Screened at UnionDocs May 13th-16th, 2016

I saw a poster for this live performance and film project advertised at Hunter and have always wanted to go to Uniondocs so I went to check it out. It was really worth it! This was a hybrid piece combining live theater, dance and filmed documentary and other fiction images and was unlike anything I’ve seen. It began with theater, a reenactment of an interview or a slightly fictionalized version of a laundry worker telling some details of her life. We then saw images of a laundromat and an interaction on screen, then a live dance piece with the four actors who were not one character, but many characters each, at different points portraying laundromat workers and customers. The whole piece went on like this, blending fiction with non-fiction, film with live performance. After a while, I got the sense that interviews with laundry workers were perhaps hard to come by as many of the stories that the actors told were often women saying “My job is boring, there is nothing to tell, I don’t want you to film me”.  I found this very interesting because, through theater reenactment, we got to see into the documentary process, which is quite rare. I appreciated the honesty of this.

What I liked most about this piece was that it was never clear or straightforward yet carried a strong emotion — we heard snippets of conversation, two people ranting in different languages with no subtitles, a strange dance sequence in unison, an interview with a Chinese man at a laundromat with subtitles, two actors reading from scripts live in shadow profile. All of these different scenarios created feelings, without following a plot. It seemed that there was always space to go in a totally new direction — to bring in facts from history, to tell a personal story, to have a trivial conversation. At times the mood felt awkward, or sad or funny.

One thing I found very interesting was that probably at least half the audience watching this piece were some of the customers that the laundromat workers told some stories about — all the drop off laundry and what you can tell from a person by what is dropped off. In that way, it felt like a strange direct address to the audience. I liked the boldness and honesty of this piece.

Uniondocs itself had a nice vibe; it’s a small space, but  even though I arrived only 10 minutes before the scheduled start I was able to get a great seat in the second row. After the performance/film there was a Q&A with the directors and actors. We got to learn a little of the backstory which was really neat. The piece developed in 2014 from live performances on site at different laundromats — sometimes they were acting out scenes and interactions, and sometimes it was more abstract. While performing at laundromats, they began to talk more with customers and workers and hear their stories — which is how the film aspect of the work began to weave in. They plan to continue working on this project and continue to expand it and have future shows.

I highly recommend this piece. The combination of other arts besides documentary to tell this story was so inspiring and helped prove to me that there are no limits to how a story can be told and that audiences have a greater capacity than I give them credit for to appreciate the abstract and non-linear sides of storytelling.