Earlier this month hours before ‘curtain’ on a Friday night show at SoHo Playhouse, I chose to brave the ‘last chance’ lines and attend the Edges of Ailey at The Whitney. What I saw was compelling. The display, curated by Adrienne Edwards, readily incorporates a range of materials, archival footage, paintings, old notebooks, and programs. The difficulty in capturing and freezing a history of live performance is apparent, as is the unique approach by Edwards chosen to meet this challenge: there is a notable presence of visual art pieces. Materials are sorted into roughly ten containers: “Southern Imaginary”, “Black Spirituality”, “Black Migration” among others. A diverse crowd of artists, enthusiasts, students, and curious newcomers freely roamed the space, gathering elements of Ailey’s life and practice – not in any chronological order – while experiencing the works of a wide range of media: a contemporary Eldren Bailey sculpture in one spot against the lush southern landscape painting in another. Wadswell Jarreth’s 1972 portrait of Angela Davis, titled Revolutionary forms a figure of both words and ideas. Another work, Kara Walker’s 1998 piece “African/American” displays a body in a distinctive silhouette, seeming to float in space, scraps of clothing waving off the figure: the body’s capacity for expression is shaped by the medium. Videos of archived performances stand out on nearby screens.
Going to the exhibit when I did was auspicious. Not only did I exit to see a line of people now extended well around the block (last chance indeed), but I approached the SoHo Playhouse with a greater awareness of how a body’s work can be explored and exhibited. What is the uniquely dynamic theatricality of the human body? How does a form – movement, musculature, etc. – represent a special sense of expression and liberation? And what of the potential of its opposite? IO//ODIO (directed by Maurizio Bàbuin and written by Valentina Diana) represented the violently grim counterpoint. The play, staged for American audiences via the International Fringe Encore Series, fixates on the body fascism of its solo character ‘Carlo’ (Luca Serra Busnengo), identifying the disturbing pathos at the heart of contemporary radicalization and mining theatricality through a war with anatomy. Over the 70-minute runtime, I watched Carlo, an unrepentant Nazi stalk about, spitting slurs and flexing, laying bare his hateful grievances with modern Italian society.
The small stage is first lit only by the glow of an electric speaker. Carlo enters, dancing stiffly to a German-language rock song, at one point turning out to ‘Sieg Heil’ in rhythm. Settling into a cheap office chair, he begins to eat an apple. He is methodical and joyless in peeling the skin with a butterfly knife before cutting and eating small pieces. Moving past the expected tirades against immigration, homosexuality, and democracy, his deeper target of disgust seems to be ‘his’ culture which has become ‘undisciplined’: too busy eating panettone and drinking wine to ‘wake up’. This proves his most frequent irritant. Reoccurring interludes see Carlo blast more music, and throw himself to the ground for push-ups. He flexes his muscles into the webcam, determined to prove himself the exception. He is not a reader or a writer. The copy of Mein Kampf is a conspicuous prop he handles like a museum piece. His ethos is recorded – archived – as six words written out and pinned to the back wall.
Carlo leaves the stage only once. He gets a single glass of water. This too, he consumes joylessly. His mother, heard watching TV from a bedroom offstage, is a frequent target of his rage. She raised him, we learn, to be weak and gluttonous. Rejecting her gave him purpose. She fed him pasta which made him fat. An act of love and nurturing is transformed into sabotage. He returns to the apple. More pieces are cut away and eaten. It took nearly the entire show for him to finish his 100-calorie meal.
A clever variation on direct address, (a type of fourth wall breakage), sees Carlo deliver the majority of this dialogue into a wireless webcam. Never once did Busnengo glance out into the audience, forcing me into the room with him. His attention remained, always, on the little camera. He announces “Here I am, brothers. Let’s wait for everyone you’ve invited”. The show, we then learn, is not for us. It is for a group of young men looking to become like Carlo, to become strong, to become driven. It is for those captured by a grotesque body fascism. He strips for his audience of “noobs”, removing his flannel overshirt Carlo roots his ideology in the notable width of his shoulders, and size of his arms. The strongman politics of fascism manifests a tendency toward cruel self-discipline and fear of physical weakness; similar to the idea of ‘bigorexia’ used to justify self-destructive diets and excessive weight training in modern young men. Why debate philosophy, or write theory, when one can train their body as an act of direct political confrontation? His abrasive talk of discipline and physical fitness is at once encouraging and frightening: a type of ‘tough love’ meant to threaten those seated in the house. The effect was unique, driving audience members to ‘volunteer’ their presence as voyeurs to a performance not really made for us. His physical presence and tendency to demean and belittle the ‘weakling’ work-in-progress strongmen on his livestream discourage confrontation from the darkened house. We sit and take it in – a passive adversarial relationship – he could care less what we think.
It recreates, to some effect, the sensation of observing and confronting fascist spaces online, like the echo chambers created by the rageful Andre Tate on YouTube, or the words of Tucker Carlson. But, here, seated in a theatre, there is no ‘logging off’. Online, the opposition can take a look inside, fire off a comment or two, and then withdraw. We are held captive until the not until the house lights go up and Busnengo steps out to de-role onstage. Still, that will be an effort. The work that went into making Carlo might not so easily exit Busnengo. He has occult ‘tattoos’ that must be scrubbed, hateful lines – carefully memorized – that must be exorcised.
Discipline has made beautiful works of dance. It also has broken backs and destroyed bodies. What is this sliding scale between the aesthetic sense of Alvin Ailey and the evil embodied in Carlo? To my eye, it is self-evident from the movement. At the Edges of Ailey, I watched a montage of recorded performances play on an expansive, multi-screen display. Incredible. At IO//ODIO, I watched a man kick, writhe to music that fueled him, and drove his sense of being. Still, from that movement, it felt as if something was twisting, abrasive. It is a credit to the physical portrayal from Busnengo. We are watching a body that is disrespected. Violent insecurity has made its mark. When does appreciation for the human figure, for the live exhibition of a body in motion, become a self-destructive practice of cruelty and denial? The pithy answer is “when there’s a swastika drawn on the bicep”. The serious answer, of course, is harder to place.
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