'Big Real' dives headfirst into the world of illusion and lies
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
CATHERINE THOMAS
Nothing is what it seems,
as Alice discovered in Wonderland. And in just under an hour in
her latest solo show, "Big Real,"performance artist Linda Austin
spans centuries of hypocrisy
and forged identity, exposes red herrings from the bombing of Baghdad to the
subterfuges
of the psyche and crystallizes personal truths while dispensing lies.
Austin's signature is
her ingenious use of props, and her talents as a scenic designer are
given full play here. The set is crafted on illusion: hidden cameras, trick
walls, secret
antechambers, optical ruses, frames within frames. Like the Old World toy
of wooden
babushka dolls stacked one inside the other, it eventually opens to emptiness.
And so begins "Big
Real," which isn't strictly a solo show, of course. Without revealing
all the
marked cards (that would spoil the fun), Austin's greatest accomplishment
in "Big Real" is
that she's bluffing half the time. Or she's deconstructing other bluffs, the
most infamous
being that of Thomas Chatterton, the 18th-century British adolescent poet
who forged
"ancient" verse reputedly written by a 15th-century monk.
Chatterton eventually
was found out, rendered destitute and killed himself with arsenic
before he reached adulthood. His suicide spawned paeans and falsehoods of
its own,
including a famed painting of Chatterton's deathbed rendering the boy in calm
repose.
Austin puts the spotlight
to the lie, dancing a narrated description of what arsenic poisoning
actually does to the body and navigating a twisted maze of distortions and
deceptions that
includes Chatterton's final work of satire, a will that fingered the prominent
politicos of his time.
One imagines that the Aldermen of Bristol were none too pleased.
Austin's spoken word
in this section is lightning fast and skeweringly funny. But "Big Real"
is
at heart a personal investigation, and Austin's best monologues emerge when
she turns
the trick mirror on herself, exposing the dubious authenticity of memory and
her own
masquerades of
ego. A slam on arts funding -- delivered by the two tiny dashboard dolls who
appear as her homunculi -- recalls Chatterton's final dig at the elite of
Bristol.
That's the sting of
"Big Real": You know that the bizarre semaphores and gestures Austin
is
sketching with her body are somehow freighted with meaning, and that the slide
show of non
sequitur "Brute Facts" has implications deeper than its surface.
Austin leads us willingly down
her garden path of self-delusions and revelations, right up to the work's
final, poignant
denouement.
The story's arc is tight
and cleverly knit, and like much of Austin's solo work, "Big Real"
could
easily be expanded. Austin's brief listing of a historical rogues' gallery
of con artists begs for
further development, and the video clips of her curious dance in public spaces
-- complete
with police-scene corpse outline -- is virtually devoid of passers-by.
We're a culture fascinated
with imposters. Who better than Austin -- a theater artist who
consistently weaves cultural commentary with comic and uneasy personal disclosure
-- to
expose the wider public to its own ambivalence?