The audience continues to hum and buzz, the lights remain up. The only indication that Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland is starting is a girl in a gold dress entering, silently, walking center stage to the smaller of two fake pianos that sit next to each other, removing something from a glass bowl, opening her mouth, sticking out her tongue and placing the tiny object inside. Shortly thereafter, a film begins to play on two giant screens upstage.
The film is in Japan. An empty hallway is shown, slowly a woman enters the screen, it appears that she is dragging a long piece of cloth. The film slides to an image of a woman incessantly rubbing her arms and hands together. Light bulbs in the center of each screen flash. Meanwhile, on stage, three more women have entered, as well as a man. The actors on stage refuse to look at the screens, covering their face with their hands, screaming suddenly. Loud, unexplained noises explode from the screen on occasion.
The Ordinary Made Extraordinary
In her article “Ideology in Performance: Looking through the Male Gaze,” Jill Dolan writes that “the spectator's equilibrium [is disrupted] through the intentionally uncomfortable process of perceiving the production.” The bright flashing lights and loud noises are part of this disruption. Foreman attempts to “render the ordinary extraordinary.”
Numeruosof clocks were hung on the walls across the stage. Additionally, there were the two pianos, small potted plants, a hammer. Did the clocks and pianos play any particular, significant role in the performance? None that was discernible.
Dolan continues by stating that “the live performers in Foreman's work lose their privileged place and become objects equal in perceptual weight to any other prop in the stage picture.” This is true of the actors in Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland as well: while each was identified by an individual characteristic, the roles were interchangeable, there was no human emotion behind the characters. Additionally, each character was identified by an easily removable piece of clothing: Man in the Striped Suit, Girl with Tiara, Girl in Sailor Hat.
The presence of the actors on the films adds another layer of objectness to the performance. Each section of the film is in another part of the world: Japan, England, New York. The films mainly focus on groups of people being blindfolded and unblindfolded, arranged in tableaus. The beginning of the sentence “I understand you immediately when you say. . .” is spoken by various actors, the ending changes depending upon who is speaking.
Foreman's Gaze
Dolan argues that “even as [Foreman] tries to empty his work of anything but pure phenomena, [he] reveals his operative ideological assumptions." His ideology is revealed through his depiction of women. Dolan writes about his work in the 1970's, where women actors were continually shown onstage naked except for shoes and socks. While the women in Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland remain fully clothed at all times, the “image of a woman [still] cannot merely denote” in the performance.
Evidence that Foreman is still constructing “images of women as enticing products that he assumes male spectators will very much want to consume” is seen first in the names of the characters: the one male character is named “Man in Striped Suit” while the female characters are labeled “Girl...”
Thus, the women are infantalized and placed in a position of power that is lower than that of the man. This is also seen when Girl with Black Hair pulls a sword on the man. She slices his neck; however, the sword is clearly plastic and not able to do any damage. The man survives. Later, all four women pull out real looking chef's knives. However, instead of attacking Man with the knives, they stab the wall.
Are the knives and swords phallic symbols? Is Girl with Black Hair unable to kill Man in Striped Suit because she lacks a “real” penis? Is the penis such a foreign object to the “Girls” that when they acquire a “real” one (the knives), they don't know what to do with it and instead of attacking the right object, stab the walls?
Sources:
Dolan, Jill. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991.
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