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November 12, 2013 – Review
Performa 13
Media Farzin
“It’s like watching paint dry,” you might say of something unreasonably boring. Watching an ice cube melt suggests the same thing. And a melting ice cube was the only thing happening onstage, for about an hour, during Florian Hecker’s commission for this year’s Performa Biennial. Luckily for the audience, C.D. - (A Script for Synthesis) (all works 2013) had much by way of distraction. The austere set, comprised of pink and green lighting and a few dramatically lit speakers, made excellent use of the Guggenheim Museum’s modernist auditorium. A group of performers chanted and warbled like broken records, their vocals designed by the grande dame of experimental voice, Joan La Barbara. The script, written by the impenetrable philosopher and purveyor of “theory-fiction” Reza Negarestani, was frequently interrupted by mechanical crackles and drones, which gave the piece an intriguing techno-futurist texture, but an uncertain sense of theoretical ambition. The program, printed in a tiny font, did not encourage close reading; it was much more fun to sniff at the plastic medallions left on our chairs, which supposedly smelled like a pink ice cube (very synthetic). Other details have escaped this critic’s performance-addled mind—then only halfway through a five-event evening—but I suspect …