An immersive work that tackles our inaction on the climate crisis, What Am I Supposed To Do (WAISTD) is inventive but politically underwhelming, says Robert Reid
Developed as part of the Take Over! Commission, supported by Melbourne Fringe and the Arts Centre, What am I Supposed to Do (WAISTD) is a participatory dance work which critiques Australia’s inaction on climate change.
Choreographed by Sarah Aiken and Rebecca Jensen, WAISTD takes over the whole space of the Fairfax, foyer and all, filling it with so much imagery and movement that it’s possible to take in completely. The six dancers (Aiken, Jensen, Claire Leske, Megan Payne, Alexander Powers and Ngioka Bunda-Heath) guide us in groups through choreographed movement, each group experiencing its own journey, sometimes clashing with other groups, sometimes in our own worlds, all with an environmental theme.
As always with immersive work, I’m on alert from the arrival. Sitting in the foyer waiting as audience gather, I notice the various tells that things are beginning: the people who move about, stopping in strategic places around the foyer, a shade over dressed for a Saturday afternoon, looking around with intent, surveying the room, watching for the signal to start.
Aiken and Jensen climb the stairs and address us. They tell us about the project, and deftly move to teaching us how we will participate by rehearsing our own deaths. With no more instruction than that, the speakers collapse to the ground. The cast who have moved through the room and hidden around us collapse as well, and it’s enough for the adventurous among us to cotton on and join in. The wave of dying spreads until the foyer of the Fairfax is littered with dead bodies. A disturbing image gently achieved in the climate of gun violence in America that panicked the Broadway pedestrians. Rehearsal or no, I think: this is not the way I want to die, waiting for a show in this foyer.
Of course, we already know we’re here to participate. We’ve been prepared by the content warnings posted around the foyer and online, so we are primed to look for opportunities to participate. After a contemplative moment or two of being dead, we’re invited into the theatre. Inside we find our way to the mezzanine where we stand ready to watch. There’s a subtle use of light as a guide: when everything else is dark we go where the light is, without being asked.
The seats of the Fairfax are covered with plastic. In the dark on stage someone is rollerblading. (Genuinely something I’ve never seen before.) I’ve seen this stage from a lot of angles, and many of them are still new for me today.
Once inside, the show begins for real. We’re participants in an abstract ritual of climate change telling, an imagined history of how it will happen. We line up next along the stairs down to the stage and, artfully lit, we pass garbage down from the mezzanine to the stage. Junk passes through our hands like it’s flowing down river. Its seems like it’s mostly things you might find discarded in the Yarra – beer cans, broken branches, a boogie board, umbrellas. Collapsing hand fans. Okay, things are getting weird. Hats. Hats full of apples. Apples on their own. It all collects on stage where a giant crevice is painted.
We are broken into groups, each with its own leader. They do a good job of caring for their audience, guiding us from activity to activity and making sure we’re okay. It’s easy to get left out of the images for someone like me who naturally hangs at the back. It would be easy to drift away entirely, I think, as I notice the moments where I find myself on the outside of my group and have to make my way back in.
But the audience undertakes it all with due reverence. We play along. The audience is happy to become suited business people on rolling office chairs. Some of them wave tree branches at the rest of us. We thrust our apples back at them. The actions we’re directed through, though given weight by the lighting and the sound and the haze, still seem detached or distant, verging on twee.
There’s little opportunity to watch the images of the performance. There’s little meditative time to sit within the performance, and the activities we’re involved in are ritualised and abstracted past meaning. I struggle to be deeply engaged. One can read meaning into these things, but can also switch off and experience the whole just as a kinetic aesthetic. Pretty but empty, because we invest nothing of ourselves.
In the wake of the Climate Strike the day before, and following two days of unseasonable early warmth, the politics of the work is a little underwhelming. Business people battle broken trees. Waving apples at the sky clears threatening clouds. My group actually has to be trees at one point, which I’d have thought was a drama school trope you’d want avoid.
The plastic wrapping covering the seats is ritually rolled up and carried off under lighting that makes the process visually very striking, and the audience is finally guided to take their seats. The six dancers are left on stage alone now, moving through their own choreography while selected audience members read a prepared text. It’s a conversation of sorts, representing international reactions to climate change as a kind of gossip among old friends. It shifts cleverly from instructional text, through confusion into a scene, but it feels increasingly clunky as it goes on. The amateur readings from the audience highlight this clunking.
I think I see a few people from the show afterwards on the street. I’m not at all motivated to approach them, to share my experience. Good immersive work should build communities, instant and fleeting though they may be. I didn’t feel attached to anyone during or after this thing. This was a solitary experience for me. A “join in” dance with easy enough choreography and helpfully low barriers to entry which is commendable. As a whole, though it requires a lot of work on the audience’s part to keep it feeling profound, rather than a bit silly.
What am I supposed to do (WAISTD). Concept, choreography and performance by Sarah Aiken and Rebecca Jensen / Deep Soulful Sweats. Design by Romanie Harper, Sound Design by Andrew Wilson, Lighting Design by Amelia Lever-Davidson. Performed by Claire Leske, Megan Payne, Alexander Powers, Ngioka Bunda-Heath, Sarah Aiken and Rebecca Jensen. Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne, as part of Melbourne Fringe. Closed.
3 comments
Hello! There are a couple of key points about this work that I think are overlooked, or wrongly weighted, in this review.
I think WAISTD was ‘participatory’ in a deliberately workerly way. The audience was enlisted to co-make the show, rather than invited to consume an ‘immersive’ experience of affect. This is a crucial distinction when considering an audience’s expectations and sense of entitlement. As simultaneous creators and witnesses of the unfolding of events, I found it a strikingly moving and elegant parallel to how we are all responding to the climate emergency, which will require a lot of work from each of us. This is one of many ways in which form and content intermingled subtly and effectively throughout the work. A ‘dance show about climate change’ could so be so many things, and could so quickly veer into didactic, overwrought, terrain that is formally banal. The fact these artists held the work in a space of complexity is testament to a whole lot of thorough and nuanced artistic work. Rather than ‘underwhelming’ in relation to the climate strike, which is a tall-order point of comparison, it used the strengths of dance-as-form to evoke and hold thematic complexity and association, and both discursive and embodied empathy: we each held every item of junk that became the show’s props; we were always both viewer and actor; we recognised at some level the many cultural symbols that passed before our eyes and ears, and we had to privately orient our thoughts and feelings in relation to that content and what we all know it is all adding up to.
A reading that these artists were unthinkingly using ‘drama school tropes you’d want to avoid’, as though through a lack of formal sophistication or an unimaginative performance default, seems like such an uncurious response to the work and one that has no knowledge of their body of work. For me, I think the cliché or naivety or childlike simplicity or known-ness or twee trope-ness of having people act as trees attacking ‘businessmen’ was so clearly a deliberate vein of dramaturgy that ran throughout the work to very potent effect: in their simplicity, for me these depictions cut through to the heart of the crisis we’re all facing. Yes, the climate crisis and response required is immensely complex, but it is also very, very simple: collectively, we are living in a way that is ruining the planet, and we need to change drastically. The complexity and difficulty that surrounds the climate crisis is frequently a justification for inaction and avoidance – mostly by adults in positions of power. A true reckoning with the simplicity at the heart of the crisis is bracing, difficult and very clear – and very clearly articulated by the climate movement’s child leader Greta Thunberg. I think in this work the artists connected many of these kinds of dots deftly and movingly.
For me, attending the climate strike and WAISTD on the same weekend had a cumulative and complementary impact. I experienced a multitude of often overwhelming feelings while standing amidst 150,000 bodies on the streets on Friday afternoon, registering the immense cultural significance of the moment, taking in the striking new vision of primary-school aged children leading call and response chants. In the theatre on Sunday evening, WAISTD provided a complex and simple, reflective and active space for these feelings to be processed.
Hi William, I’m really pleased you found so much to like in it. Immersive and participatory work is, of course, a deeply subjective experience and so I can only reflect on my own pathway through the work. It’s really great to have a counterpoint here from you, so thank you. Sounds like you had the experience I was hoping to have. I’ll try and clarify some of what I felt here in response…
I’m curious about your description of the experience as “participatory in a deliberate workerly way.” Do you mean that we were involved in the staging of the imagery of the show like the performers? I can’t say I agree that I felt like a co-creator of the show, I certainly never felt any agency to contribute to the show or effect its outcome. Rather I felt more like a prop to be used by the performers. So immersive, yes, but the participation is limited.
As a parallel for our inaction on climate change, well, yes, I suppose so. We’ve certainly been pushed around by our various leaderships into a range of fantasy non-responses to the climate emergency. If this is the intent of the work, to parody that political inaction, then for me this needed to be clearer in its articulation. I think your interpretation here does a lot of the heavy lifting on behalf of the work itself.
I can’t really agree about the complexity of the work. Whether the artists are unthinkingly or knowingly using “drama school tropes” doesn’t change the banality of those images for me in the moment of the encounter. If I have to be preloaded with knowledge of the artists body of work in order to fully understand the work (if i have to be “in on the joke,” as it were) then I think that’s a dramaturgical problem which needs to be solved rather than pushed onto the audience.
I’d also agree that the response required to climate change itself is immensely complex, so I wonder how it can also be very very simple. This dichotomy strikes me as hedging the issue. I think the strength of someone like Greta Thunberg is the clarity with which she articulates the complexity of the problem. Trying to reduce that complexity to something simple, sound bitey or catch phrasey, is a quick path to inaction. So, the naivete of the images presented by the work, I felt, were inadequate to the task – which, as you suggest, is a tall order. I can’t say I saw depth where I didn’t. Lots of aesthetically pleasing constructions, definitely, but not more.
Finally, I’m also curious about the distinction you make between participation and consumption. I would argue that these are not necessarily mutually exclusive. As you illustrate, the audience for this work were both creators and observers – which is a transaction common to immersive work – and I would suggest that the experience of this is a kind of consumption. It seems like you equate consumption with passive experience here, and I’d argue that it’s not solely so.
Anyway, like I said, I’m really glad it had more resonance for you and I’d certainly agree that WAISTD does provide a reflective space for processing the feelings and thoughts generated over that weekend.
Maybe I was just hoping for more than was on offer.
Hi Robert, thanks for your reply. I’m pleased to advocate for this work and its ilk.
I experienced the first half of WAISTD mostly as an observer from the balcony above the stage, with relatively light active involvement, so yes, certainly different experiences of the same show. I acknowledge that this would have given me more of an overview of the unfolding choreography – probably quite a different perspective to being amidst the action down on the stage.
Here are some thoughts in response to some of your points:
I guess by ‘workerly participation’ part of what I mean is that this seemed to me to be a central conceit of the show: your active involvement is required to make/perform/execute this work. It’s less a point about audience agency to affect the outcome, etc. (which would make for a very different type of show), more about identifying that this was a formal premise, a necessary buy-in from audiences, for the show to function. Also, that this is a different type of premise to immersive work that is more focused on creating phenomenological affect, story, etc., for a less active audience to take in – WAISTD did this, too, of course, so I will try not to make it into a dichotomy, but I think the ‘workerly participation’ conceit locates the audience’s role somewhat differently, maybe with more responsibility for what is happening and how you take it in?
I think this premise of workerly participation played out on several fronts: practically – some audience members must wear hats, while some must pretend they are on a beach, etc.; choreographically – the marshalling of scores of uninitiated, obedient people through the seemingly simplistic activities was very carefully timed and I found it choreographically complex and interesting when viewed from above; dramaturgically – with active participation in performance activities implicating audience members into the show’s choreographic and thematic content as it went along so that, for me, sitting in the seats for the second act watching the core ensemble dance while people around me spoke, I felt more a part of the work (its thematic content and embodied action) for having participated; metaphorically – with resonances for the collective responses to the climate crisis, as I discussed above.
Re: my point about knowing the artists’ body of work, which has included: virtuosic dance; extreme and humorous physical endurance; semiotics of ‘Australian cultural detritus’ (reference and images of old Australian movies, camping, native flora and fauna, beer drinking, rave culture, surf culture); mass participation; screen culture; a tendency to pick at and corrode pre-existing forms and knowledges (in choreographic structures and thematic references); strong quiet female power transmitting its information physically more than through language/discourse…. Knowing that their body of work is diverse and peculiar, filled with specific and unusual choices, when I see them choosing to deploy ‘drama school tropes’ I know that this too is a deliberate choice and I’m interested in what it’s doing in the work. In addition to the thoughts I outlined earlier, maybe that choice also functioned dramaturgically by making audience members confront, resist, reminisce about, negatively judge, be bored by, or embrace the ‘unsophisticated’ performance activity – not necessarily to make some major point, but as a layer of the processes of acceptance/resistance that are part of taking up the request to participate. (As you said in the review: “As always with immersive work, I’m on alert from the arrival.” So there is something to be overcome.) I don’t think this is about being in on a joke or not, but, like with all culture, it’s contextual knowledge that contributes to (and adds to the enjoyment of) how it’s read.
You mentioned a couple of times about having to do heavy lifting or a lot of work as an audience member, also of the artists’ intentions not being clear enough. I think that often to seek clarity and coherence in dance and choreographic works is to bypass, or undervalue, some of the form’s greatest strengths, which is in being able to hold you in tricky locations like uncertainty, contradiction, multiplicity, complexity, subconscious, imperfection, disorientation, confusion, combination, etc. Often when dance becomes too clear or explained it can feel overexposed and really lose its potency. More so than most forms dance encourages a lot of autonomy in its audiences, which in some ways can seem like lots of work, but which I think is a major part of the pleasure and richness of experiencing the form. I acknowledge that my reflections here might seem to be doing lots of heavy lifting to arrive at the points I’m making, but I don’t see that as reflecting a failure of the artists. I’m making these points as a reflection of my own experience, and posting them here to offer an expanded take on how the work was operating.
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