Imbolc                                                                        Valentine Moon

This Clement World.  Not sure why I decided I wanted to see this.  In part the content of course.  Climate change.  In part a chance to get back into some kind of rhythm with Kate, going out, away from home.  She wants that and she’s right.  It’s a different dynamic than the domestic scene and important to the health of our relationship.

Still.  When I attend a performance in an art center, I expect the aesthetic dimension to pre-dominate.  In that sense I want a unity, a coherence and, perhaps most important for me, an emotional punch, a dragging of this often too cerebral guy into his heart and soul, piecing the three into an ensemble, at least for an hour or even 5 minutes.  Didn’t find that tonight.

Cynthia Hopkin’s journey, from personal melodrama to global catastrophe had the potential for merging the political and the aesthetic, rolling them into an engagement beyond the impending doom.  And I’m sure that’s what she wanted.  It’s what I wanted ,too.  It was there at moments.  When she channeled the German physicist studying carbon in sea ice and he spoke of being stuck without food in a bay during an arctic winter.  He became, he said, a predator, too.  He killed a seal, cut off its head, cleared out its guts and ate.  On occasion her beautiful voice touched me, but too often the cacophony in the background, singers and band, drowned out her song.  At least for me.

I know this about art and politics.  They don’t mix well or easily.  What especially doesn’t mix well is message art.  When the performer has a political point of view and uses an artistic medium as vehicle for sharing it.  Tough.  This is very different from a movie or play or poem or song about political issues.  That’s commentary, critique, a venture to find the universal through the story of Hamlet or All the King’s Men or House of Cards or Twelve Angry Men.  It’s different when the art has a perspective it believes in and tries to pitch it.

What I’m talking about here is a play against domestic abuse, a performance to change your mind about climate change (tonight), a play to advance gay rights.  Where the art work is the equivalent of political speech, persuasive political speech.  Then the narrative and flow of the art can easily get bent in service of the message, rather than following the emotional and creative arc.  It’s not impossible; it’s just damn hard and this one, for me, didn’t reach that spot.

Glad she tried, though.