Drawing the line between grafitti and art Veracity Butcher's theatrical experience glitters creativity on the Zoo

Author: Colin Foss

A healthy dose of egotism can do wonders. As simultaneous writer, director and actor, Veracity Butcher '09 brought her audience through a twisted ride into her own psyche in her most recent spectacle entitled "Glittering Graffiti." Not really a play in the traditional sense, Butcher instead billed the piece as a "theatrical experience," which was the first in an endless procession of avant-garde moves that inform the structure of the performance. Short life-art vignettes helped to explain how a whole character is made, how Butcher herself wants to be seen, how any of us compartmentalize and cope with our own bits of schizophrenia. "Glittering Graffiti" pushed self-conscious art to its limits, where the art becomes so introverted that we have to muddle our way through the folds of the creator's cerebrum to discover the essence of the piece.

The stage was sparse enough. Three full-length mirrors were suspended from the ceiling, behind which three dancers enacted a curiously inhuman flailing. A red banner filled with the scrawling of lines drawn from the performance forms a drawn-back curtain over the stage. As the audience entered, they saw the arms of the three dancers waving from the sides of the mirrors, as if the performance had already begun. When Butcher made her appearance on stage, it was uncertain if it was Butcher the actor, Butcher the character or Butcher the playwright who was addressing the audience. She shifted in and out of each persona, fracturing the lines that she had written for herself and escaping to somewhere less theatrical and more real. Why then did the dialogue feel so much like lyric poetry and not common parlance?

Part of it could be the desire to elevate vulgar emotion. She gave each of her characters a veracity their elevated speech nearly crippled. The full emotional impact of their testimonies could not stand that kind of pressure. The composition and unity of the piece glittered enough to let the speech stay metaphoric and not sacrifice any bit of efficacy. The characters within the play personified certain lines of thought and certain base emotions that could be disassociations of an individual, or could have represented certain generic characters in modern society. Vanity, the emergence and protection of individualism and even modern stereotypes of evil - embodied in a representative of the oil industry, of all things - come up as brief arguments for a case that was vaguely mentioned in the introduction. But the point behind "Glittering Graffiti" was not in what connects the vignettes thematically, but in their representation.

"So what if there's no theme?" Butcher wrote in her director's notes within the playbill. "Theatre is art!!! Therapy! Coarse. 3-D. Beautiful."

The notes themselves were actually "notes on the director's notes," which meant hand-written, first-draft brainstorming on what a polished bit of director's notes may look like. This presented itself as an attempt to end presentation and identified itself as a manifesto against manifestos. What were important were the images, Butcher wanted us to believe, but the need to contextualize those images was present in both the notes, the introduction and in the conclusion to the performance.

The dialogue, despite the embellished lyricism, was powerful. In one scene, two characters stood in front of the audience, each facing slightly away from the other. They were billed as the "Necessities," played by Josha Nathan '08 and Noah Kazam '07. Their monologues, delivered simultaneously, shot through the choppy bits of "Graffiti" giving the audience something notably tangible and convincing to hang on to. Each line jumped to a new character and a new desire - trivial or profound, a cup of coffee or peace from a violent war. It was an oral collage of desires and needs, engaging enough that the image needed no introduction or explanation. This scene found a universality that seemed to hit on what other, more internal portions of the performance lacked.

The final monologue delivered by Butcher began with a complete blackout, which was disconcerting to an audience who, after watching the complete deconstruction of a number of identities, found itself alone, separated from the theatre-world by total darkness. When the lights came back on, Butcher stood triumphantly on stage. Her final monologue was a reassertion of the philosophy of the image for image's sake. She even undermines the ability of the audience to analyze the performance by doing it for them, assuming the academic air of a scholar and administering a thorough psychoanalysis to her character/self. Art can be self-conscious, and art can be self-centered but art should never be mired in the individual. Butcher allowed ample space for her theatric experience to move around within herself, but there were a few scenes where she let it escape her control and let the characters speak as independent entities, resembling more of a cross-section of society than the disassociate personae of a single person. The images became more powerful when you caught a glimpse of yourself in one of those suspended mirrors, suddenly realizing that you are enjoying a performance that is about you just as much as it is about the fractured actors on stage.