I’m over at the new library watching Shorebirds Atlantic, a free lunch-hour dance concert by Margaret Jenkins and Rinde Eckert. They’re known as intense postmodern performers from San Francisco, very cool, so I’m all serious. The lights come up on a man and a woman dressed in identical white bathing caps, black swim goggles, white shirts, long white coats, longer white cotton skirts, and black gym shoes. “Death,” the man says, “has become regrettably commonplace. Not the grand affair it was . . . ”
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In my mind this is a serious piece. A man, knowing he’s going to die of cancer, creates a strange ritual around his own suicide in order to give it meaning.
After the show Jenkins and Eckert held a Q-and-A session. Everybody had questions about what things were supposed to mean, whether they were meant to be funny. Jenkins and Eckert wouldn’t say directly. Instead they asked the audience the same questions. As Jenkins pointed out, Shorebirds Atlantic (like most of her work) is designed to be ambiguous. “Explanations,” she said, “annihilate the whole piece.”
The two of them seem to believe you can’t create art any other way. When we were discussing Shorebirds Atlantic, Jenkins said, “Yesterday, when that one woman was talking about how the white represents hospitals and crazy people, and then someone else said it meant surrender–that was fantastic, absolutely fantastic. If Rinde and I said, “Let’s make a piece End, about surrender . . .” She shook her head. “End. End. End of art.”
