On the Other Side by Marike Splint
Sara Lyons on On The Other Side
The beginning is deceptively gentle: four people appear on stage and stare straight at us. Chatter dissolves, eyes turn forward, and they hold our collective gaze, unflinching, calm, and direct. Audiences never know what to expect at the start of a performance; in this moment, it actually seems like the performers don’t either. One speaks after a long silence: “I don’t want to start.”
These words simultaneously spark and protest the beginning of the show — a dialectic that informs each element of this company’s unraveling of borders. Each performer has lived a life defined by borders between nationalities, citizenships, languages, and gender — now they occupy a space populated only by a few microphones on stands. They slip between documentary and abstraction, intertwining first-person storytelling, re-performance, and movement sequences to inspect “bordered moments” throughout their lives. Theatricality flips to disarming mundanity like a light switch.
The performers tell us that what we are seeing is not the show: it’s what was cut from the show. They wheel invisible panels across the stage with full allegiance to their existence, destabilizing our sense of what is and is not. Avalos describes crossing the Brownsville-Matamoros ‘borderplex’ from one home to another; Assadourian rants about impossible stereotypes she must navigate as an Iranian actress in America; and Outlaw recalls life as a queer, black American in West Berlin before and after the fall of the wall. “We are territorial beings,” says a program note.
Splint is a site-specific director who has worked in public spaces. Now, in a theater, she lays bare the social, economic, and political systems that create and interpret a work alongside artist and audience. America becomes her site, as it lives in our every breath, move, purchase, and turn at the ballot box. She reminds us that empires begin with a simple utterance: who is, and who is not.
Sara Lyons is a Los Angeles-based director, theatre-maker, and teacher focusing on adaptation, social practice, and feminist forms.
Elizabeth Schiffler on On The Other Side
the show began by defining
Looking back at the experience, with the space between me-now
and me-experiencing-the-show growing bigger,
all of those borders and spaces have become stranger… I am new to los angeles theater, new to the city, and privileged in my ease of navigating borders as an american citizen. This was an opportunity to listen and watch those borders that are sticky and violent and unjust and bound, and three-five people who moved through the borders. I learned stories of border crossings and not-crossings, space and not-space, lines and not-lines.
Yes, I just listed a stream of paradoxes. We seem to live in that world, full of paradoxes, and Marike made messy those borders and lines at each level of this piece, down to the crossings of actor to audience, director to stage, and words crossing each other as the stories told were both clearly autobiographical and clearly not.
The microphone was a tool for Splint’s (not)borders. As an actor might approach the microphone to share something intimate from their life, such as their ability to speak multiple languages and the ways borders have left them out or on the fringe in America. They might later come to the microphone and speak for another actor, or with another actor, crossing bodies and spaces and the connections between actors were forged through the voice jumping stories, bodies, and space - as the show continued, these instances of crossings multiplied, making messy borders vivid.
looking forward, the borders of theater spaces will continue to change. cancellations of spaces abound due to COVID-19, (broadway was closed just today), and yet somehow we still can think and feel the performed story space - I think. Theater will have to be imagined differently, but as Marike has shown, it already has been.
Elizabeth Schiffler is pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at UCLA and practices as a filmmaker and video artist, sifting through the multiple cultural, ecological, and transnational scales at which food and performance interact. She was the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at Seattle's Pacific Science Center.
A work-in-progress presentation of On the Other Side happened at the Skirball Cultural Center on February 21, 2020. A subsequent life is planned, dates TBD.
Marike Splint is a Dutch French-Tunisian theater maker based in Los Angeles, specializing in creating work in public space that explores the relationship between people, places and identity. She serves as a faculty member in the Department of Theater at UCLA.
Photo credit: Gema Galiana / La Mujer Tranvia
