A House in Asia @ Traverse Theatre
Agrupación Señor Serrano’s A House in Asia is a unique exploration of our post 9/11 world that spins between live video simulations, projected films of miniscule plastic models and a driving hip hop soundtrack. It is an intelligent approach to making art in the Trump era, that also evokes an emotionally conflicted response on the part of the audience.
In A House in Asia, America’s narratives of advancement and conquest, as present in the tales concerning Geronimo, Moby-Dick and Osama bin Laden, are cross hatched together under the husky, melodramatic memoirs of a navy seal involved in Operation Neptune Spear. Violent repetitions emerge in the bloody trail of America’s history; men driven by an insatiable belief that their battle is the final struggle surface again and again. The artists’ emphasis on America’s belief in its own greatness, its ability and divine right to fight, allows for a disconcertingly easy slide from Obama’s speech to Trump‘s. It is this ability to create links across history and fiction that proves the work’s strength, rigorously demanding a flexible, thinking audience.
While a hunched-over cowboy often presides over the front edge of the ‘stage’, the prime characters are the array of small figurines, plastic and sticky. In climactic battle scenes, they are mangled and mutilated in grisly depictions of real life events. A House in Asia’s ability to draw you in and latch onto these figurines speaks both to the quality and commitment of the work, and the human ability to map real emotions onto unreal situations. It’s why Hollywood works, and the artists know this: they successfully manipulate the audience’s emotions, while the piece’s reflexive nature means the audience know they are being manipulated.
As such, A House in Asia creates a horrible mixture of eager anticipation and dread, through its mix of cinematic stakes and real life consequences. A disturbing opening flight simulation, heading for the Twin Towers, is extremely hard to watch. A House in Asia never allows poignancy (it’s pretty funny) but nor is it flippant, thereby side-stepping the potential throwaway attitude of similar collage works. Trump’s words at the end jolt the audience back to the here and now: this is not history, this is the present, a present of inevitable repetition.
Part of Manipulate festival 2017