Steve Paxton’s “Bound:” A Restless Ride
A review of Jurij Konjar’s performance of Steve Paxton’s “Bound” at Cal Arts REDCAT, May 13, 2016
In the program notes to “Bound,” originally created in 1982, Steve Paxton invites us to consider the life path of a drunken man that you’ve just met in a bar: “You begin to make conversation,” Paxton writes. “And gradually his disjointed story emerges, lived — as lives are — one moment after another, but now remembered as fragments of a journey, finally to explain how he came to be sitting alone, elbows on a bar and glass in hand, talking to you.”
In “Bound” that conversation takes circuitous paths, meanders, stops, starts, takes unusual turns, veers left, goes right and arrives at a wildly unexpected destination.
So it seems appropriate that the journey begins in a car — of sorts.
Slovenian dancer Jurij Konjar — on whom Paxton set the reconstruction of “Bound” — fashions a cardboard box slung around his body into a makeshift vehicle.
He dons a pair of sunglasses, puts on a swimmers’ cap and flips up the box’s sides, revealing an army fatigue print — a tank to carry him across town to an unspecified location.
In his cardboard car he putters in place, rumbling down an imaginary road as horns beep, brakes squeal and vehicles from a pre-recorded sound mix whoosh and zoom by. Perhaps he’s caught in traffic — a commuter at the mercy of the daily grind.
Konjar’s destination becomes clear when he brings a wooden rocking chair and small crib onto the stage, placing one on his left and one on his right. The perimeter of the stage bound in by wooden planks, this seems to be home, but something is not quite right within this abode.
Konjar looks at the crib as if it were an alien object, then pushes it, stirring the piece of furniture to eerie locomotion — animated by an external force, but devoid of any life force within. The same strangeness ensues when Konjar pushes on the rocker. It swoons back and forth, but there’s no human sitter to perpetuate its momentum. Lifeless though these objects are, they exude a ghostly presence.
A somber situation strikes my mind. Perhaps Konjar isn’t your average commuter. Perhaps he’s a bereft father who has lost a child, a lonely husband without a wife, or a veteran dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder come home to an empty house either marred by death, or marked by abandonment. (Paxton did after all create “Bound” with the Vietnam War in mind).
Perhaps Konjar’s cardboard box isn’t just his car, but his home, his only shelter in an unforgiving world. Perhaps his wife and child didn’t die, but simply left him, unable to deal with the static in his brain and its attendant physical manifestations — jerky arms, skittish feet, wobbly legs.
Throughout, Konjar moves like a human pinball machine, as if a tiny silver ball were bouncing inside of him, against his bones and round his ribs, trying to find a slot in which to settle, yet never quite finding its intended socket. Angst, paranoia and fear seize through his body. It’s almost like watching an emotional Richter scale go off the charts. Yet Konjar’s face remains strangely calm and concentrated. His cerebral brain doesn’t seem to belong on such a frenetic body. Perhaps he’s more sane than he appears and we’re the fools for sitting there watching him go “crazy.”
Even so my thoughts continue to darken. A section in the soundscape — puffs of air seeming to shoot into a cavernous highway tunnel sound like gunshots, then sirens. When Konjar uses a projector in the center of the stage to reveal the image of an elaborately painted church ceiling, and then appears dressed in white after a black out, while ethereal choral music plays, I can’t help but think perhaps he’s died — suicide, a bullet to the brain — and miraculously emerged on the other side of the pearly gates.
Yet the journey is not quite complete. Konjar dances like a man possessed, performing moves that seem beyond the realm of human possibility — a hand stand that cabrioles, legs that bend inexplicably overhead, spinning as unbroken as a dervishes’ sublime meditation with Allah.
The trance ends at a trumpet sound; Konjar finally is drawn to the light. He unravels a spool of string connected to a stage light, stretching the yarn across the stage’s expanse. The string appears to shoot straight through his head like a laser beam.
As if zip-lining in slow motion, Konjar gradually moves along this tight rope attached to his head, walking ever forward to the light, until finally he’s consumed by it, swallowed whole — total moth to flame.
Some long conversations are regrettable, but not this one. If you ever have the opportunity to encounter “Bound’s” lonely man at the bar, lean in, listen closely and be ready to take the ride.
