"Accidens' at Fringe Festival

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4 minute read
1056 Loriente
Is it torture? Is it art? Is it boring?

JIM RUTTER

The New York Times recently ran an article about “underground restaurants”— upstate locations where upscale New Yorkers travel to help butcher and prepare their own meals (usually boar or other exotic game). The Viennese Actionists of the 1950s and ’60s, on the other hand, publicly tortured and slaughtered dogs and other animals in the name of art.

Somewhere between these two extremes lies Accidens (matar para comer), Rodrigo García’s piece staged this month during the Live Arts Festival. Accidens stars Juan Loriente and one less than enthusiastic lobster, only one of whom survived the show.

García sought to “create a metaphor for torture.” As a South American, he told the audience afterward, he felt pleased to perform this work in Philadelphia, because “the U.S. government has financed the use of torture” in Chile and his native Argentina.

García’s piece, set in the appropriately named Ice Box Space in Northern Liberties, opened on a seated Loriente smoking a cigar at the side of the stage, a large griddle warming up on a table at center, his victim/co-artist lying motionless in a tub of water at his side. The audience— to my amazement, mostly women (who are said to comprise two-thirds of vegetarians)—shuffled in, and for the next 20 minutes sat enraptured, watching Loriente “torture” the poor thing.

First, Loriente hung the lobster from a microphoned wire, and in the height of pretentiousness, used two cords to splay the crustacean’s arms out like Christ on the cross. The lobster hung there, at first motionless, then writhing and kicking, as the microphone and two speakers picked up and amplified every little sound the creature made.

The passive audience

I’ll admit to feeling moderately troubled by this spectacle, and I wondered why no one from the audience stepped up and freed the thing. Had it been a puppy— or a child— I’m sure someone would have put a stop to his performance. (In the talkback afterwards, García offered a partial answer: No one tries to rescue the lobster, because they’re afraid it will snap at them, whereas audience members did interrupt a Loriente performance that used a pair of rabbits).

But everyone in the audience sat transfixed, even in those moments when Loriente poured water over the lobster (a symbolic last meal for the condemned?), evoking some sort of pathetic sound from the creature. In contrast to the shocked audience— which García described as “typically bourgeois”— I felt only a combination of boredom and amusement. When Loriente went tête-à-tête with the beast, staring it down while blowing smoke in its antennae, I found myself thinking not of Abu Ghraib but of the most excessive moments of Quentin Tarantino’s films.

After just ten or fifteen minutes of “torture,” the lobster was dead— quickly and cleanly hacked apart by Loriente. The remainder of the piece called on the audience to watch Loriente flavor the remains, quietly sipping a glass of wine while the lobster cooked on the griddle, and then devouring it while a text-driven slideshow played in the background.

Sarah Palin’s new slogan?

Which brings me to Garcia’s second goal for this piece. To him, we urbanites no longer kill for our food, and consequently we’ve lost a part of our humanity. (Sarah Palin’s new campaign slogan, perhaps?) Killing our food, for Garcia, is an act that makes us more human than shopping for a mass-processed package at the supermarket.

I found Garcia’s messages intriguing (if not original), but I’m uncertain how well his piece delivered either of them. Only a committed member of PETA could have thought that García offered an effective metaphor for human torture. And Loriente’s stone-faced grimace suggested a good deal less than an ideal human who “kills in order to eat” (the subtitle’s translation).

In any case, other South American playwrights—Ariel Dorfman comes to mind— have explored this material so much more dramatically and effectively, using humans who actually survive the performance. Watching it die (and the lobster is an it, not a he or a she) won’t make me understand or condemn the torture of humans with any greater force.

Ultimately, I found myself thinking about the underpaid Latino kitchen workers at Devon Seafood Grill who cook and serve up lobsters 50 or more times a night. For all the artistry of their cooking, none of them would think to call it art. Aside from the shock of seeing a lobster metaphorically tortured, the remainder of Accidens was as dull as it sounds: In effect, you’re paying to watch another person eat. At least Loriente might have offered to share.


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