Talking Heads and Speaking Bodies
[All section headings are to be sung according to their melody in the original Talking Heads song “This must be the place (Naïve Melody).”]
Part 1. Hi Yo I’ve Got Plenty of Time
Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never opens with Stephen Fiehn’s voice on the loudspeakers announcing the events that will soon occur on stage, promptly followed by the entrance of Selma Banich, Mislav Cavajda, and Matthew Goulish, but before I talk about the piece, I should let you know that the four sections and one epigraph of this paper are framed by text derived from the love song by the Talking Heads, entitled, “This must be the place (Naïve Melody).” Several of the framing devices in general for the composition of this paper, also, come from appropriated text and writing strategies that Every house has a door employs in their performance. I should also let you know that there will be a brief dance interlude in the middle of my lecture.
At the start of the performance, Stephen explains over a loudspeaker that they will talk about the Swedish Film director Ingmar Bergman and Yugoslavian film director Dusan Makavevjev. The two directors’ films serve as the basis for much of the gestures in Every house has a door’s performance, and the American philosopher Stanley Cavell’s essay on Makavejev and Bergman acts as source material for the spoken text. In 1978 as part of an academic conference at Harvard, Makavejev had re-edited the nonverbal sequences from Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s films, and ended the screening with the scene of Persona (106-7). Stephen continues to describe a cake that they will supposedly prepare at some point in the performance with “apples, cocoa powder” and “flavorings such as food dying coloring red number 40.” He describes looking through the theater’s refrigerator to find milk, only to find a carton that expired on April 2002. This announcement anticipates the performance’s playful testing of the boundaries of theater, as in the last section of the piece in which Mislav and Stephen go outside of the theater space to yell Selma’s name, in order to see how far outside the theater they can go and still be heard. This approximates the limits, or the “end” of the theater, according to Stephen. Behind Selma is the image of a table covered with white cloth, recalling the image of covered corpses at the end of Makavejev’s Sweet Movie.
Stephen tells us exactly what to expect when all the performers take the stage. In a sense, this makes the stage a somewhat overdetermined space. While Makavejev’s re-edits of Bergman films are stripped of any verbal content, Every house has a door’s performance space is full of words that announce the coming action, or else retroactively describe actions that have happened earlier in the performance. Plus, we never really see a cake, at least in the traditional sense. Their reconstruction of Makajavev’s montage inverts Makavejev’s nonverbal approach to Bergman’s films as the performers stand back-to-back describing the action of these sequences. The performers take turns wheeling around a spotlight to frame each other as they describe details of scenes from the montage, while the other performers intermittently adopt the gestures from these scenes. They use this strategy later as well, when they reconstruct the feast at the commune headed by Viennese Actionist Otto Muehl from videos on laptop screens. I will return to this feast later on in the paper.
