A Sunday afternoon in the future. Perhaps a bye week for the 49ers. A young couple (girl and boy), could be in Noe Valley, sit at their kitchen table and watch their two pet goldfish. One of the goldfish is sick and may be dying.
To pass the time, and avoid thinking about the multiple disaster scenarios that await our common future, the couple imagine they are goldfish, or the goldfish imagine they are human. Possibility and probability mix and merge as in a dream. A lot of swimming back and forth among the various dimensions of time, space, species and the soul, accompanied by the plaintive tunes of a struggling songwriter.
It is, according to the program, “a contemplation on mortality, memory, relationships and questions that loom large in these uncertain times.” Welcome to the World Premiere of the Future Project’s Sunday Will Come playing at the Intersection for the Arts through November 7.
“Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another’s view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which would otherwise have remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon.” — Marcel Proust
You know it’s going to be a long and potentially difficult night at the theater when the program notes begin with a quote from Proust. Almost unknown in the Mission as a writer, here as elsewhere he endures famously as a sign of artistic sophistication (or pretentious foppery, take your pick). By relying on Proust (who knew he entertained thoughts on getting out of himself) the Future Project appears to be hoping its audience will experience its artistry the way Proust’s M. Swann experiences a little sonata by Vinteuil. Maybe they will. In the future. Right now, like the tragic goldfish it portrays, the show is still struggling to breathe (a comment on Proust’s asthma?).
The performance has the feel of a work in progress, which seems both intentional and the actual state of development. The skeletal structure skips from one scene, still wet from improvisation, to another. They’re stitched together with a great deal of energy, but unlike Proust, not enough thought. Oh not like Proust at all. Can you imagine what he might have done with a pet goldfish?
Which is no knock on the considerable performance talents of Erica Chong Shuch of the Erica Chong Shuch Performance Project and Sean San Jose of Campo Santo, the resident troupe at Intersection for the Arts. Shuch is an engaging dancer/actress, consoling San Jose while she deals with her existential loneliness (as both girl and fish) and fears of death. San Jose deserves major props for his work as the sick goldfish and the mourning guy who seems far more attached to the goldfish than his partner. She cares, but only in a way that couples who have gone through the death of a pet will understand.
Although Shuch is also an accomplished choreographer, even the best moves get dulled by repetition. Overall the dance, at times entertaining, lacks direction and can’t sustain the weight placed on it, either in carrying the story or expressing the subtext.
The Future Project is a collaboration between Shuch, San Jose, their respective groups and many others with “the idea that artists are uniquely able to shed light and provoke dialogue in relation to life’s great mysteries.” Yet to take on such mysteries as mortality, memory, relationships and questions that loom large in uncertain times, not to mention goldfish, requires more than a collaboration of artists—no matter how diverse their perspectives, how sincere or how talented. In times as perilous as these, with the future balanced on a knife’s edge, such endeavors demand a lot (everything?!) of the players and the audience. Art must deliver before it can demand.
More humor would help.
A work of art? Suddenly this is not a frivolous question because for Proust, and possibly for the audiences of Sunday Will Come, only a work of art can redeem lost, or wasted.