Goat Island's "We Got A Date"

Abstract

Goat Island works collectively, collaboratively-slowly over time, paring down essence of piece like salt in a crucible (as D.H. Lawrence said of stories of Edgar Allen Poe [195I]). In their most recent work tech is modest, music haunting. The movement is original, excruciatingly painful, purposefully repetitive. The narrative is rich in psychological and social complexity. I took eight friends to 1989 Chicago premiere of We Got A Datethree painters, a classicist, a psychiatrist, a labor organizer, an insurance representative, and a sculptor. The painters and sculptor loved choreography, which they saw, respectively, as painting and sculpting in space. However, they thought perhaps there should have been little or no use of text. The classicist, moved by darkness of piece, nonetheless bemoaned absence of eros and longed for pleasure and some sense of catharsis. The psychiatrist, disturbed by performers' robotlike movements, reminiscent of the rigidity of catatonia, feared for mental stability of director. Trained as a literary critic, I exulted in overdetermined, metaphoric, cipherlike quality of work -which begged for explication. Performance art, which operates in four dimensions, does not reconstitute itself easily into two dimensions of words on page. We Got A Date is no exception. It is a difficult piece to unravel, dependent as it is on music, dance, movement, and narrative to fulfill its intention. The result is that there is no one vantage point from which to illuminate its complexity. Also, there is no clear way to avoid inevitable extracting of a part from whole. Only in alchemical process of performance itself do all layers and levels come together. To even approximate this experience, it is necessary to rely on many discourses: literary/ critical, psychoanalytic, sociological, anthropological. Stealing from them all, one can begin to tackle its cumulative effect.