45 Seconds for Joints: On Carol Trindade’s Performance at the Mall of America
In December of 2021 the Brazilian dance-theater artist Carol Trindade improvised for some 20 hours a kind of theatrical dance in the window of a store in the Mall of America in Minnesota. She has posted forty-five seconds of this improvisation on YouTube. Dressed in a black-and-white checked one-piece skirt, she stands behind a glass window in a small space irregularly decorated with same checked pattern she wears. She has identified herself as an artist working at the intersection of the dance of Butoh and clowning, with the Tanztheater work of Pina Bausch another point of orientation. This segment begins with her crouching, hands forward and elbows bent, and looking to her right; it ends with her fully upright, arms slightly extended at her sides. Several of her movements between plainly evoke the movements of a toy or a doll, with bent and inflexible elbows or knees (rarely both at the same time), mechanical shakes of the head, and contrasting flashes of extraordinary flexibility of the hips and lower torso that suggest something made of rubber or clay. The motif of a doll or toy coming to life is familiar from classical and modern ballets such as Coppélia, The Nutcracker, and Petrouchka. Why does it re-emerge in this most contemporary of contexts and dancers, and in one whose work otherwise bears no trace of ballet?
One of the canonical texts of dance is the short and profoundly enigmatic piece by the playwright Heinrich von Kleist from 1810 entitled ‘Puppet Theatre’ (or sometimes rendered ‘On the Marionette Theater’). The piece purports to describe a conversation between the unnamed narrator and a famous dancer named Herr C. that was incited by their mutual watching of a marionette-theater set up in a market place. The often-cited conclusion states that the marionettes, like a god, seem to possess a kind of grace that human beings, with their self-inhibiting consciousness and reflectiveness, have lost, and that humans can only re-gain when they eat again of the Tree of Knowledge and possess self-consciousness to an infinite degree. But the earlier parts of the discussion, though equally enigmatic, perhaps provide more hints as to the enduring attraction of the motif of the animation of dolls. One advantage of puppets over humans, so Herr C. claims, “is that they are not subject to the law of gravity,” and so “only use the ground as fairies do; brushing it lightly in order that the momentary check may give a new impulse to their bounding limbs.” In ballet, as the aesthete and art critic Adrian Stokes put it in 1935, the rigidity of the floor is recruited into the dance in two ways, two gender-specific ways. Both are manners of assault and revelation: the male ballet dancer’s legs assault the stage like cylinders “as if pumping up from beneath,” while the female dancer’s assault is a show of indifference, “the suspended oval of the ballerina’s form gracing the stage in an attitude.” (Stokes, p. 51) The animation of the ballet dancer shares with the animation of a toy something of the overcoming of gravity and material as weight. So too the forty-five second rise of Trindade, except that her work is not assaultive, but rather eirenic through her absorption in and continuity with her checkerboard environment, a continuity further enhanced through her wearing socks rather than shoes or being barefoot.
Stokes’s further thought that the ballet dancers’ assault on the stage is only a part of a broader theatrical conception in ballet wherein the three-sided box of staged space is a metaphor for the body, one also assaulted from its sides in the service of a eliciting its inner life (p. 54) suggests what I would take to be the most central meaning of Trindade’s invocation of the animated doll. To see this one must recall an earlier performance of hers in Miami where she posed within a glass box as a robot that could be made to dance by the viewer’s manipulation of a handle. The mere idea of the viewer in control is invoked, but no one is taken in: the viewer immediately understands that it is Trindade who arranges the situation, who only ‘pretends’ to dance, and the fantasy of control is sustained in the service of its self-undermining. The disjunction between the fantasy of control and Trindade’s movements is bridged by the play of the viewer’s imagination among the elements of moving the handle, observing Trindade’s movements, and attempting to recover Trindade’s intentions. Kleist’s Herr C notes that the life-like movements of a puppet arise not from the puppeteer’s precise control of every articulation of the figure, but rather from simple lines of movement that control the joints, and that the puppeteer does not thereby so much control the joints as “place himself at the marionette’s own center of gravity, in other words that he [i.e. the puppeteer] should dance.” (p. 180) So whereas the traditional puppeteer, whether hidden from or visible to the audience, is a matter of secondary aesthetic interest while typically taking on the conception (as explicitly in Petrouchka) of a conjurer, Trindade’s use of the motif of the animated doll is distinctively contemporary, invoking the artistic conventions of installation art wherein the viewer’s own physical, perceptual, imaginative, and cognitive activities are invoked and put on display for reflection.
All this in forty-five seconds from some play with the joints in a movement from squatting to standing. And what might have arisen in the twenty hours of improvisation?
--John Rapko
References:
Friedrich von Kleist, ‘Puppet Theatre’ (1810) in What is Dance? (1983), edited by Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen
Adrian Stokes, To-Night the Ballet (1935)
Carol Trindade, Mall of America Performance (2021), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvSRTG4vEKU&ab_channel=CarolTrindade (accessed 1/05/22)