Column “Trans Atlantic Express” – Culture

I’ve consumed so much culture this month! Most of all, I saw films in the cinema after the absurdly long break. I’ve been in “The Shining” and “Last Night in Soho”, “Dune” and “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City”, which definitely counts as culture, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I also got the Criterion Channel running on my smart TV and spent Thanksgiving mostly with French erotic thrillers: I watched “The Stranger at the Lake” and “The Swimming Pool” and “Belle de Jour”.

But it wasn’t just the movies: my sister invited me to a modern dance performance that a friend of her had staged at Symphony Space, so I wandered up to 96th Street and saw a trio of incredibly fit women on a show called “Murmur”, which was advertised as a “show about love” but was about breaking up.

The most memorable part for me was the one in which two women dressed in black, while they were dancing, pulled a long, bright red tape all over the stage and across the middle of a table – tape is not a common medium and whenever the role was a bit stuck it cramped me myself enormously – and then when one of the women pulled on it super hard and I was sure it would tear, I realized they were splitting up because one of them was going to move out and I almost started crying, and that was the first Time I’ve ever reacted emotionally to modern dance.

I stayed home, watched Seinfeld reps, and had no regrets

I have the feeling that this wouldn’t be a precise culture diary if I didn’t include the culture I intended to consume, but then canceled at the last minute: I had tickets for something called “Party for Freaks” and on was held at a secret location in Bushwick, which I was excited to see, but it didn’t even start before midnight and I had nothing to wear that looked appropriately freaky, so I stayed home and watched Seinfeld reps with no regrets.

I also had a ticket to a show by the Candlehouse Collective, a Chicago theater company doing what they call a “contactless immersive experience,” which I’m sorry to have missed. I’ve done that before and what actually happened there, that they call you at an agreed time and you play in a personal … could you maybe call it improvisational theater?

In a play called “Klauen” last year, I had to pretend I was responsible for a hotline for people in need, and a kid called me who was afraid of a monster in the closet and asked me what to do . It was terrifying, and while the play was obviously designed to get the kid to open the closet and find out what was inside, I got so overwhelmed by my role that I urged the boy to shut the house right away leaving and getting help and under no circumstances opening the closet door, are you crazy, child?

In hindsight, I think it’s funny to imagine the poor actor on the other end of the line trying to cope with my psychotic and codependent insistence on saving his life instead of, say, experiencing the art of storytelling , but what speaks for him is that he stayed tuned. I never knew what was in the closet, but the emotional satisfaction outweighed the lack of a plot, I would say.

This month I signed up for a play called “Next Time” in which I was supposed to pretend I was a social worker and lock myself in a closet with just a pen and paper and a call from “Anonymous” but instead I went out to dinner with friends at the last minute, ignoring the call and feeling incredibly guilty about it, which was a strong emotional experience in its own way.

My main cultural event of the month but – are you ready? – was this: I went to the opera. And not just any opera. I was in the premiere one new Opera in the Mead. I didn’t even know that new operas were still being made! My God, I have to tell you that: the clothes. People had told me about the evening dresses, but I was still unprepared. I wore my black jeans with no holes and one of my prettiest sweatshirts and felt like I showed up in week-old pajamas with crumbs of biscuits in my hair. To be honest, I thought it was great. I felt like I slipped off the tween deck and into the first class of the Titanic the day before it went down.

The evening at the Met is the most socially relevant experience I’ve ever had

I went with my friend Emma, ​​who also writes a newspaper column, but in which it must appear differently than in my “social relevance”. During the break she said she wasn’t sure whether she could write about having been to the opera because she didn’t know whether there was anything deeper to be found politically, and I said, are you serious? This is a clear case of Eat the Rich, we’re still in a pandemic, the world is on fire and we’re attending an event with people whose gem-studded mouth and nose guards match their tiara, we’re hanging in the epicenter the collapse of civilization is the most socially relevant experience I’ve ever had. She seemed to like the idea, or at least nodded until I stopped talking; i really hope she used that.

Anyway: the opera. It was Matthew Aucoin’s version of “Eurydice” with a libretto by Sarah Ruhl based on her play. It was only the second opera I was in (the first was “Madame Butterfly” when I was studying), so I don’t have much comparison, but I liked it a lot. It broke my heart. I realize that the funky listing of culture I’ve consumed this month makes my life seem quite enviable – and in some ways it is – but November was tough. The holidays are tough and since I’ve stopped drinking myself, I have no choice but to just shut my feelings feel and frankly, that strikes me as grotesque.

The myth of Eurydice – which is usually referred to as the myth of Orpheus, certainly out of sexism – is about a woman who is stolen on her wedding night by Hades, the god of the underworld; her husband, Orpheus, goes down to hell to find her. Hell’s vague rules dictate that if he doesn’t turn around and look at her, she can escape with him, but of course he does and so loses her a second time.

When Eurydice came to the underworld, she forgot how to speak human language

Each version of “Eurydice” finds a different explanation for why Orpheus makes such a self-destructive decision – fear, distrust, desire, a typically male lack of impulse control. In this version, however, the decision is that of Eurydice: Orpheus only turns around when she calls his name. The why is up to interpretation, but I get it as a story about the ambivalence of grief, how it can feel like a betrayal to come back to life after a severe loss.

When Eurydice came to the underworld, she forgot how to speak human language; the chorus explains: “She speaks now in the language of the dead / it’s a very quiet language / as if the pores of your face / were opening and talking … like potatoes sleeping in the ground.” I kept these lines in my head. Later I thought about the fact that when people die or disappear from our lives, we can definitely continue to talk to them in our heads, in the whispering language of our thoughts, and the voices of real people are very loud and overwhelming, frankly ; Sometimes it’s nicer – quieter and more comforting – to just stay at home and listen to the whispering potatoes.

But oh, we can’t stay in the underworld forever – some people have to write culture columns! – so it’s lucky that there is so much to do up here. I was so raving about the opera to two of my new sober friends that we bought tickets for “Porgy and Bess” next month. I probably won’t write about that – including “regular opera goer” in my public persona seems like the surefire way to be the first to stand on the wall when the revolution begins – but I’m really looking forward to it. We will wear evening dresses.

Translated from the English by Marie Schmidt.