A Pornographic Performance—Minus the Erotic
Mette Ingvartsen’s 21 Pornographies
By Elizabeth Kiefer
Partway into 21 pornographies, presented last week by Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen at Performance Space New York, she instructs audience members to reach underneath their seats to find a piece of Ferrero Rocher chocolate. An unexpected treat is usually a pleasant surprise, but in this case it seems more like a cheap gag: For the preceding 20 minutes, Ingvartsen has been narrating a scenario in which the main characters consumed feces, and the turd-like brown candy ball is the scene’s climax. Eating it seems to signal symbolic participation in the perversion. The sound of crumpling foil rises into the air.
Ingvartsen boldly probes the sphere of erotic provocation. Now 38, she began choreographing professionally in the early aughts, and over the past four years her work has fallen under the umbrella of an ongoing series called “The Red Letters.” According to Ingvartsen’s website, the series “explores relationships between sexuality and the public sphere” and “investigates naked and sexualized bodies and their influence on societal structures.” That exploration has taken the form of highly technical simulated orgies performed by a dozen dancers to a “guided tour through an archive of sexual performances,” among other things. 21 pornographies continues in the same vein.
Ingvartsen builds a persuasive intellectual scaffolding for this work — her artist statement claims that the piece begins from “the idea that pornography has leaked into many areas of society” — but 21 pornographies seems designed largely to shock. Skating on the obvious, the performance delivers little else. The result is a variety show of porn’s most easily recognized tropes — from scat play and orgies to BDSM and golden showers — that is missing the erotic qualities that explain why anyone desires to watch porn in the first place.
The format is a one-woman show starring Ingvartsen, who toggles between narrator and the subject of her own narration. Over the course of an hour, she portrays a prostitute who spoon-feeds a client her own excrement, and a porn star beneath a waterfall of chocolate syrup; she visits a psychedelic orgy as well as an editing bay where a wartime film is being produced. Later, she briefly embodies the role of a cinematographer capturing footage of dead enemy soldiers, and pantomimes training a camera down onto their decaying bodies, while in reality, urinating on stage, a puddle forming at her feet. As narrator, Ingvartsen speaks in an evenly modulated and emotionless voice, as though she wants to be viewed as a tour guide and not a participant in the actions she describes, even though she sometimes enacts them: this makes for a strange dissonance throughout the performance.
Each scene is only tenuously linked to the next. Early on, Ingvartsen begins to describe, as the narrator, a labyrinthine mansion where children are being held as sex slaves. Following the Ferrero Rocher moment, she next announces a scenic switchover to a porn studio; from there, it’s on to a cave with golden walls where a circle of couples are in mid-coitus. Later, she returns viewers to the mansion where, for a brief moment and without any clear reason, she recounts the defilement of a corpse.
Ingvartsen never explains — during the show nor in the program notes — why she chose these particular acts. If she aims to comment on the porn-like nature of the spectacles of media, violence, and sex that pervade the culture, she provides no critical framework for understanding. There are only two moments when the energy Ingvartsen brings to the stage outshines the question of what she is attempting to accomplish with this work. The first occurs toward the middle, when, out of nowhere, she launches into a sustained showgirl routine, her dance technique distracting me, momentarily, from wondering what it is all meant to add up to.
But it’s the second moment that is still looping in my head, and which makes me wish that the entirety of 21 pornographies could have risen to the bar it set: At the end, ambient noise has given way to heavy metal, and Ingvartsen holds a glowing tube — the only light in the room — and wears a black bag over her head. She begins to spin, moving the tube up and down, illuminating different parts of her naked body as around and around she goes. The effect is eerie and haunting. Still, there is a difference between shining a light on what looks like porn and saying something productive about what you’ve illuminated.
