“Kiosk”
Arica Performance Company
Japan Society, New York
September 19, 2008
by Tom Phillips
Copyright 2008 by Tom Phillips
“What do you do?” is the classic New York question, and now I know the follow-up, the corollary that makes it worthwhile. What do you do, and what do you do with it? What do you do to make bartending, bus driving, teaching, or toll-collecting a work of art; how do you take time and space and craft them into dramatic moments and sequences, rises and falls, surges and lapses, intermissions and grand finales? In other words, how do you turn the tedium of labor into the joy of creation? (The humbler your job, the more apt the question.) “Kiosk” is a lesson in how it’s done, and a warning of the woes of our post-industrial age.
The lone character in this show is a middle-aged woman who works in a tiny store kiosk, the kind you see all over the world. She only sells newspapers and bottled water, but here’s how she does it: with balletic flourishes, she attaches herself to two bungee cords, one affixed to a large steel case, the other to a garbage can on opposite ends of her counter space. On a rolling chair, she spins, zips and zooms back and forth, in and out, filling plastic bottles from dripping water coolers on opposite ends of her counter, while rolling newspapers and unloading boxes from a pile in the back of the store. She choreographs all this to a Beethoven symphony, punctuated with live bursts from an electric bass and guitar.
In her mind, she is not a kiosk lady but a circus dancer, stuck in a diminished space in a diminished time. “Even when I walk on the ground,” the script goes, “I am walking on a tightrope. I dance on the rope, but there’s no place to fall… There is no danger. I’ve already fallen to the ground. There is no space here. It’s gone.”
Still, as she reaches for the top boxes with thrusts of a long pole, she has all the controlled violence of a Japanese Kendo fighter. Dispensing bottle caps from a foot-operated contraption on the floor, she snatches them out of the air like a latter-day Chaplin, turning the mechanical into the comical. It’s something, but it’s not enough. In despair, she collapses with her head on the counter: “It’d be better to bury myself in the earth and keep still there, but that would keep me from ropedancing..”
Oh, but even this will be taken away. After arranging the boxes on the counter, she opens them and finds they’re filled with pre-packaged, shrink-wrapped 12-packs of bottled water. Ruefully, she shuts down her bottling operation. In the end, she opens the steel case to reveal a glowing array of bottles – prearranged with no need for any human hand. And so she goes away.
“Kiosk” is the auspicious opening offer in Japan Society’s fall-winter series, “Beyond Boundaries: Genre-bending Mavericks.” It’s a one-woman show by the brilliant performer Tomoko Ando, but very much a company production. The musicians are live and engaged, and you can feel the presence of director-designer Yasuki Fujita as bundles of newspapers suddenly drop from the sky, and the set seems to move and light itself by an invisible hand.
The only disappointment was the half-empty house at Japan Society. “Kiosk” has one more performance, tonight (9/20) at 7:30. If you care about art, or life, or even just work, you shouldn’t miss it!
Copyright 2008 by Tom Phillips
Photos copyright Miyauchi Katsu
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