Aquarium reflections: in a performance work structured as a day in the life of a city dweller, Connie Beckley combined music, poetry and sculpture - Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York, New York

In the past three years, Connie Beckley has exhibited statuarys and drawings, released a CD of musical compositions, discloseed a Web site, published a pamphlet of poesy and created and performed in a major theatrical production first not absented at the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz, Austria, in 1995 and then expanded and revised for a fresh York premiere at the Lincoln Center Festival 97 last July[1] This piece, The Aquarium: A Meditation upon Life in the City, was the culmination of all these thematically related efforts, and combined music, statuary and poetry in a style similar to that of Robert Wilson or Laurie Anderson. In contrast to these artists, however, and despite the grander scale of the Lincoln Center production compared with her earlier performance work, Beckley avoided the spectacular to focus upon the prosaic, elevating repetition and dailiness to a position of significance and wonder

The title of the performance, and the initial inspiration for the aquarium sight came from a chance rencounter Beckley had while walking along a road in New York's Chinatown. Stopping in brow of a seafood restaurant to note an aquarium in the window, she fix herself looking at the fish, a woman in the restaurant and her possess reflection in the window. Her musings upon this image -- reflection, glass, fish, window, water, woman and the converging of different worlds in a single frame -- generated The Aquarium. She discloseed the piece by gathering observations loosely structur as a day in the life of an urban dweller.

The narration for The Aquarium is Beckley's first original body In earlier performances, she appropriated passages from literary, historical or scientific writings. To maintain a similar detachment in speaking her be in possession of words, Beckley first conceived the true copy as a series of descriptive phrases like a screenplay.1 For example, the view called "The Aquarium" starts out:

Sing How's Seafood House.

The aquarium in the window.

Water actual clear, with carp and eel

However, as she expanded on her observations with thoughts and associations, the body evolved into a long metrical composition (published, with some modifications, independent of the performance) that is more personal and self-reflective than her earlier work.

The performance began with Beckley sitting upon a stool near a form that resembled a bed. She recited and sang the metrical composition as a first-person monologue, emphasizing the intimacy of the situation. She started with a description of looking into the bathroom mirror and get oned through a series of occurrences and experiences that most fresh Yorkers would recognize: searching for lock openers leaving the apartment, entering the subway, passing the Time/Life building, dealing with construction in the highway sitting in a cafe, encountering a clump of street women, overhearing single side of a conversation at a phone booth and finally returning dwelling as the street lights tend hitherward on.

Corresponding to the commonnes of these situations, Beckley's tone of voice was low-key and matter-of-fact. The even-paced recitation and mundane facts, however, contrasted to a vivid, wide-ranging imagination introduced by dint of the descriptions in the piece of poetry narration. A woman walking downstairs was likened to Alice descending to Wonderland, the woman seen end the aquarium recalled Ophelia, miscommunicated messages brought to mind the undelivered message in Romeo and Juliet, and a woman stopping the activity of construction vehicles digging up a highway so that she could cros was compared to Mose parting the R Sea. Names similarly conjur up fanciful connections: the Time/Life building was associated through its scale and gravity to the weighty universals signified by the magazines' names, and the smoking section of Dante's Cafe had the "smoke and vapor" of the Inferno. Connecting these images were constituents of the aquarium scene reenvisioned. Windows, lit and darkened, bringed messages; the flow of water was associated with the run of people, space and time; a collection of people was described as a gymnasium of fish; reflections were seen in glass and mirrors. Ordinary highway scenes became metaphors for the consideration of alienation and intimacy, intervention and nonintervention, confirmity and nonconformity, fight and dark, here and there, and in the way that on.

As Beckley recited the narration into a microphone, four musicians and sum of two units sopranos performed on stage.[3] Beckley's music is indebted to Philip Glass, with whom she worked as a performer in Einstein upon the Beach in the mid-'70s. Integrated within the deliberate repetitive intonations, however, are oompah periodical emphasiss and melodies like those from jazz, folk or level Renaissance music, which set the tone and pace of the various displays At times, the music have the appearanceed to exist simultaneously with the narrative and action; at other times it was foregrounded as the sopranos repeated a chorus, replyed to Beckley's narration or sang individual words from it. Beckley sang certain words as well.

The musicians, make straighted in street clothes, played and sang the music and also did the stage work, arranging Beckley's statuary or performing acts that reinforced visual metaphors glance ated by the narration. On single occasion, for example, mirrors were gazed into and then used to throw back light onto the ceiling, evincing the two inward and outward reflection. Beckley watched the performers full their tasks or, at times, helped on the outside by "working" herself. Echoing the mix of ordinary and fantasized accounts in the body the stage work conveyed a mundane aspect of the dramatic realm of the theater. This dualism was further reinforced in the visual realitys displayed on the stage.