From Tantrums to Prayer: Goat Island's "Can't Take Johnny to the Funeral"

Abstract

Although it is not billed as such, Goat Island's most recent collaborative work,1 appears to be the completion of a trilogy that began with Soldier, Child, Tortured Man (1987). It deals not only with the humiliations, fears, longings-the dark side of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood-but with the extreme vulnerability of infancy. This earliest condition, over which we have no control, profoundly shapes the individual psyche. A squared circle forces the audience into a more intimate, more intense confrontation with the action than the basketball court arrangement of the earlier work. The synchronized movements are back, presenting us once again with an initially mystifying and indecipherable code. There is the same commitment to gesture, action, the same hyperactivity of movement. However, the tension and strenuousness are augmented by a microphone used sparingly to capture the heavy breathing and the pounding of blood in the performers' heads. Because they are willing to work themselves to exhaustion to alleviate the anxious urgency that appears to motivate the work, we become committed to their excessive action. Once again we are willing to suspend analysis of its symbolic meaning while we give ourselves over to its unravelling. This time the inspiration for the movement was derived in part from sports photos-rugby, lacrosse, water polo-frozen motion reactivated, translated into dance/gymnastics. At times the emphasis is directional, reminiscent of the kata, the patterned movement of karate, or various Native American rituals that honor the north, south, east, and west-an obeisance to direction as if it, as a concept, were a player in this drama. Here, as in other Goat Island works, we cannot resist wondering what has set these performers in motion and what hidden necessity motivates their action. When the performers do slow down enough for us to study them, they appear as lost souls wandering inside their own intent, a bit like the inhabitants of Dante's hell, caught in a circle or malebolge of pain, a bit like the figures of Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. They appear as part of some social interaction, yet inevitably apart. At times they become ontologically regressed, adults reduced to infancy writhing in convulsions. They also appear phylogenically regressed, wild dogs gnawing on each others' legs, humans reduced to a lesser species. Or they simply appear helpless, deranged inmates of a sanatorium, caught in the privacy and isolation of their illness. They reenact obsessive patterns and appear to obey silent directives whose meaning they alone can understand. Karen rotates her finger in the air and swivels her body while looking sidelong off into space. Matthew spins and collapses as if shot; with a circular movement of his hand he appears to torque down his mouth. There are times when they do interact. Karen crawls into a fetal position on top of Greg's prone body. Tim rubs his head against Matthew's leg like a cat. They cover their mouths with their hands, politely, almost with a slight gasp, as if they are remembering some unspeakable event, as if they must restrain the words they might otherwise utter. All motion is laboriously synchronized, separate scenarios woven into one complex, perfectly choreographed nightmare. At intervals someone separates from the group to make a statement, not unlike the shattering of silence in We Got A Date. Language once again is a way out of the abstraction of (continued)