1000 Airplanes On The Roof
One of the questions that obsesses us as a species is — Are we alone in the Universe? And if not, who and what are the “aliens”? And are we being watched, and possibly visited by them? We are torn between longing and fear. Thus, we have cast these “others” as bearers of enlightenment (angels), or reptilian monsters (devils). But most of all we fear the incomprehensible, something whose alien “otherness” would shatter all our long-held beliefs about the nature of reality.
1000 Airplanes On The Roof, a collaborative performance written by David Henry Hwang, composed by Philip Glass and designed by Jerome Sirlin, made an attempt to take the subject beyond the Hollywood sci-fi versions of terror or salvation. As theater, it met this challenge formally, but was less successful in content. How it succeeded or failed can be measured in terms of what we expect of art.
Thus the most successful aspect of this piece was Sirlin’s quite startling stage set and scenic designs using multi-dimensional photographic projections. The viewer was confronted with an almost hallucinogenic shift of spatial perception in which material reality collapsed into illusion. The differentiation between theater and cinema was blurred, forcing the viewer to question which side of consciousness he or she was on. We soared over and landed on the rooftops of New York City, went down streets, entered buildings, vanished into forests with the lone performer/narrator, who appeared in a hologram-like projection of a gridded globe that transformed into a cage, the mind, a spaceship, the Universe. It is ironic that the manipulation of the formal structures best conveyed the deeper implications of the narrative.
The story, told in a monologue by Jodi Long or Patrick O’Connell on alternating nights, is basically the tale of someone who has been abducted by aliens, and whose body and mind have been probed. There are pieces of time missing in her life. She fears her own memory, and as she begins to recall various incidents, she questions her own sanity. She comes to remember and understand what has happened, only to have her fear of ridicule and punishment, of being thought crazy, drive her back into denial.
Though evocatively and beautifully written by Hwang, the narrative is one-dimensional. It seems to have been based on the now familiar testimony of numerous people whose contact with aliens parallels or closely resembles what is described in the book Communion. Something is shoved up the nostril. Later there are lapses of memory, nosebleeds. There is the sense of a hive-like organization, of aliens being of one mind.
The language was sometimes transcendent, but the story itself, which remained locked in a singular point of view, never got beyond that limitation. Given the subject matter, I kept waiting for it to go beyond the familiar, to stretch the imagination, risk unorthodox speculations, make daring perceptual, philosophical, or metaphysical leaps. Alas it did not. Did Hwang have a failure of nerve or of vision?
The weakest and most disappointing part of this piece was Philip Glass’s music performed live by his ensemble. It was uninspired and predictable, and one can only wonder if Glass spent any time contemplating the sonic dimensions and possibilities of the subject matter, or the structural innovations of Sirlin’s visual environment.
Hwang suggests that perception is the fifth dimension, and the performer spoke of being drawn up by the aliens into the sound, which was also experienced as light and touch. The narrator’s description defies her and our notions of time and space, and transports her into a parallel reality or dimension of consciousness, the implications of which she cannot cope with. Hwang struggled with this dilemma, but ultimately remained trapped within his character. Sirlin played with our perceptual assumptions, and introduced us to other possibilities. Glass, however, never even took the journey. He merely rehashed himself, with some humming insects thrown in for atmosphere. The result was oppressively redundant.
Angels of Swedenborg
As Chinese Americans, David Henry Hwang and Ping Chong have both made the experience of “otherness,” of being aliens in American culture, a central theme in their work. For Chong the issue of perception is paramount. He consistently and consciously reverses the viewpoint so that we can see our own strangeness, while also identifying with someone who is different, be it a golem or a gorilla. Had he staged 1000 Airplanes we probably would have been puzzling over humans from the perspective of the visitors.
Angels of Swedenborg was inspired by the eighteenth-century Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg’s writings on heaven and hell via Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings. According to Swedenborg, angels and devils are not “a species apart but derived from the human race,” and we are not assigned but choose to inhabit one or the other’s domain.
For Swedenborg time and space were no obstacles. He visited other realms while his body remained in his study. Chong also allowed the audience to be in several places at once. Simultaneously, what happened in the corral that represented Heaven traversed several centuries in its reflection on our changing ideas about what constitutes “goodness.”
Chong reincarnated Swedenborg in the twentieth century as a modern man who suffers from existential angst. Alone in the empty void of eternity where all souls live, Swedenborg dramatically recited his credentials, his knowledge and accomplishments in the arts, humanities, and sciences, followed by the indicators of his present success — his IBM PC, Sony Walkman, VCR, Deutsche Gramophone recordings, etc. Alienation is now a common condition generally relieved by acquisition of material goods, preferably user-friendly.
He sat at his desk with his computer and telephone, grappled with unanswered questions about the nature of the Soul, Heaven, Hell, and the Universe, had revelatory visions, and a few visitations. An electronic word display randomly repeated Chevalier, Montrachet 1977, Batard, Puligny.1 The sun rose over Heaven and turned into a Chinese painting of a beatific-faced baby.
Ping Chong, Angels of Swedenborg 1989. Photos: Joe Jeffcoat.
Projections of a text in an unfamiliar and unidentifiable alphabet, later replaced by pictographic signs of satellite dishes, airplanes, computers, and so on, appeared and disappeared. The world was overlaid with a grid as the names of countries were recited, and Swedenborg asked, “Where is the seat of the soul?”
Chong marked off the site of Heaven by putting a fence around it like a sheep pen, and covering the ground with white feathers. The Angels who inhabited it were identical female figures with white Noh-like facemasks and golden hair. Clothed in pigeon-gray nineteenth-century-style dresses with wings, they might have been schoolgirls, governesses, or a peculiar order of nuns. Heaven (or Hell if you prefer) was also occupied by male figures in white lab coats, with benign fish-like reptilian heads, like beings in a Surrealist painting. There was also a little brown furry creature, sort of a cross between a teddy bear, a chimpanzee, and a beaver, who scampered through kicking up feathers. In one sequence the precisely choreographed gestures of the winged angels had courtly grace as they pointed, questioned, bowed and prayed. Much later, two fought. The victor, cheered as a hero, became the commander. Donned in orange lifejackets, the rest moved in unison like the Red Guard.2 The defiant individualistic angel, the one who didn’t “fit in,” had her wings clipped.
Which world is more “alien” — the one we imagine or the one we have created? Are they not one and the same? Chong leaves us to ponder such abstract questions. Though Angels of Swedenborg at first seemed a less complex, softer work than many of Chong’s other pieces, its elegant images contain subtle nuances of meaning that continue to resonate much, much later.
Latest Flames
Now imagine yourself a traveler from another world, and as you approach Earth, tableaux of twentieth-century high-modernist art float across the black horizon of deep space in ever-changing, exquisitely beautiful permeations of light and color. Or exactly the opposite. You’re on a long distance journey on a starship, and through the wonders of technology the world you left behind can be conjured up for contemplation and sustenance.