You are in an open field

Playing through May 19^th at HERE, You are in an open field is a fun romp with free-style rapping, game-play as a coping mechanism, and awesome old-school video-game imagery – you know, the kind where you can count the pixels if you aren’t paying attention to the show. Not that that’s an issue: You are in an open field is a Neo-Futurist shout-out to the nerdcore sub-culture that has you toe-tapping along, nerd or not. The subject matter was of secondary importance to me – of greater weight was how that subject matter fit into a visualization of game-play as a coping mechanism.

Robert N. Bellah sets up his book Religion in Human Evolution with a description of Abraham Maslow’s Being and Deficiency cognition, or B- and D-cognition. D-cognition is the anxious world of daily life – afraid of getting hit by kickballs on the playground, feeling hustled on the subway, a sense of artistic malaise. It’s “the recognition of what is lacking and what must be made up for through striving.” (5) B-cognition, on the other hand, is more transcendent: “When we are propelled by B-motives, we relate to the world by participation, not manipulation; we experience a union of subject and object, a wholeness that overcomes all partiality. The B-cognition is an end in itself…and it tends to transcend our ordinary experience of time and space.” One sphere in which B-cognition reigns supreme is game-play, from video-games to free-style rap competitions, from treasure hunts to making forts out of the sofa cushions. Play, then, exists in a clean break from the world of daily concerns. (Huizenga 3) In his ground-breaking Homo Ludens, Huizenga lists a pair of descriptors as to what constitutes play: it is a voluntary activity (7), and it is “a stepping of out ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.” (8) The temporality and separateness of play lends itself to the manufacture of inviolable rules, since “they determine what ‘holds’ in the temporary world circumscribed by play.” (11)

All of this holds within the world of You are in an open field. The different kinds of game-play are figured as escapes from the anxieties of ordinary life, and they all adhere to strict rules. For example, if you can’t follow the rules of a free-styling competition, then you are out and you lose. If somebody calls you on the “no food in the fort” rule, then you respond by trying to establish that it is not, in fact, a legitimate rule. The performance itself is a kind of super-game that encompasses all the other games. It is separate from the anxieties associated with space outside the theater, and it adheres to its own rules. First, the world constructed within the piece must be consistent (and it is). Second, the Neo-Futurists have their own code of rules that define their performance, and so You are in an open field needs to be consistent with those aims (and it is).

The flaw in analyzing game-play, however, is that it tries to reduce B-cognition to D-cognition. (Huizenga 3) The point is that the game is fun, and effectively takes you out of D-cognition. And, except for a few places where they slipped into didacticism, the Neo-Futurists in their You are in an open field did that for me.

If you want to see if they do that for you, you can check them out now through May 19^th at HERE on 6^th Avenue. You can buy tickets at the door or online at http://here.org/shows/detail/898/.

To learn more about the New York Neo-Futurists and their rules, please visit http://www.nyneofuturists.org/site/index.php?/site/whats_the_whatism/

And if you want to read the books that I cite in this review, here’s their full publication info:

Bellah, Robert N. Religion in Human Evolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Huizenga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Amazon eBook, 1971.