Andrew Pearson Asks Who’s Your Daddy?
Sheldon Smith
I was grateful to be invited to witness Andrew Pearson’s most recent work, Abbale, an autobiographical one person show that operates as a mashup of experiences between fathers and sons, gay partners and a general questioning about “daddy issues.” I too have made a few dance/theater works about fatherhood. I’m also a father in a complicated relationship with my son and of course once had a father of my own. So, I suppose I have a lot to say on the subject and certainly so did Mr. Pearson.
Hmm, already feels weird. Mr. Pearson? Andrew is easily young enough to be my own son. The only time I call my own son “mister” is when I am trying to bend my son’s will in a way that he might start to demonstrate some form of maturity. Not optimistic. And now he has taken to calling me “father” instead of “dad” in an interesting twist of jest, button pushing and probably with a similar desire that perhaps it is time that I start acting like a “father.” I try to be a father as best I can but there is no road map. It has been brutally difficult at times, and I must admit, at this stage in my life I think I might be more interested in a show created and performed by Andrew’s father as I can imagine there could be a lot to unpack.
And for sure, generational differences were on my mind while I experienced Abbale. Let me foreground, before I go further, I was quite impressed with Andrew’s work as a maker/performer and I understand completely how much work it takes to create something such as this. I’ll give this more detail in a moment but back to me, now 60 years old and feeling it lately…I too was once young, eager to be seen as an important artist within my own making/performing, eager to be seen in general, eager to get laid, eager to understand why life keeps curving chaotically away from what I thought it was supposed to be like, eager to have a stable income…well, truth be told I still feel most of that except the young part.
I relate to the intense need to both make art and to be loved for doing so. How much of that has to do with a need for love or affirmation from our fathers? I don’t know. Like his father, I was lucky that mine was also supportive of my work. And now that I am a father, I want nothing more than my son to be a happy creative person. There are many possible readings of Abbale that could flow out of various father related psycho-analytic theories but part of what works for me about the piece is that it resists an obvious analysis. If there is poetry in the work it is felt in how the various stories weave together into a portrait of real people in complex relationships that on the one hand are quite literal narratives and on the other, an expression of the messy poetry of real lives lived.
Throughout Abbale, there is a tension explored about dominance and submission whether that is between lovers or fathers and sons, or whether all of that might be condensed into various observations around younger/older gay relationships and “daddy issues.” At some point in the work, I recall Andrew confessing that he considers himself mostly to be a “bottom” and yet the piece has a kind of dominating, insistent presence that either contradicts that confession or asks us to reconsider our assumptions about what the power dynamics are in any relationship. If anything is clear, it is that power dynamics are rarely fixed or permanent and are often far more complex than we would like to admit. As fathers get older and young sons become men, all kinds of things change. Not all bad by any means, but there is a very real shift that happens when you see your child become strong and physically intimidating. Believe me I know. It is some super weird shit.
But I have to say, what fascinated me most about the piece was less about daddy issues and more about my sense that I might be witnessing and coming to terms with how dance/theater performance work might be (or went through a long time ago and I wasn’t paying attention) a generational shift. I say this knowing that it is always dangerous to categorize: I couldn’t help but place Abbale as the work of someone born into a generation that has different values than my own. Not radically different. And in no way are my values “better.” But the difference is palpable and it is kind of exciting to consider that, if there are more artists out there doing what Andrew is doing, then I think we can be assured that our artforms will continue to evolve in wonderful ways. It’s just that, if you happen to be on the edge of evolutionary progress that is being progressed away from…it is not an easy thing to witness or accept.
Through my increasingly aging and imperfect memory, I recall a show deeply saturated by the effects of social media and all its energetic, short burst, hyper-real literalism and the concurrent need to be seen as perfect or loveable all up close and weirdly intimate in front of both family, friends and complete strangers. There was also a slickness to the presentation, simple but precise, everything always on the surface like a well-tuned Ted talk (fortunately without the corporate, turtle neck wearing shticks). For the most part, nothing ever got messy. It was all tightly scripted with no apparent room for improvisation or pausing for a breath and the content was intensely literal, comprised of what I assume were true stories and confessionals. All of it composed with what was probably the least amount of abstraction I have probably ever witnessed in a dance adjacent performance. Much of Andrew’s movement literally mimed (quite brilliantly) the exact language that we would at times hear spoken through the theater’s speakers. Everything ultimately framed by straight forward video projections of home movies and photo-collages. I could do with less of what might feel to my generation as a sort of narcissistic need to have more than our allotted 15 minutes of fame.
Generally, I prefer more weirdness and unpredictability in live theater and I have long tortured audiences with little art puzzles that probably have no obvious solution partly because that is the stuff that I like to make and like to pay money to see. I was all in on post-modernism and its cool kids doing pedestrian movement in tennis shoes. For me, Rainer’s “no manifesto” was profoundly and quixotically seductive. So, when I see something where every moment of a 90-minute-long show is emphatically projected at the audience as though we have been invited into a teen bedroom to listen to a literal re-enactment of a personal diary…it presents challenges.
Without question, Andrew is an exceptional mover with an interesting and creative mind. I would just like to challenge him to consider a broader pallet of possibilities. While I think he is doing the good work of making work accessible (and I have taken a few points from Abbale for my own work in the future), sometimes it is ok to be opaque. I also found the overall structure to be overly repetitive as it seemed to have found a formula early on and stuck to it. The component parts of the structure tended towards pop-song length. That is not all bad but why not allow some moments to be much briefer and some have more time, patience and breath? I could be wrong, but I don’t think the ghost of George Michael would be all that upset if you cut one of his songs short. And I know his music was central to the show, but in a world with so much music made by so many amazing gay icons, I was desperate for more variety.
All said, I’m grateful that there is a future for dance/theater and there are smart artists like Andrew out there continuing to push it along. I have seen my fair share of autobiographical one-person shows over the last 40 years. Not easy to make these and sell to the world. But so necessary as live theater helps us reflect upon our own lives and our own stories. Here’s looking forward to another show from Andrew Pearson in the future. Or maybe from his father?
Sheldon Smith has been a full-time adjunct at Mills College since 2008. Originally from Omaha, Nebraska, he discovered a love of experimentalism and electronic music while becoming the first-ever dance major at Colorado College. He went on to receive an MFA in dance at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he wrote a thesis, prior to the internet era, speculating on an emerging form of dance that might radically innovate through swiftly evolving technologies.
