This past Monday, POST•M, a “devised metatheatrical creation”, was performed in the Dance Studio. Directed by Nerina Cocchi ’10, the show featured Alena Giesche ’11, Heather Pynne ’11 and Andrea Messana, and was a preview of Cocchi’s vision for an international show that will begin touring next year across Europe.
The performance began with a prologue by Messana, who walked onstage dressed in a giant gray coat and a moose hat. He walked about for a few silent moments, then turned to the audience and made a sound like a sheep, dropping five balls of white yarn from his pockets as he gave his bizarre greeting. He then walked offstage and the performance began.
Giesche assigned Pynne the role of “Girl at the Typewriter,” and true to her title, Pynne sat down at the typewriter set on the ground. Giesche then posed five questions to the audience, and gave a gift — a ball of white yarn — to each person who answered. She then formed a rather nonsensical sentence using the answers, and repeated it several times, transforming it into a sort of mantra that would be used throughout the show. Following this, Giesche then took the balls of yarn and began to string them around audience members, finally bringing the yarn back onstage and tying it around the curtains and lights backstage. More balls of yarn in various rainbow shades joined their white kin, and soon the entire stage was swamped in yarn strung across, up and down, making it difficult for Giesche to navigate the stage.
Meanwhile, Messana took to the stage and began talking in a combination of Italian and French; since the audience was mostly Middlebury students, it was easy for some to identify what he was saying, and they responded when he asked them questions. All the while, two members of the audience had been called up to the stage; one began to read a newspaper and the other had his hand wrapped entirely in yarn, only to have Messana untie it and order another audience member to begin knitting the yarn as it unraveled from the man’s hand.
Messana then began to call more members of the audience up to the stage, myself included, and handed them newspapers to string out on the strings of yarn. The papers were current; one of mine bore a national headline about the unrest in Egypt, while another was a Campus frontpage. As we did this task, Giesche began to dance and writhe fervently among the strings as more and more newspapers were added — until she finally collapsed. Throughout, Messana occupied himself by taking photographs of everything that was transpiring onstage.
By this time the entire audience was onstage with the performers, and as the last ball of yarn was unrolled, we were then silently told to begin cleaning up. It took a good 10 minutes to fold the newspapers and re-wrap all the yarn strewn around the stage, but through teamwork, it was a relatively easy task. We then returned to our seats and the show was over, leaving us wondering as an audience what we had just been witness to and what our own experience onstage meant to us both as individuals and as a singular humanity.
Inspired by Cocchi’s grandmother’s stories about World War II, POST•M was initially imagined as a reflection on how the past affects our generation’s involvement in present society — but according to Cocchi, what we really want to talk about is the present, not the past, and also about what it takes to be a human being today. She wanted to blur the boundary of roles, and wanted us to know that whether we like it or not, we live in a global society and the world that you consider yours is, really, just yours — individually yours. In POST•M, Cocchi wanted audiences to go beyond their own world.
Though it was a rather confusing, amusing and slightly embarrassing ride, I believe that is what the audience ended up doing as we returned to our seats, feeling a strange sense of silent accomplishment after cleaning up a stage drenched in rainbow yarn and newspaper. Our combined experiences onstage brought our own unique worlds together. Ultimately, whatever Cocchi was trying to accomplish with this bizarre and experimental theater experience, I believe it worked.
Metatheatrical experience combines our worlds
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