Enter The “Deepe Darknesse”
Garth Grimball
Albert Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus, “In a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and light, man feels a stranger…This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity.”
Every generation is allowed a healthy amount of solipsism because their comparisons are oriented completely towards the past, but this year, let alone the temporal generation to which I belong, feels exquisitely absurd. Gone are the meanings of words, images, and sounds that acted like gravity maintaining an orbital path. Algorithms dictate and create content. Truthiness reigns. Trick mirrors subsume institutions.
Enter Deepe Darknesse by Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein.
In the praxis of Theatre of the Absurd, Deepe Darknesse, presented July 31-Aug 1 at ODC Theater’s State of Play festival, played in the surreal, upending narrative and theatrical conventions and expectations. Inspired by the Ancient Roman novel The Golden Ass by Apuleius, Fagan and Engelstein take stupidity seriously and absurdity as commonsense.
In The Golden Ass, the protagonist performs a spell to transform into a bird but accidentally turns into an ass. Deepe Darknesse opened with the duo in sequined dresses tartly walking on yards of bubble wrap rolled out like a red carpet minefield. Every step and every pop could elicit full body convulsions, twittering arms and heavy nostril panting. Would these two protagonists transform into a bird or an ass, or something else entirely?
The theater stage was transformed into a backstage kitchenette meets props black hole. When the duo made their way into the melee of objects and costumes and food, their banal interactions would blink into aggressive showgirl high kicks and stomps as the 1960s Italian pop song “Stasera” by Cocki Mazzetti played in fits and bursts.
Hannah Mitchell joined the fray in full stage manager drag as she smeared make up on the duo in the darkness or cued Engelstein in a deftly comedic solo in which Engelstein knows zero of her lines.
Deepe Darknesse was full of movement — aerobic, slow motion, partnering — and full of bodily function — belching, urinating (off stage, presumably), masticating, chugging, exhaling smoke — so the corporeal frisson wasn’t activated in the usual distance between performer and viewer, but between bodies in motion and the internal motion of bodies. The ideas and episodes of the production were interrupted or derailed like when you have to leave a conversation mid-sentence to pee. The next action cannot be held off any longer.
Fagan and Engelstein were so committed to the world they created in Deepe Darknesse that the nonsense began to make sense. When loaves of bread were worn as shoes or a face was smeared with glue, I felt embedded in the logic of the show enough to think, well, yeah, of course.
A fair amount of Deepe Darknesse took place in the dark. I was a stranger to many of the meanings in the work, but rather than feel deprived of reason I left the theater filled with questions, ready to face the absurd.
Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to SF Examiner and Dance Media. He is the editor of ODC Dance Stories.
Enter The “Deepe Darknesse was originally published in ODC.dance.stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.