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The clean, classy zones of Definition seem like waiting rooms in a ’90s movie set in heaven. Structurally, the superb installation Samuel is similar to Definition: The audience (in pods of three) shifts from empty room to empty room, listening to the recorded show on headphones. There’s more confidence on that front at the Tank, an Off–Off theater complex on 36th Street. But the contrast between the strength of the preshow exhibition (all those video eyes, making contact) and the lassitude of the show itself highlights how much even our finest theater artists are struggling to choreograph an actorless space. Obviously we’re in a period when everyone is scrambling just to make anything at all, working inside a shifting net of constraints. Definition is handsomely realized - unsurprising, since it’s produced by the Bushwick Starr - but it feels like an experience under glass.
Everything about the project shouts with its desire to not be an installation: The rock and roll wants to be jumping around in the room with us, not demurely playing on our headphones White’s dramatic ideas about the shock of being seen (by a therapist, a lover, an inanimate painting) require a vivid energetic exchange. That explains why Definition seems to always be pointing elsewhere - it’s a trailer for the musical to come. In her program note, White explains that she’s been working on the stage version of Definition for half a decade, converting it into this “snapshots” version only because of the shutdown. The numbers seem only lightly connected to the scenario the connections stay elusive we groove along in our quasi-private listening parties, as the mood remains muted, even a little stoned. In this contemplative plot, White and composer Dan Rosato’s rock songs act as interludes. At her therapist’s request, Sam goes to a museum, where she falls in love with Magritte’s painting The Son of Man and attracts the gaze of the museum guard, the only other Black person she sees in the museum. We’re ushered to a narrow oblong to hear a scene of Sam at her job. We sit in a cozy corner filled with lamps and hear a woman, Sam, talking with her therapist. The audience wears wireless headphones that transmit White’s audio drama with music at given moments, we move among “rooms” created by the translucent drapes that partition the venue. Inside the main space, set designer Daniel Soule has made a gauze-curtained maze on a huge warehouse floor. Watching the videos before the start of White’s own show, we fill our minds with Black faces looking out of the video-screen frame, meeting our eyes, or seeming to connect with the unmoving paintings hanging around us.
Whitney White’s Definition: An Installation Experience actually starts in this gallerylike foyer with a beautifully curated prologue, an exhibition of artworks and videos by (among others) Kenard Jackson and Cloteal Horne. The newly converted warehouse is a clean pocket in that gray particulate haze it’s gleaming and elegant, with a blonde-wood lobby staircase descending in big amphitheater jumps to a polished floor. The Mercury Store is in Brooklyn, a few blocks from the reeking Gowanus Canal and only steps from Third Avenue, where the air is heavy with asphalt fug. Installations create a sense of cosmic loneliness that’s rare in conventional drama, an art form which usually fills up every available cranny with bluster and presence. No one claims they’ll still be in the theatrical repertory after the recovery - they’re such a profligate use of resources and space. (Installations are environments in which an in-person audience encounters sound, sculpture, and other media, but never a living performer.) You don’t get the same advocacy for installations that you do for digital work.
Will institutions keep producing online shows? Or is Zoom destined to be retired, filed alongside techniques like candlelight and dancing bears? But while conversation about digital rages, another pandemic method trundles quietly along: the installation. In theatrical discussions these days, artists debate digital performance.
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