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Lynndie England Followed by No Space

nytheatre.com review by Matt Freeman
August 15, 2005

In the middle of the 15-minute performance of David Tretiakoff’s Lynndie England at P.S. 122, it occurred to me that I had forgotten my New Yorker at work. The reason this occurred to me is that I realized that I had gathered far more information and insight and even shock from factual retellings of the events at Abu Ghraib from actual news sources. For all the bizarre artifice of this piece, and some interesting ideas, it fails to amount to more than it’s closing statement: “violence begets violence.” And indeed, because of the slight and esoteric nature of the piece, this pat editorializing fails to provide much satisfaction or new insight.Sitting on stage with a paper shopping bag on his head, Tretiakoff speaks into a microphone, breathing heavily and whispering derivations of “Don’t touch me.” All the while, our stand in for Lynndie England, dancer/actress Charlotte Schioler, bucks and feigns intercourse with his voice as it comes through an onstage speaker. If this is a piece about war violence and torture, it’s hard to see where they factor in, although I can infer that there is a sexual component to domination. Unfortunately, the images (Schioler wandering around in front of the audience repeating that she is testing the microphone, giving the audience flashlights to “choose what they want to see”) are so unspecific that Tretiakoff has to resort to speechifying to bring us back to the central theme. All in all, an interesting experiment, but too short to grow into its images, and written with clumsy, if earnest, directness. In the program, it is said to be “very troubling,” but this lionized Lynndie is far less troubling than the frank pictures of actual and thoroughly normal-seeming Lynndie England.The companion piece, No Space, is a bit more successful. It’s another dance piece, performed by the physically powerful Schioler, that starts with a great deal of controlled chaos and more passion. She begins in a pool of light, with quick thrusting gestures, as if she is batting away a swarm of flies. It’s impressive, but loses the thread when she takes the rest of the stage. Only her natural charm allows us to enjoy her at this point, as she sweetly begs for our sympathy, explaining that she has, in fact, “no space” and needs her “inner space” and can’t breathe. Unfortunately, as she runs from one half of the stage to the other, her complaints start to feel hollow: she has a lot more space to move and breathe than her audience, who are trapped and passive.