All photos © Rihards Klaužs
There’s an expression in English: “stuff and nonsense”. Stuff is clutter, mess, things without order. Nonsense is, of course, something that makes no sense. So stuff and nonsense means: a lot of miscellaneous things together, meaninglessly.
Three works at Baltic Dance Platform used a lot of stuff on stage. But were they also nonsense? Netti Nüganen’s The Myth: Last Day took place on a stage covered with piles of dust, from which emerged random remains of human civilisation: coffee beans, spray mist, a handbag, a roulette wheel, casino chips – and indeed Nüganen herself. The objects are debris, unearthed from some dry alien land, and Nüganen documents her finds and reports them via a plastic intercom to some unknown other place. Is all this stuff nonsense? Kind of, but that’s the point: they’re leftovers, separated from the human use that once gave them a semblance of sense. Within this performance, that makes a lot of sense.
In FrostBite, Jette Loona Hermanis, Anna Ansone and Krišjānis Elvik cohabit a mightily messy apartment. There’s stuff on the walls: pictures, shelves. There’s stuff on the floor: a bathtub, a rug, assorted toys, gooey blue gloop. There’s stuff all over their bodies: false nails and eyelashes, skin prosthetics, hair extensions, caked makeup, heeled boots, mismatched layers of clothing. They do stuff: sniff each other up, coddle a fibrous plant root like a baby, syringe each other’s faces as if with some toxic botox. Once again, this makes no sense in any ordinary way – yet it does here: somehow, all this stuff teeters at the edge of a surreal coherence, part and parcel of a dystopian, plasticky world of synthetics and prosthetics.
There’s also a lot of on-stage stuff in Cowbody/Oh wow, it’s you! by Hanna Kritten Tangsoo and Sigrid Savi. Two trampolines. Tapes hanging from the ceiling. Candles. A black refuse sack with a horsetail dangling from it. A stepladder. A colony of inflated rubber gloves. A metronome with a white cloth tied to its pendulum. Spoken lists of random everyday stuff. We humans have a natural propensity to try to make sense of the stuff we perceive and experience, and pushing that envelope is something that art often does, intentionally or otherwise. I tried to make sense of the stuff here, and failed. Except for the metronome, with which I (over?)identified, marking time while waving the white flag of defeat.
