It's a Rorschach test of sorts: Fifty adults in a room, all wearing sheets with eyeholes cut out. What do you see?
Ghosts, decided most people at Luke George's Sunday afternoon show, though I heard a few comments on the resemblance to a full-body hijab. The Klan connection is there too, though I think it's deliberately discouraged: Many of the sheets are pale pastels, like last-minute Halloween costumes, rather than bright white. Mine was pink.
I was a pink ghost.
Upon entering the studio where Not About Face is performed, each member of the 50-person audience is draped, one at a time, in a bedsheet that smells like it's just been through a hotel laundry. For a few minutes, everyone just roams the space freely, getting their... ghost legs? Most people seem to take to their sheets quickly, flapping and swooping and twirling. (Or, if you're me, giggling uncontrollably because you've got the Diarrhea Planet song "Ghost with a Boner" stuck in your head.) There's a video monitor at one end of the room, showing a picture of the space we're in—but on the monitor, the room is empty. We're ghosts! We're invisible. And it's hard to be inhibited when no one can really see you.
After a while, two of the ghosts begin shouting lines of dialogue, revealing themselves as undercover performers. (I do not remember what they said because ghosts don't take notes and I have a terrible memory.) The rest of the audience sort of coalesces around them, a formation that reminded me of watching the Chapman swifts swirl around the school chimney. Soon the lady ghost summons the audience toward her and leads us in a quick breathing exercise, encouraging us to be aware of our bodies in the space, in relation to other bodies. I've been asked to be "present in the moment" many, many times during the nearly 10 years I've been covering live performance, but something about the anonymity of this scenario made it more resonant than usual. Then everyone was asked to sing together—again, not something that usually works, but surrounded by all my faceless fellow ghosts, I had a became a beautiful, emotional moment. I have a terrible, singing voice, but somehow I felt the way I imagine people with nice voices who sing in really fancy church choirs must feel. (There's an obvious religious/ritualistic subtext to much of the show, beginning from when you step into a pool of light to be draped in a sheet by two volunteers as you enter the space.)
After that truly lovely moment, though, the show lost me. The sheets encourage playfulness, but George's intentions with the show veered in a different direction—a buzz kill-y sort of a direction. He did some screaming and some violent ghost-wrestling, and then some very aggressive micromanaging of the audience—instructing us to press up against him, to scream, to find a neighbor and cuddle. Being bossed around is no fun, even when you're wearing a sheet, and the audience buy-in visibly dropped—plenty of us rode out the show at the fringes of the room. (I assume some of the others, like me, were hanging back to avoid physical contact with strangers. I don't particularly like touching strangers and I even more don't like being in a position where the default assumption is that I'm going to be okay with touching strangers. It was very possible to avoid, however.)
He got me back a bit at the end, during a relaxing story-time portion where everyone was encouraged to lie on the floor and rest, but it was hard to fully check back in after feeling so alienated by some of the earlier segments.
George's show is truly memorable, and if you're at all curious, I definitely recommend it. (And I wouldn't be surprised if different shows offer different dynamics, as it seemed like a decent amount of it was unscripted.) I just wish he'd taken more advantage of the absolutely unique place he brings the audience to. I've seen plenty of dancers thrash around and yell—as audience members, we get to experience confusion and mild discomfort all the time. Actual joy? Not so much.
I should note that I left before the show was quite over, and missed about ten minutes at the end. I actually thought it probably was over (it was a vey natural ending point; if you see it you'll know what I mean) and was really eager to get out; the thought of having to wait in the bag-check crush in Conduit's tiny lobby was enough to make me preemptively hightail it. I'm told I missed "a bit, but not much," so take that for what it's worth.
Not About Face runs through Thursday; details here.
We've also got a ton more photos of the show, which are all the more impressive when you consider that our photographer was also dressed as a ghost. (He had a mouth, though; a big grimacing ghost face with a camera poking through.)
