The Waves
Sara Porter and Jessie Garon in L-E-A-K at the Theatre Centre
“Love letter to the ocean?” Actually, no. You should disregard all the copy that accompanies this play because it doesn’t do it justice. Dancer and choreographer Sara Porter herself likes to describe LEAK as a piece on ecosexuality, Nova Scotia, the leakiness of categories, the ocean, and any number of other things, which, fine, but the core of the play, its beating heart, is a relationship between two women - humans - one of whom is significantly older than the other. There’s a whole universe there; no need to stuff the oceans and the Bay of Fundy gulls and the history of the planet Earth in there too. Porter plays and is the 50-something of the story, Jessie Garon the young 30-something. They have different dance material, different stage characters, though in some scenes they echo and overlap and ever so tentatively merge.
The Earth Mother business, the inspiration drawn from Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens’ “Wedding to the Earth”, that entire drearily earnest project of the thing almost put me off. “Unless we fall in love with the ocean and the natural world with as much passion as we feel for one another we won’t be able to save the world,” Porter said to Michael Crabb in the Star a few days ago, as if artists should be tasked with nature conservancy and renewable energy. Sure, a good story could be about that too, but not primarily and not programmatically, like a manifesto. And I’m glad to report that LEAK isn’t.
There’s also been some extremely iffy writing on ‘ecosexuality’ around, one of the most egregious examples being by the tech optimist Sophie Lewis, she of the “full commercial surrogacy now” demand, in her piece in n+1 on “making love with a reservoir” (LSD was involved. And narcissism. Not linking.) Oh gawd, not another one on the polymorphous eroticism of the bodies of water, I thought.
I was wrong. This is one of the best things I’ve seen in recent years because its core is truthful and deeply feeling, under a few layers of other stuff. Theoretical physics, stats about seagulls and the tides in the Bay of Fundy? All nice to have, but not the main course. Porter said in the talk-back after the play that she’s been reading a lot and that literature and science feed her work. Rachel Cusk got a mention (her Trilogy is pretty watery, come to think of it), and Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, poetry of Sue Goyette, and Trinh Minh-ha. All this, though, if present, is very lightly carried.
A couple of philosophical issues that are central here do not stick out and actually blend in well. First is the pesky alignment in western philosophy (and some non-western systems of thought too) of wetness, instability of borders, messiness, leakiness, weakness, engulfing, cycles of ebb and tides, emotion - with the female sex. A good number of people have written well about this in the twentieth century — see Iris Murdoch’s “Against Dryness”, for example, and anything by Richard Rorty on feminism and Derrida.1
Second is the question of where the autonomous, self-creating individual/mind starts and where a larger factor enters the equation (language, society, family, economic system, class, genes, the climate and the geography, sheer good luck). This has been a febrile question in liberal democracies for centuries now, as we try to balance individual freedom with collective and long-term good. Women are at the edge of it, or rather its breaking point, with their capacity to literally be two in one, which continues post-partum for quite some time - boundaries unclear, human mammal dependency on another human starkly obvious. Every system of thought insisting on self-generation and independence, you could argue, and many have, is a fantasy, an attempt to escape the non-negotiable helplessness of the social, symbolizing mammal.
Porter isn’t anywhere near as explicit on this as I am being here; the artistic alchemy does its thing without any didacticism. She starts the show with the story about her mom delivering her - and she immediately runs into a comic and absurdist mode (Water is involved. A lot of it.) Discreetly weaved through the play later on is the fact of this dyad, and of human dependency on air and water, and of our recency in the long life of the planet.
But it’s the second kind of leaky interdependent situation that LEAK primarily focuses on: being a in a relationship, sexual, emotional, and intellectual. Being in love, being-with, is another way to destabilize our dream of self sufficiency and self-generation. The one closer to most adults.
And jeez, the utter sexiness of this thing. There is a scene for ex in which video shows time lapse of a centuries-long erosion of rocks by water and other elements through the cracks and mounds that look… well, you can guess. (It’s not my mind that’s in the gutter: Porter confirmed the intention the in talk-back.) While we watch that, Porter’s character speaks of a time she was revealed, opened by an other, her skin losing its shielding capacity, becoming a receptor. Further back on stage, among the video screens, partly protected by the dimmed lighting, there was Garon in the nude, dancing an enigmatic dance on her own. Illustrating Porter’s character’s states? Or being the figure who brings them about? It’s a moment of mystery, a glimpse of something sacred.
Then there’s the comedy. A lot of the 65-min dance/play is funny, some of it pretty slapstick and commedia del arte-ish. The lines exchanged, and addressed to the audience, are often playful and clownish. There are seagull hats. Spray bottles used as a means of communication. The pliés performed in flippers and wellies. The gliding around on suitcases with wheels.
So nothing really prepares you for the final scene, which is not funny at all, but an eccentrically, intensely danced rendition of the relationship between these two characters. The moments when the two communicate in an uncomplicated manner, and manage to hold each other, are not many. There is almost a physical impossibility about it. But it happens. Not a frictionless embrace in the final scene, but the impression that all is ever tentative between two people. (Except perhaps our need for each other.)
L-E-A-K returns to the Theatre Centre tonight at 8 p.m. and tomorrow 4 p.m.
Photography: Ömer K. Yükseker
“I agree with Drucilla Cornell that one of Derrida’s central contributions to feminism is that ‘he explicitly argues that fundamental philosophical questions cannot be separated from the thinking of sexual difference’ (Cornell, 1991, 98). Indeed, I should go further and say that Derrida’s most original and important contribution to philosophy is… his association of ‘ontological difference’ with gender difference. This weaving together enables us to see for the first time the connection between the philosophers’ quest for purity, the view that women are somehow impure, the subordination of women, and ‘virile homosexuality’… Compared to this insight, the grab bag of easily reproduced gimmicks labeled ‘deconstruction’ seems to me relatively unimportant.” Richard Rorty, “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View”, 102-3.