It’s been a
while since I had the urge to vomit. To turn my insides out, and start messing
around with my own entrails. Yet such was the case last Monday at DUNCE, during
Tatsuya Nakatani and Vanessa Skantze’s jarring performance.
Donning a coat
of rags consisting of torn scraps of fabric, Skantze teetered through the
audience in a seizure-induced stride, until reaching the stage. Proceeding to
twitch and convulse, she eventually collapsed, just barely clinging to her
paralysis. Abandoned, slivers of percussion eventually stirred her, as Nakatani
unfurled his artillery of noisemakers. Emerging slowly, twine-like dreadlocks
cast cobweb shadows onto the wall.
Meanwhile
Nakatani unleashed a cacophony of noises evoking nails-on-a-chalkboard, and the
opening of the heavens. Laboring on other instruments, he sawed cymbals with
violin bows, dragged fingernails along drums, pounded gongs, and delicately
tapped temple bells and chimes with chopsticks.
Skantze’s
personae, dredged up from the depths of a primordial soup, thrashed and seized,
while teetering on the brink of a cataclysmic abyss. Her pale skin encrusted
with paste, was lizard-like and brought to mind the Marat de Sade’s excruciating
suffering. Here was a woman who’d lost it all, survived the apocalypse and was
clinging to the faintest glimmers of existence, while writhing about in her own
chthon. And when her life-force
surged, she sputtered and slashed, gasping for air, as sinews of flesh peeled
from her acrid body and shards of mantle swung wildly about.
Skantze equaled
any number of femmes fatales – from the Classical medusa to the medieval witch.
Above all Kiki Smith’s iconic ‘Tale” came to mind. Just thirty minutes of this
harrowing spectacle left the audience utterly depleted and traumatized to their
core.
