Visiting artists take on the big issues

It was only a smattering of faces that stared out from the audience at the Off Broadway Theater Space the afternoon of Thurs., Apr. 6. As the performance piece Tongue Smell Color came to a close, the lights shot up bright and the two performers, Brenda Dixon Gottschild and Hellmut Gottschild, pulled up chairs and announced that "hearing from the people in the audience has become an integral part of the performance. This is not a Q and A, but a chance to share stories, connections, associations." It was a fittingly intimate close to a strikingly intimate performance.

In a basic way the piece existed as a semi-autobiographical exploration of race, gender, and nationality—all of which were powerfully condensed into the two bodies of Brenda and Hellmut: black and white, wife and husband, American and German, respectively.

The performance handbill dubbed it a "movement theatre discourse in 17 events." It is a vague description, but this very indefinite quality was where the piece drew much of its resonance. Tongue Smell Color is hard to describe because it stood as a commandingly interwoven presentation of dance and theater, history and theory, fact and fiction. A refusal to adhere strictly to any specific structure of performance—an ability to exist seamlessly as all of the above—was exactly where the greatest power lay. A raw, open power. A startlingly intimate power.

So it was that the scant audience showing was a loss for the Yale community. For both the performance and open dialogue bred a refreshing and inspired degree of "critical intimacy"—a term spontaneously coined by an energized audience member as he attempted to refer to the fusion of an academic impulse to critically distance oneself from the great human questions, and the more performative desire to expose one's own flaws in the hopes of response and recognition.

In terms of the fundamentals of performance, the piece was of the highest caliber. The Gottschilds have compiled an impressive list of credentials in dance and interpretive performance. Brenda was formerly a professional dancer, actor, and Professor Emerita of performance studies at Temple University and has written two texts on dance—Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts, Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era.

Meanwhile, Hellmut was co-founder of Gruppe Motion Berlin and Philadelphia's Group Motion and the founder of ZeroMoving Dance Company, as well as the 1993 recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, after which he relinquished his own professorship at Temple University in order to concentrate on solo performance.

The pair lived up to the promise of their resumés. The performance was a sleek combination of both dance and academia—they moved with utter synchronicity and fluidity, creating a variety of settings on one bare stage—but the real concentration lay in their absolute best of intentions. The issues raised were difficult, some of the most difficult of life and of history. And there were no attempts to give pat answers. It was most clearly summarized when Brenda asserted, "In my opinion racism is alive and well with those we love the most. And we don't have the answers for that, but we do have the love."

It was this belief in the transformative power of emotion—be it love or guilt, personal or national—that seemed the message of the afternoon. In one especially startling moment, Brenda and Hellmut moved away from each other in a diagonal line across the plane of the stage—Hellmut growing distant with his back to the audience, Brenda reaching closer. She was involved in a recitation of facts from her past ("Our grocer was Chinese"). To each statement Hellmut responded with a corresponding piece of his past. Finally came the statement from Brenda that "Our milkman was a Jew." And there was silence. Silence. The phrase was repeated again and again while Hellmut, a boy raised in post-war Germany, remained frozen.

The overwhelming emptiness that followed was a beautifully rendered encapsulation of the personal and cultural strains of pain and culpability that flow through us all. Big topics. What could be bigger? The audience simply sat. Breath came slowly. Silence.

A few moments later Hellmut thoughtfully stated his feeling, "Performances need to be allowed to reverberate into the silence afterwards." And the audience simply sat.

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