Ugo Rondinone tangos with Samual Beckett

 

This performance was cogently concise, clearly weird; It's a witty existential display of the absurd which might have pleased André Breton if he hadn't been such a dour sourpuss of a Parisian snob.

I was amazed, and I stayed riveted for about an hour or so walking about in this space through which one was invited to contemplate life. While I was there hardly a dozen people passed through, many of them with wry smiles and confounded looks.

I remember that it was December 9th, and my birthday. I was in Sydney for a few days so I went to the Gallery of New South Wales to contemplate my own passing years by having a cake in the cafeteria. Looking back, all this seems now like an extravagance, ambulating through these public spaces, carefree, and without a worry, watching others do the same. 

Perhaps, this is at the truth of why the piece is so engaging, captivating, and so absurdly serious. What has the pandemic taught us about ourselves? How do we live? Who do we love? What do we really care about as we move too quickly through Life? 

This piece comprised of two clowns made of unknown substances don't move and they only seem to speak through an audio loop playing again and again the same dreary dialogue. It is a play, in fact, and maybe Samual Beckett would have approved had he meandered through this space zoomed up from the 19th century. He might have even asked, 

"Isn't this what theatre is all about?"