Last year a group of us heard a presentation by Dario Robleto at the Fogg Museum. (More about that here.) Robleto is a refreshingly unpretentious artist who is doing his work without the sandbaggery of fads, posturing and artifice. His projects have gestated in the liminal space between science and art. Working under the canopy of his personal passions, his art installations and objects have a sophisticated elegance and a childlike curiosity that I find infectious.
Robleto’s ongoing focus is on the Golden Record, an audio portrait of the planet assembled in 1977 and placed on board the Voyager spacecraft. The implications of this project–sending a message out into space with no idea who will receive it—is the underlying theme of much of his most recent work.
Sebastian Smee, one of the best writers about art (now working at the Washington Post but formerly here in Boston, a loss many of us are still mourning), recently flew to Fort Worth to see Robleto’s most recent film, Ancient Beacons Long for Notice.
In Smee’s words:
“Plenty of cultures here on Earth have made resonant objects they never thought of as art. So what is the likelihood that extraterrestrials, if they exist, would recognize the Golden Record as art?
Probably zero. But that is not Robleto’s point. What he wants to know — and it is one of several surprising turns in his work — is what the Golden Record means to us.
Turning seamlessly from empirical facts to poetic speculation, he communicates with his heart. He knows he is onto something and wants so badly to share it that you feel your eyes begin to water under the pressure of his yearning.”
Robleto isn’t the only artist who communicates with his heart and wants to share something so badly it makes our eyes begin to water with the pressure of that yearning. On October 5 Melissa Hale Woodman rented a Boston theater space, chose three worthy causes (Movement Voter Pact, Reproductive Equity Now and Corporate Accountability Climate Campaign) and did a one night, one woman show to raise funds for these worthy causes. She called it Beastly: An Autobiographical Feminist Folk Tale.
Woodman is one of those people with so much theatricality in her she can barely walk down the streets of Brookline without breaking into a bit or instantly becoming a character (there’s always that indefatigable “Olga,” Putin’s former lover, who has her own series called Late Night with Olga.) Woodman’s Beastly is an evolving work, one that includes political commentary, personal storytelling, a cast of characters as well as well-crafted verses that feature first person reportage from a few of our cohabitants here on Planet Earth—penguin, pug, cat, sea turtle, python, mole rat, ladybug, crocodile, sloth.
This was a night with someone who knows how to delight and entertain. But Woodman also uses her theatrical moment to ask big questions: What can each of us do to make a better world? What part can each of us personally play? And–as she pointed out–“you can’t make a better world if you don’t believe a better world is possible.”
Woodman sold every seat in the house. She also won over every heart in the house. We came in as strangers but left as a tribe.
Nassim, currently at the Huntington Calderwood (through October 27) is another theatrical event centered around an individual vision. Written by Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour, Nassim is a love letter to being alive, one that has been meticulously crafted and inventively conceived.
The staging is simple: A desk, a file box and a chair, with a large projection screen at the rear. Every night a different actor, community leader or public figure—of any gender, ethnicity or background–comes to the stage. They haven’t read the script, nor do they have a relationship with the playwright. Consequently every performance is unique and unpredictable. (My Nassim experience featured Mfoniso Udofia, author of the nine-play Ufot Family Cycle that begins being performed city-wide next month.)
The experiential nature of Nassim is hard to capture as a description so I am choosing to leave it tantalizingly vague as encouragement to see it for yourself. (You will thank me.) This is a work that considers, collectively, what it means to connect, what home represents, what we carry inside and how we share that with others. Soleimanpour was raised in Iran speaking Farsi. His plays have been performed all over world except in his own homeland. At one point he poignantly reminds us, “A writer’s heart will always beat in its mother’s tongue.”
Loretta Greco, Artistic Director of the Huntington, has worked with Soleimanpour in the past. She has good words to describe him:
“a truly gifted, inventive theater maker”
“an astute cultural critic”
“a kind and gentle community builder”
“His vulnerable exploration of connection and culture through language miraculously transcends borders with grace and large doses of laughter.”
In an interview with Kevin Becerra, Soleimanpour speaks to how theater can align with this particular moment in time:
“We have had enough of being held separate. I live in Berlin where there was a wall. You are in the middle of an election with a candidate who is very much interested in talking about walls. We don’t need an extra wall. Why would we separate the stage from the audience and say, ‘We’re up here and you’re down there.’ We’re all in the room.”
At first we do not know that Nassim Soleimanpour is actually present in the theater. Eventually he does come out on stage and reveal himself. In keeping with his demure Charlie Chaplin-like demeanor, he does not speak. And while his presence is held without the use of spoken language, his delicate vulnerability endears him to us all. As with Beastly, we entered the theater as strangers and departed as a tribe, one that has shared a quiet enchantment.
Soleimanpour points out that his production is a small one. “We travel with just a suitcase, me and sometimes a stage manager,” he noted. But that simplicity has not deterred the play from having a worldwide presence. “It has been all around the globe and we’ve done nearly 500 snows now.” In a world where “casts of thousands” and sky high entertainment budgets are de rigueur, the “small is beautiful” ethos continues to thrive.
In writing about Robleto’s latest film, Smee notes how “loneliness, love and the ethics of art and truth telling” are addressed in this work. While neither Beastly nor Nassim explore the unknows zones of outer space as Robleto does, they are doing their own excavations into loneliness, love and truth telling.
Smee again:
“If the universe does indeed teem with intelligent life, why haven’t we heard anything yet? How long will we remain lonely? Perhaps we and our extraterrestrial siblings are like doomed fireflies, cruelly separated by space and time, flickering out before any connection can be made.
Connection, seen from this cosmic perspective, can be understood as the rarest of gifts. It’s not as if artists haven’t always known this. ‘Only connect,’ wrote E.M. Forster in the epigraph of ‘Howards End.’”
All three of these artists—Robleto, Woodman and Soleimanpour—are on distinct paths, but each is traversing through the landscape of connection—our connection with each other, with our planet, with all that is. Each artist, in their own way, is bringing us one step closer to a more embodied, embedded, enacted and extended existence.