Uchronia: when contemporary art met hanging dick in the theatre.
He was wearing a shiny yellow jockstrap, with a Pokémon tattooed on the right leg. Chansey (the Pokémon) showed her naïve imagination at the peak of his wrapped and tight genital. His hand was pushed to the ground, he tilted, the hair on the chest became a blatant show-off. Within a glance, he looked at you directly and thirstily, in silence. He was murmuring at you in a rather nuanced volume. Apparently, you cannot resist, either by the deep blue color or the seductive manner of that gesture, or you are just a super Pokémon fan like I am. Then you stopped while cycling under the railway bridge, reading the text “feeling curious”.
You were hooked, and then you started to get confused. What was this performing art about? Who was this guy? Why was he publicly in that flirtatious yellow jockstrap which never left my wardrobe? What was his message? How was he going to present himself on the stage?
Before I got overwhelmed with all those question marks, I found my way out by arriving five minutes before the show started in Theatre Rotterdam. No one told me that in the next 70 minutes, I was going to witness an almost naked performance. The genital could make their glamorous feministic pride out, the manifesto statement would be sent out in songs, the dancer would put their barefoot on the glass pieces to articulate their hallucination. It was all just like the website stated
“The title literally means ‘no time’, related to the concept of utopia: ‘no place’. In Uchronia, Vincent traces the origins of dance and of humanity itself, and then invents new scenarios for the existing stories of creation.”
The performance was being fragmented into diasporic pieces, each transcended the definition of time and space. The artists on stage were more in a carnival, celebrating the disappeared norm in our daily lives and replacing it with the celebration that could possibly only be present in this 50 square meters stage. The play started with a monologue where the performer was structuring himself in a hospital room. The monologue was woven with manic expression, later intertwined with the fantasy of sexual arousal and contemporary dance. Unfortunately, a concrete storyline would no longer be possible to trace as the concept of Uchronia dispel the chronological narratives.
Confusion stranded me along with the show. This celebration never ended, as if it was the moving feast portrayed in Henri Matisse’s La Danse. Loud as the celebration sounds, the visual language and vocal line forced you to think about the underlying message they were trying to convey. What was the connection between the line “my loneliness is killing me” and the performers’ masturbation on the stage, along with the attack of cramp? What was the relationship between “Everybody has got their own body” and “I am binary but everyone thinks I am cis”? Or maybe there was simply no meaning. The presentation of the hedonistic nature of humanity was the purpose itself.
For me, the show seemed more like an overwhelmed sense of liberation. It liberated the restriction of the performing format, from dance, vocal to acrobatics. It liberated the costume on the stage. The use of erotic dress enabled the free flow of the penis, the vibrating glute, the dazzling nipple decorated on the breast and the outrage of the virginal growing like the baby bamboo rushing out from the ground. My mouth was opened, thus released the inner shock.
Sitting in the center of the Rotterdam, the building was decorated through the public fund. Thus watching the play processed erotically in the theatre Rotterdam was almost like office sex in the play. The message was clear, break the wall, break the structure, show up the genital and fuck the rule.
When the show ended, I stayed still in my seat for another five minutes. People were leaving the chair, but I was lost in my own interpretation and translation. The artists made cotton candy and distributed them to the audience. It looked so soft, like a remote fantasy. When you have a bite, it melted immediately, left the sweet enchantment, just like the show itself.
I walked outside the theatre with that sense of confusion. So what was the purpose? Or there was simply no purpose at all? Then I randomly talked with two audiences who also just left the show and expressed my sincere feeling toward the performance.
“How long have you stayed in the Netherlands?”
“Two months this time.”
“Well, if you stay longer, then you will understand. It is just a way of free expression.”
Maybe they were right. It was just a way of free expression. When contemporary art encounters a hanging dick in the theatre, who cares about the meaning?
