“In any case I pivoted to stuff like this:” the Unfinished Collaborations of Dance and Theater in Lucky Plush Productions’ UNFINISHED BUSINESS: a response by Clara Nizard
Photo courtesy of LuckyPlush.com
Lucky Push Productions
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
October 20-22, 2022
Links Hall
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You might encounter the title of Lucky Plush Productions’s new work, Unfinished Business, and start to speculate. Whose unfinished business are we discussing? What is the nature of that unfinished-ness? Kurt Chiang and Melinda “Mindy” Jean Myers soared through this prompt, back in late-October, using their own unfinished artistic relationship to produce a palpably live experiment in making-together.
“Unfinished Business” indexes an ambivalent set of feelings. It could, on the one hand, be thrilling to ‘finish the business’ of a missed connection—friend or lover, for instance. Yet, anything ‘unfinished’ could conversely become ominous. To suggest you have an ‘unfinished’ or ‘unprocessed’ set of concerns about a person might leave room for the business of revenge or an impulse to ‘set the record straight.’ With the support of Lucky Plush’s Embodied Research Grants, Myers and Chiang devised a far-reaching meditation on unfinished-ness through a rich and moving set of accounts of their own artistic histories and ‘unfinished’ personal aspirations. In a rich review of the production by Kerry Reid, we glean a sense of the process and biographical background of the work, incepted in 2021 and fulfilled asynchronously (for the most part). This response will attempt to draw out some of the formal (theatrical and choreographic) devices supporting these interrogations.
It seems that in response to my initial query, the work turns to its audience’s own unfinished business. What have you left behind, on the backburner, or been too busy to confront? Without providing any sentimental apotheosis, Myers and Chiang instead perform these affective ambivalences with tender force, drawing upon their distinguished performance histories to do so. Most immediately, they share the asynchronous challenge of their collaboration with the audience. Indeed, the piece is melodically underpinned by Myers and Chiang’s voice-notes to each other since 2021, wherein they riff about the ongoing conditions of pandemic-induced lockdown or their own asynchronous creation process, or about the specific sonorities of linguistic puns. If you yourself are an avid user of the voice-note, your spine will tingle with recognition at the intimacies involved in recording, sending, and preserving the voices of your interlocutors. Upon this rhythm of asynchronous vocalic fragments unfolds a layered, live negotiation of what we discover to be the ongoing—rather than the unfinished—business of performing.
Two outdoor-pool ladders, dull metallic gray, stand upstage. Surrogating the performers’ bodies, these ladders frame the piece and provide a potent dramaturgical metaphor. That is, beyond the fact that they play a part in some of the significant ‘stage business’ of the piece (being transported from here to there, being toppled over and then set upright again), the ladders also index the innovation of children attempting ever-more virtuosic dives at a public pool. The ladders thus render risk and its attendant thrill, going up to go down as a way of thinking and embodying a distant collaboration. Jacob Snodgrass’ lighting design provides each ladder with its plank-like rectangle of light at key points in the performance, allowing Myers and Chiang to seem like they are, at times, ‘walking the plank’ or ‘preparing to dive.’ This is a strong scenic argument for the risk and reward involved in collaboration, in addition to framing the intimate something of live performance—a something akin to when your toes curl over the edge of the diving-board—as bracing oneself to jump and make, in Myers words, a “clean cut into the water.”
It is precisely the stuff of life's weird temporality—which is to say, its ever-unfinished nature—that Lucky Plush in general and Myers and Chiang’s collaboration in particular explore with virtuosity. That performance might offer a mode to work through personal, unfinished collaborations by way of a generous interrogation of the unfinished business between dance and theatre as forms is perhaps what is most delightful about this work. Strengthening this impression is the locale of performance; the piece was performed at Links Hall, a perfectly hybrid space. Both a white-box gallery and a small theatre with risers and a lighting grid, Links Hall produces a frame of experimentation and a thin (almost nonexistent) fourth wall. The piece begins with Chiang up close and intimate, right at the ‘lip’ of the stage space. Eventually Myers and Chiang play across language and dance, acting and moving—burlesquing each other’s discipline with bravado and joyful curiosity along the way. If Chiang quips “You can’t even use AirDrop” to Myers, she retorts a few paces later “Just leave your leg out of it” while he attempts a movement sequence. Subjective ‘limitation’ is replaced with playful mockery and pedagogy. The artists remind their audience that the necessary didacticism of collaboration is a vulnerable affair.
One of the scenic games, derived from acting techniques, is particularly enjoyable. Chiang and Myers face each other on their respective “diving boards” and experiment with stances and affective intensity. Myers, hands on hips, exclaims “Oh, I feel like I GOT something” and Chiang, mirroring her, validates, “Yeah, it DEFINITELY looks like you GOT something.” Playing this game of tone and feeling, they eke out micro-gestures and tones of voice, playing them out across the actor and the dancer’s bodies. While there is artifice here (anyone can “look like” they won something), it is the process of making-believe that is shown off here—with great payoff. Chiang and Myers make us giggle, as we implicitly confirm: “with your hands on your hips, like that, you DO look like you just GOT something!” But, we don’t care about what ‘got got’, or if accomplishment truly lies behind this gesture. Instead, the performers sublimate a reminder: to make with others is what allows you to build, grow, and variegate your own instincts. The gaze of the collaborator, in other words, is paramount. What they achieve is not to instill a purportedly universal gestural language within the white-box space, but rather to play at the precise limit of what appears obvious about our movement patterns—and what a collective sense of signification (“we all understand through your hands-on-hips that you got something”) might mean within and without the rehearsal process.
Dance is woven through with theatre here—in a way Lucky Plush knows best. In particular, Myers’ working through, with the audience, of her inability to listen in a non-dancerly way (think: melodramatic and performative listening, of the kind you might see in pantomimes or ballet) is hilarious. In movement and in speech, she humorously unpicks the impact of her dreams of a professional dance career and the automatic patterns her training has left inside her body. Myers is particularly hilarious when she is acting, and Chiang is particularly hilarious when he is dancing. None of the hilarity ensues from technique (o or lack thereof), but it lies instead in our collective figuring out that dance and theatre are both paradoxically singular and capaciously friendly forms all at once. Chiang, for instance tries a movement phrase and one of his legs drags behind the rest of his body. Myers gently observes: “just leave that leg out of it” and he is ultimately able to perform the phrase. Language troubleshoots movement. The idea that the actor has ‘excess limbs’ that he is not in control of offsets the notion that the dancer cannot manipulate words or perform outside an excessively expressionistic mode. Chiang and Myers jumping between gesture and language is tremendously heartening for an audience, who get to experience their undeniable, singular virtuosities alongside a humble interrogation of their own artistic priorities. A motif in the work which both artists expand on in depth is precisely the gestural potential of language—the other way around: movement troubleshooting language.
In roughly the middle of the piece, the performers riff on the phrase “the whole kit and caboodle,” which one of them hears consistently (this writer also does!) as “kitten caboodle.” Now, sometimes, idiosyncratic inside-jokes do not translate in performance. But here, from the voice-memo explaining ‘kit and caboodle’ to the deconstructive gestural language they produce out of this sonic mishap, they then begin to metabolize the joking prosody into a pun of their own invention: puppy paneedle. Kitten Caboodle, Puppy Paneedle. What does this have to do with dance-theater? Well, gestures are one way to parse the problem of language, and vice versa. All of a sudden, then, we are privy to two specialists using their respective tools to break open the other’s disciplinary bias. By picking ordinary idioms (or even simple words like ‘pasta’) and breaking them open through gesture and scenic device, Chiang and Myers bring metaphors to life and joke their way into an ending, as in one of the final punning conceits of the piece: “close but no cigar.” Like an echo from the Surrealist past, a literal cigar drops down on invisible thread, just out of reach. This almost-ness—the close-but-not-quite-ness—provides an aesthetic response to the initial querying of unfinishedness. Just as sound does not always promise to map onto semantic meaning, planning to ‘finish the business’ rarely means achieving a sense of completion. The relationship on display is thus less about conflict as much as it is about living and being parallel to people, as is encapsulated by Chiang and Myers standing on their lit-up, rectangular diving-boards side by side. Where does similarity depart into specificity? How do we share our idioms and unfinished aspirations? How do we let the other fulfill them with or for us?
These questions, unanswerable, are movingly taken up. The dénouement of the piece stands out for taking up an actor’s desire to act, that is, Chiang’s desire to be in Chekov’s Seagull. Historicizing his own acting, much as Myers historicized her own dancing (dancing for free, auditioning for a company, touring the world), Unfinished Business provides the actor with his moment to perform Chekov. Without the support of a production, the play, a cast, or a director, Chiang’s desire to act is allowed a moment to shine on its own, for what it is: a desire to perform. And while Chiang is taking this moment to seemingly ‘accomplish’ an ‘unfinished’ desire, really what we learn is that, to perform it for us in no way ‘finishes’ that desire. Instead, in another joking turn, the script of The Seagull gets manhandled, ripped up. Chiang comments: “No one likes the play anymore.” What to do when your desire for performing is not matched by the keen interest of onlookers? Do performers, always, in a sense, have unfinished business with their audiences? Where Myers addresses the labor conditions of apprentice-work in dance, Chiang harks to the importance of others desiring you or desiring a particular text. Both are splashing water at the inscrutable logics underpinning who is allowed to perform what, when they are allowed to do so, and where—including the often-nonsensical value-judgments structuring these possibilities.
The non-sense of one’s artistic path or career is the final joke, then, in this work. One of the best throwaway comments of the evening was the phrase: “in any case I pivoted to stuff like this.” And what is ‘stuff like this,’ exactly? Stuff like Unfinished Business? Post-dramatic performance, like dance-theater? Or just ‘stuff like’ the pool, where dance and theatre can hang out without being ontologically at odds, each helping the other dive off the same board in new and meaningful ways? Myers and Chiang remind us that dance-theater is alive and well, retaining its emphasis on embodied collaborations between people, between speech and movement, between humor and tenderness, and between what occurs on stage and what lies just beyond its four white walls.
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Clara Nizard (she/they) is a joint-PhD student in English and Theatre and Performance Studies. Her research considers motion, movement, and mobility, particularly, the ways in which these terms intersect and bind Anglophone and Francophone histories of the Americas together. Clara has also shown multi-media performance work focused on queer epistemologies in France, the UK, and Canada.