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The following
is from 312 No. 5, May 2005 [Download
Publication in .PDF format]:
Storytelling,
Colour Bars, Expecting
Storytelling:
“Each time you play the piece, I will tell you a different
story about motherhood.”
Penny
Lane’s The Waiting Room contains six vignettes
that explore clichés of motherhood (think: the tidy housekeeper;
the woman trapped in the home; the woman waiting on or for someone
else; the childbearing vessel) promoted by society. The video
runs as a DVD anagram that starts within the Waiting Room itself,
then re-orders the next five vignettes each time the viewer prompts
the DVD to play. From viewing to viewing, the narrative unfolds
differently, complicated by the DVD’s introduction of variation.
Technology is very much a visible part of the performance —
the DVD controls the order of the experience, and the camera’s
framing focuses my attention upon Lane mostly from the waist down,
her head usually left offscreen.
Colour
Bars: Watching Green and Red
Throughout
the video, pastel greens (“surgical green of the medical
industry”) and reds (“blood red of the uterus”)
dominate everything from the floor to the phone. Green is relegated
to the inanimate objects — chairs, table, phone, toilet,
vacuum, crib — of ‘domestic bliss,’ or at least
the kind of bliss advertised in the late 1950s-early 1960s within
the pages of Good Housekeeping and Better Homes &
Gardens. It’s a green I associate with my grandmother’s
kitchen and bathroom, but also with hospital scrubs. This association
is apt, for in The Waiting Room, a folding table doubles
as an operating table. Also noticeable is how red covers the floor
as though painted on with a mop, tiny splatters invading the surfaces
of the walls. It colours the large apples and tiny strawberries
that decorate Lane’s white dress. The reds lead me meandering
past stereotypical thought-paths like fertility, blossoming flowers,
and picking ripe berries, but also past blood & menstruation,
the ovaries (which resemble strange dangling fruit when isolated
in medical diagrams), and childbirth (the ‘fruit’
of her labour).
The pastel
greens and reds suggest familiar pleasantries, like vacation memories
of the sun-faded tones of resort beaches, but veer slightly into
hallucinatory metaphor, like a restrained Hunter Thompson acid-soaked
Las Vegas. The colours give me the feeling that everything I see
is just a touch insane, all while conjuring up the stereotypically
domestic, medicine and the body.
Expecting:
“You will always begin in The Waiting Room.”
In
a sense, I never get to leave it—the room itself is remade
six times, and in each vignette Lane still waits: for someone
to call her, for the doctor, for the results of a pregnancy test,
and so on. The authority is always indicated but always elsewhere.
“We’re
expecting”—I imagine this phrase being said in a casual
way, as though the expected were houseguests or out-of-province
relatives, not a baby. In one viewing, it seemed that Lane was
hovering over the baby crib in feverish anticipation of a child
to fill it, or perhaps anticipating a baby’s cries. In another
viewing of the same vignette, it seemed to me that she was going
through the bizarre motions of an elaborate social ritual.
In The
Waiting Room, the DVD controls the random order, but it traps
Lane in a narrative of waiting and expectation. The elements remain
the same, but chance (even the programmed, technological kind)
decides their relationships. I, the viewer, interpret the context
based on the order of elements and my expectations of what I see.
Lane’s performance ensures that the usual motherhood clichés
float into my mind, but are subverted and interrupted, allowing
me a critical moment of hesitation.
Mark Prier.
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