Oney.Young plays two roles as both George Washington and Martha,
Ms.Isabel Lewis, a dancer and choreographer, portrays the slave ‘Oney
andMichael Guerrero’s laconic character is a Jack of all trades.
The inception of this mind boggling narrative began when Young
discovered her relatives, the Bagwell’s, owned slaves. To explore
thisshocking fact further, she created a play revolving around the
ever moral and genteel George Washington, who could not tell a lie
when hechopped down the cherry tree. History lies and conveniently
leaves out the sordid tales of ownership of human beings, objectified
asflesh, traded for money, used for sexual pleasure and then tossed
away. Willing to look the revulsion of owning people straight in the
eye, Young forces the audience to strip down as well, to drop their
guard, to blow open that pristine portrait of George Washington and
all the George Washington’s of the world who speak and live as
hypocritical racists. George Washington’s shiny face is as tarnished
as every other slave-owner and trader of flesh, a fact which still
remains with us today. Not even a week ago we witnessed John McCain
shooting his hand at Obama saying “that one over there.” He never
would have uttered that if he was debating Kerry or any other white
person. That is certain.
The story line is as follows: George Washington is having sex with his
slave Oney, who he believes he loves. Oney has no choice,
she has to have sex with her ‘master’ and Martha Washington wants to
kill Oney. The choreographer, Ms Lewis, who plays the slave Oney,took
great risks herself, while donning black face as a black woman,her
character is bound, gagged, tortured, and literally raped on stage by
the dildo wielding George Washington. She must swear undying love for
Washington and depicts her desperate survival instinct for herself and
her child. We think we understand the horrors of slavery from
literature and films that depict slavery, yet Young made palpable the
horror of utter vulnerability a slave must endure. The point is made,
showing that our society is still struggling with the “help.”
The ferocious veracity of Young’s message lunges at the audience as
she sharpens her sword on a litany of words and actions, destroying
all dramaturge decorum. In her startling visceral performance she
doesnot let one complacently sit – we are active participants in this
harrowing tale of lust, betrayal, danger, domination, slave trade, and
lineage which still resonates. One of her trademarks in most of her
performances is to break the narrative movement of the story by
interjecting a different story.Splitting time apart, she vacillates
between the historical sceneswith George Washington and contemporary
strip clubs. She unsettles the
audience by blurring the boundaries between the real and the
scripted,mingling impromptu commands into the performance, for
instance, at one moment demanding her sound be fixed, or the music in
her computer made louder. It is a hard act to pull off, but whereas
others generallyproduce a contrived result, Young succeeds in creating
a fusion of the real, the fictional, the imagined, the constructed,
and the
manipulated. By destroying the traditional play format, the audience
is disoriented, our equilibrium overthrown, placing us in a vulnerable
position. She interestingly aligned the stripper disco to
slavery,raising issues of the ‘body’ with regard to who owns it. The
girls in
strip clubs are paid to become objectified. Yet, they have a choice in
most instances. The reference to another kind of flesh trade, for
amusement and excitement, is an increasingly complex thread. Did she
shock people, yes, did she titillate, perhaps, did she gross out to
coin a phrase, maybe…did she scare the audience, yes.
In “Bagwell” Young destroys boundaries with the audience. I say
destroy boundaries, because interacts is too cold and performed. Young
moved from the stage into the audience with livid bold vehemence, fury
and the look of a person obsessed’ . Her entrance into the audience
was not gratuitous. This play absolutely called for those Actions,
with a capitol A. It was mentioned that she assaulted her audience
members in Bagwell.She did not assault the audience in this piece. The
aggression was completely called for in George. if one is dealing with
slave owners who could at the drop of a pin rape and pillage their
work force, kill them, unexpectedly, have them live on the edge of
terror- then Ann succeeded in making us feel afraid- in the safety of
our seats. I saw the play on Friday- and she barely touched the man
who complained.I was sitting in his row and saw the entire “incident”
her quick intelligence was able to not only step into the real
universe and give him hell for hassling her- she was also able to stay
in character as an “owner of human beings… As she stated to the
complaining audience member “I own you are all my slaves.
It was breathtaking watching her switch back and forth between being
George Washington and Martha… Speaking in voices… Breaking out of
storyline to dance strip disco thereby throwing expected body rhythms
off in the viewers.
In Young’s previous performance, at the Kitchen, Snow White – her
actions were kept within the confines of the stage. the story was a
non linear tortured love rant- based on the storybook character of
Snow White. Live is no Snow White. Moving in and out of character she
read love letters, sangs songs of loss, laments the broken heart,
becomes a late night DJ drifting into psychologically complex and
pained narration. Ms. Young tries to understand human connections in
all her works. She is our connection to lost loves, passion, and
confusion. I read a review that implies Bagwell is a superficial and
simplistic play that adds nothing to our understanding
of slavery. One would have to wonder what it would take to wake this
unconscious person up, given what was put before him on stage. Young’s
play is a powerful treatise on the horrors of slavery (of all kinds-
if one wants to stretch beyond the obvious) all oppression is
tyranny–and psychological and community oppression, while polite can
also kill the soul. ” Bagwell” exposes the troubles at the heart of
global economies and politics as well as the minutiae of personal
lives. I have also read that she re-use her ‘riffs’. All artists have
a signature style. If they are good, we come back for more.Sam Shepard
does not write like Thomas Pynchon, Scorsese does not direct like Gus
Van Zant, Pina Bauch does not dance like Ann Liv Young. Each of these
aforementioned artists have identifiable strong styles, which is part
of why we like their work and their content is dependent on the
delivery. Form does follow function.
Young’s aggression was definitely needed to shake the audience and
wake us up. a line in a song “Fake Empire” by The band The National,
is “we’re half-awake in a fake empire”. Well we are half awake.Every
now and then we need to get banged in the head to wake up in our fake
empire. I am glad to have Young around for that. We are all so inured
from genre films of blood and gore and sentimental documentaries of
the horrors of slavery, which distance racism as if it has dissipated.
We are lost in our computers. . Young exposes the fear that one’s
flesh, one’s very being, may be subjected to another’s whims. At any
moment you may be murdered, raped, tortured. In fact, it also
highlights the sad tale of torture the current administration
continues to inflict on the detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.
Young, it can be said, lives in the spirit of the great line of
eye-opening humans who make wake up ‘art’ such as Paul McCarthy,
Marina Abramovic,Dieter Roth, Karen Finley, Annie Sprinkle,Valie
Export, Thomas Hirshhorn, or Kurt Kren who collaborated with the
performance artists Günter Brus and Otto Mühl, Kren on a series of
films made between 1964 and 1967 in which they fornicated and shit.
Yes, that is appalling yet- these films were made to expose our
‘shit’. They were a simple, powerful statements of the human
condition. Pathos runs through “Bagwell” .
Young, whose elastic face can within seconds go from rage to angelic
(she is quite beatific when she smiles) exposes the dirty raw horror
of these actions.as she defies good manners yet she embodies an
enormous amount of vulnerability, which makes the rage so much more
poignant and terrifying. In the last scene of the wild ride in
“Bagwell” Oney sings a Sam Cooke song “Change is Gonna Come.” It was
performed as a lament which brought some of us to tears after the
relentless energy, disorientation and ‘fear’ that Ann so brilliantly
put on stage. To be terrified and mesmerized, hypnotized and
fulfilled, to be on the skin of your flesh and the edge of your
senses- is something quite phenomenal- given how jaded and unperturbed
the art world has become with regard to performance and living on the
edge, along with the world at large that accepts the death filled days
of children and innocent people and only worry that someone who knows
how to read might find their way into their backyards. I am not only
speaking of America here. Polite is everywhere- Ann is not polite.
Polite is boring, Ann is anything but…
And as I digress, I left out mentioning the other stars of the show,
the audience and the tech people and of course The Kitchen without
whom Young’s performance would not be able to be carried back out into
the world.