When I was in college in the 80s, in Oberlin, Ohio, we used to from time to time, if someone had a car, drive north to the small city of Elyria for an outing. Elyria was run down and working class, an exciting change from our cute little college town. It had a good little diner, Mom’s Open Kitchen, and it had a tattoo artist, Big Ed, a biker friend off of my boss at the Student Union, and it had a mall, where we would shop for fast fashion and maybe go to a movie. After I graduated, the last thing I saw was Elyria receding into the distance, as the train pulled away from the station to carry me east to New York City. I didn’t know then that I would so vividly remember its dinky, crumbling platform, the scant minute you had to hop on board and change your life forever.
So it seems fitting to write this morning from a Courtyard by Marriott plunked at the rim of the Midway Mall, now abandoned, a dusty gray hulk of ghostly buildings and a flat sea of empty asphalt. I drove here last night from Yellow Springs, up the interstate from Columbus and then down two-lane country roads, through towns I remembered from the perimeter of my college consciousness. It started snowing around LaGrange – a hard, pelletlike snow that swirled across the road and pinged off my windshield as I motored north. It was still snowing when I pulled off onto the mall service road, following the GPS directions, and it felt as though the car drifted with the snowflakes past the looming reminders of long-forgotten retail, looming eerie and spectral in the headlights of my rented Corolla, til I found the hotel tucked behind the shell of the Midway Cinemas.
I was in Yellow Springs for the weekend with what I call “my theater company,” Theater Oobleck, but the company long predates me and really it’s a company of talented writers and performers to which I have somehow attached myself, a barnacle with useful skills. We had been invited there to perform a play written some twenty-three years ago, Mickle Maher’s The Hunchback Variations, which has been produced in the intervening time since its premiere around the country and the world. (If you’re at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer, check out this London company’s rendition.) I was the stage manager/board operator for this show during a Chicago run earlier this month and this weekend at the Foundry Theater at Antioch College.
Yellow Springs is a beautiful little town, with its titular spring up a ridge in a glen where industrious beavers built a majestic dam during the quiet of the pandemic, when the school and the park were shut down and no one was around. But Antioch is another ghostly space – the college, long committed to alternative learning and social justice, closed down in 2008, and reopened thanks to the efforts of some impassioned alumni in 2011. I won’t get into that long story here, but it still feels like it has a tenuous connection to existence, with just over 100 students enrolled, only 75 of whom are rumored to be on campus. We saw few signs of them, no packs of kids shuttling to class, no lounging on any quad. When we did spot one we’d crow, “Look! One of the 75!” When on Saturday night we heard what sounded like college revelry coming from the general area of the dorms we were quite relieved.
The Hunchback Variations is itself concerned with the problem of nonexistence. A 45-minute play for two actors, it is structured as an academic panel discussion conducted by the unlikely pair of Ludwig van Beethoven and Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame. The two have come together as collaborators to try and ascertain the precise sound called for by Anton Chekov in a stage direction given in The Cherry Orchard – “the sound of a string snapping, as if out of the sky, slowly and sadly fading away.” This is a legendary theatrical puzzle, the bedevilment of sound designers through the ages. No one knows what it means. Chekov himself died before he could explain. The premise of our play is the collaboration between these two figures, both deaf, as they try, and fail, to come up with the right sound. Quasimodo sits with a table array of noisemakers — a finger piano, a bell, a turkey call, a wood block — and after each of his frustrated efforts to fulfill the brief, Beethoven passes judgement, “That is not the sound.”
If it sounds absurd, it is. It is very funny. But it is also very moving. It is an investigation into the perils of collaboration, the frustrations of making art, and the impossibility of art to ever manifest in the world in perfect alignment with the artist’s vision. Anyone who has ever tried to write, to paint, to dance, to sing knows this impossibility: in the moment of realization, as the art is brought forth from the mind to the senses, we are forever inadequate.
I love this play. I feel so lucky to be a little part of bringing this piece of art into being, however much it might remain inadequate.
After our matinee yesterday, we piled into the car and I was dropped off at the Dayton airport to pick up the Corolla. While the cast returned to Chicago, I’m staying behind for a few days. Shortly, I will head down to Oberlin to do some research for a memoir. It is my own impossible mission to try and recover the past and turn it into art. It feels like a fool’s errand. Out the window, the snow has continued to fall and I am wildly inadequately dressed. But it all feels of a piece, this ghost mall, the snow, my thin sweater, the impossible sound, the beavers making art that no human could see. I’ll let you know how it goes.
PS: If you liked my thoughts about modern dance last week, you might like this essay, by choreographer Emily Gastineau, which I devoured, nodding along, “Yes, YES.” Among her many sticky thoughts I appreciated her note that “dance is the sluttiest art form,” followed by:
This idea that everything is dance comes primarily out of postmodern dance in the United States, which famously worked with pedestrian and everyday movement as dance, a practice which itself had roots in modernist ideas like M’s readymades and F’s naturalized movement. This idea has been historicized as a democratization of dance, so that more and different types of bodies and expressions could appear within the form, to make it less out of reach of the “everyday” person. Then these practices became even more rarefied, inscribed in institutions and legible only to an elite class of those in the know. Power is reified once again and so arguing for the expansion of dance has an elitist ring to it, despite the democratic rhetoric. Why now expand to include “anything, any movement” in a lazy white mode, when whole lineages and legacies are still systematically excluded? Which bodies and which moves may become part of “expanded choreography” and which are still pushed off to the side?
Meanwhile, mass entertainment doubled down on virtuosity and spectacle and make-believe (xo, Y). Dance is also part of this machine of extraction. The freshest moves, scooped up and repeated, sexed up or decontextualized or commodified or artwashed, chopped up beyond recognition or definitely still recognizable but not credited. This process is as egregious and structural as centuries of imperial history, but it can also be as unconscious and social as your friend making a move on the dance floor and you doing it back. Often these modes are conflated.
Oh I love so much of this, obviously. ❤️🙏🏻 (let me know if you’ll be around campus tomorrow — I’m there from 9am to 9pm! Would love to see you!!)
"....til I found the hotel tucked behind the shell of the Midway Cinemas." I was in that exact spot a month or so ago for a funeral, the parking lot showing no signs of life save for a ring of tire tracks in the show, looking like the least hopeful crop circle on earth