Putting on Your Game Face

Super Bowl weekend. Patricia and I went to the Walker Art Center last night (Friday) to see David Neumann’s FEED FORWARD, the last piece this year in the WAC’s INSIDE OUT THERE series.

Neumann’s sets the stage as a playing court or field delineated by the space definitions, lines, message boards and hot spots that made game playing a challenge. This might sound pretentious and gooey with ‘significance’ as Walker curators like to be, “...Feed Forward reimagines the athletic event as contemporary performance,” but Neumann is not.

Neumann’s show is anything but heavy and droll with self-importance. Patricia and I, and the rest of the McGuire theater, were in stitches the whole night with laughter. Cycling through a whole bunch of sporting actions and moments beginning with gymnastics (contemporary dance's closest cousin) tennis, basketball, football, and tennis, Neumann makes light and grace of it all. As the dancers/performers take to the court, we are provided with commentariats who spray morsels of profundities about the players and the lingo laced nuances describing their actions. Probably most humorously, they also provide “color” for their performances.

From time to time, play-by-play men run out onto the court and get the athletes first hand reaction to their failure or success in competition. Growing up with the high media spectacle of sports rituals surrounding the national daily and weekly event, we embrace the conventions as a part of our cultural DNA. Everything about sports is closely regimented by a formal language of motion and the "sports speak" is rehearsed and filled with cliche. Neumann never quits being the humorist, as he highlights the parts of game that catch you off guard.

For instance, two female dancers line up facing each other and move in graceful and astonishing athletic motion, swinging the arms and hands as if the face of their tennis racket. Suddenly, they begin a loud lower gut grunt at the implied moment of impact. Exactly, when did that savage sound of exertion become common to the game of tennis? Now, it is almost signature to the power game that professional tennis (as opposed to gentlemanly English club tennis) has become. Neumann is hip to this insight, he highlights the moment but at the same time makes it funny.

Players run on and off the court as if to be set in and take out tag team style. This is action common to the rules of basketball but many other sports as well. On the sideline, a man wearing a sport coats with insignia on the pocket, shouts and yells obscenities, throws his hands in frustration, protest, and indignation and he too is choreographing high performance. It is all theater or performance and the roles are cast in bronze, silver and gold.

And then you also have the other non-competitors but the ones who somehow find themselves in the middle of the action. In this case it is the dancer, referee and this marginal yet highly significant player in the spectacle. Neumann interprets the Ref as a peacock and comic figure, whose value rests in their ability to arrest the flow of action and then perform hand signals. The dancer blows a whistle, runs to the middle of court, points with impunity and then wiggles his ass.

In the final segment of the performance, a celebrity pitcher enters through a backlight stage door (the bowels of the stadium) with hand raised in victory and massive display of arrogant warriorism. I’m thinking Roger Clements and steroids at this moment. He takes the mound, the dancer mimes all the pacing, spitting, kicking the dirt as we hear an internal voice that could easily be a standup routine on Comedy Central. The audience is rolling on the floor with laughter.

There are times when I think the Walker does itself a disservice by being too high minded and artsy in its talk about performances like this one. This is right out of Comedy Central and its wit is as incisive as Jon Stewart.

Stop the pretense, this is Super Bowl weekend and FEED FORWARD is the best way to get into the mind of it all.