When I was a student in the mid-70s, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was to modern theater what Macbeth was to modern tragedy. How did the Vôlkischer Beobachter headline the Warsaw Uprising? That’s it, Godot was “A Reminder & a Symbol!”.
Or so it seemed to me.
At the very least, a fellow felt obliged to at least recognize references to merit a place at the department cocktail.
In fact, at some point in the late 60s, I’d been precociously corrupted by my late brother, Peter, already a student. We shared a taste for literature and vast distrust of those set above us.
Peter had introduced me to Godot up on our old Victorian-style house’ widow’s walk. We used in those days to sometimes hoist ourselves up there to smoke cigarettes. Good view and absolutely safe from fretful busybodies.
At the time, I was swatting away to make a “cloud chamber” – promoted by my Dad’s Scientific American as an easy way to prove in your own home that atomic particles do exist. From there, I expect I hoped to show that Jesus was just an undisgested bit of beef and that sex was just fine.
Peter was learning Godot for English and brought the playbook up there with us.
I had a cursory look and, for commentary, made a rude noise.
But Peter said, not for the first time, something like, ‘No, no, you’re wrong,’ stood up, straightened himself and read a few lines while galooting (carefully!) on that narrow patch of lead, tin and slate of a perch. From further talk and his intensely sincere galoots, I managed to understand that, in his opinion, Godot wasn’t about what was or wasn’t said so much as howthe performers were in saying it. Also it was a really good play.
When I later saw Godot on stage, as my brother predicted, I did get carried away by the shuffles, glances, pauses, postures and bits of chat. And it was a really good play for that not for whatever flakey story it was telling.
This walk down lit-crit memory lane is owing to thoughts following on Ivana Müller’s performance-theater piece, Slowly, slowly… Until the sun comes up. Also involved: Atelier de Paris, a chat with a fellow spectator, a few hurried words with Müller herself and a pretty long bike ride through woods and town at night.
I went to see Slowly, slowly… without many expectations; I avoid reading the notes before a performance. The only work I had seen from Müller, as far as I can recall, is Hors-Champ (Off-field), an in situ performance, part of Lafayette Anticipations’ Echelle Humaine 2019 dance-performance program.
Before going into Slowly, Slowly… space, spectators must, at a minimum, get rid of their socks and shoes and put on clean socks. This done, they enter the space: long benches set in a square around a large performance space. Swathes of beige or grey cloth fabric cover spectator benches and performance space alike.
Taking my place, I had the impression of leaning over a sunken space… like a wrestling or orchestra pit.
A variously zippered full-cover tarp let Slowly, Slowly’s three performers – two men and a woman – pull out and use long strips of different-colored material for activities in the course of the performance.
The piece ends when the performers roll up the tarp.
Three minutes of dialogue into Slowly, Slowly and Waiting for Godot popped into my head. While performers try to smooth out wrinkles or straighten or dress up in the fabrics nearest them or pulled out from under the tarp, Slowly, Slowly’s dialogue turns mostly around performers’ dream monologues. The monologues, and short commentaries related to them, are allusive and evasive, crafted to avoid conclusions. Performer verbal and physical interactions point toward patterns and place and then, since there are no theres there to worry over, simply change the subject, vary words and syntax and indirection a little.
Three minutes after realizing this, it occurred to me that Ivana Müller’s performance space had re-created in my mind the “sleep and rassle pit” – you could sleep there any old way you wanted – my folks put into the family’s summer cottage. And because it puts physical place in the place of story place – no street corners, no chance meetings, no slaves, no masters: no literary clichés, no ongoing other stories to pursue (WTF? A sleep-rassle pit? What’s that mean? What story’s that from?) – that’s all very different from Godot.
And 10 minutes after I realized this … I was completely carried away by the shuffles, busywork, glances, pauses and postures and savoring the bits of pointless content in the chat. Chat that felt much more like my son’s text messages than Estragon and Vladimir’s cracker-barrel philosophizing. And all in the comfortable framework of a private memory, evoked by Müller’s psycho-socially- informed, as opposed to literary-politically-informed, stagecraft.
Once the performance was over, the person sat next to me, a performance scenarist as it turned out, took the performance completely in stride, volunteering among other sharp observation and praise, that she also sloughed into memories of sleep-overs: an experience of positive feeling, a sense of moments of friendship and intimacy.
When I told Ivana Müller that I’d been struck by the Waiting-for-Godot in her Slowly, Slowly…, she told me she was unfamiliar with Beckett’s play.
I believe Müller.
My brother, though dead, was wholly right to look at Godot as about being how, rather than saying what. Then contemporary and later critics, along with Becket himself, on the other hand, thinking that the piece was about how to say what, were only almost right.
It is the greatest modern play but that is because it resembles theater so little and contemporary performance so much. It’s a transition piece.
Beckett struggled to get where he goes and struggled even more to understand where he’d got to.*
Seventy years after Godot – and still without a critical framework for un-narrative to account for it! – Ivana Müller just doesn’t need to think too much about shaping movement, place and sound to make “performance-dance” that gets beyond words.
Have I mentioned that Slowly, Slowly … Until the sun comes up, as well as Samuel Beckett’s number, has that special piquant that makes good performance? Put Ivana Muller’s Slowly, slowly … Until the sun comes up on your bucket list and you won’t go wrong.
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Author: Paul Tracy DANISON
