Aquarium reflections: in a performance work structured as a day in the life of a city dweller, Connie Beckley combined music, poetry and sculpture

Art in America, Feb, 1998 by Tiffany Bell

In the past three years, Connie Beckley has exhibited sculptures and drawings, released a CD of musical compositions, developed a Web site, published a pamphlet of poetry and created and performed in a major theatrical production first presented at the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz, Austria, in 1995 and then expanded and revised for a New York premiere at the Lincoln Center Festival 97 last July.[1] This piece, The Aquarium: A Meditation on Life in the City, was the culmination of all these thematically related efforts, and combined music, sculpture and poetry in a mode similar to that of Robert Wilson or Laurie Anderson. In contrast to these artists, however, and despite the grander scale of the Lincoln Center production compared with her earlier performance work, Beckley avoided the spectacular to focus on the prosaic, elevating repetition and dailiness to a position of significance and wonder.

The title of the performance, and the initial inspiration for the aquarium scene, came from a chance encounter Beckley had while walking along a street in New York's Chinatown. Stopping in front of a seafood restaurant to observe an aquarium in the window, she found herself looking at the fish, a woman in the restaurant and her own reflection in the window. Her musings on this image -- reflection, glass, fish, window, water, woman and the converging of different worlds in a single frame -- generated The Aquarium. She developed the piece by gathering observations loosely structured as a day in the life of an urban dweller.

The narration for The Aquarium is Beckley's first original text. In earlier performances, she appropriated passages from literary, historical or scientific writings. To maintain a similar detachment in speaking her own words, Beckley first conceived the text as a series of descriptive phrases like a screenplay.1 For example, the scene called "The Aquarium" starts out:

Sing How's Seafood House.

The aquarium in the window.

Water very clear, with carp and eel.

However, as she expanded upon her observations with thoughts and associations, the text evolved into a long poem (published, with some modifications, independent of the performance) that is more personal and self-reflective than her earlier work.

The performance began with Beckley sitting on a stool near a structure that resembled a bed. She recited and sang the poem as a first-person monologue, emphasizing the intimacy of the situation. She started with a description of looking into the bathroom mirror and proceeded through a series of events and experiences that most New Yorkers would recognize: searching for keys, leaving the apartment, entering the subway, passing the Time/Life building, dealing with construction in the street, sitting in a cafe, encountering a group of street women, overhearing one side of a conversation at a phone booth and finally returning home as the street lights come on.

Corresponding to the commonness of these situations, Beckley's tone of voice was low-key and matter-of-fact. The even-paced recitation and mundane facts, however, contrasted to a vivid, wide-ranging imagination introduced by the descriptions in the poem narration. A woman walking downstairs was likened to Alice descending to Wonderland, the woman seen through the aquarium recalled Ophelia, miscommunicated messages brought to mind the undelivered message in Romeo and Juliet, and a woman stopping the activity of construction vehicles digging up a street so that she could cross was compared to Moses parting the Red Sea. Names similarly conjured up fanciful connections: the Time/Life building was associated by its scale and gravity to the weighty concepts signified by the magazines' names, and the smoking section of Dante's Cafe had the "smoke and vapor" of the Inferno. Connecting these images were components of the aquarium scene reenvisioned. Windows, lit and darkened, conveyed messages; the flow of water was associated with the flow of people, space and time; a group of people was described as a school of fish; reflections were seen in glass and mirrors. Ordinary street scenes became metaphors for the consideration of alienation and intimacy, intervention and nonintervention, confirmity and nonconformity, fight and dark, here and there, and so on.

As Beckley recited the narration into a microphone, four musicians and two sopranos performed on stage.[3] Beckley's music is indebted to Philip Glass, with whom she worked as a performer in Einstein on the Beach in the mid-'70s. Integrated within the slow, repetitive intonations, however, are oompah rhythms and melodies like those from jazz, folk or even Renaissance music, which set the tone and pace of the various scenes. At times, the music seemed to exist simultaneously with the narrative and action; at other times it was foregrounded as the sopranos repeated a chorus, responded to Beckley's narration or sang individual words from it. Beckley sang certain words as well.

The musicians, dressed in street clothes, played and sang the music and also did the stage work, arranging Beckley's sculpture or performing acts that reinforced visual metaphors suggested by the narration. On one occasion, for example, mirrors were gazed into and then used to reflect light onto the ceiling, evincing both inward and outward reflection. Beckley watched the performers complete their tasks or, at times, helped out by "working" herself. Echoing the mix of ordinary and fantasized accounts in the text, the stage work conveyed a mundane aspect of the dramatic realm of the theater. This dualism was further reinforced in the visual objects displayed on the stage.