Anna Kohler looks back at her life as both muse and model in MYTHO? at Abrons Arts Center (photo by Caleb Hammond)
Abrons Arts Center Experimental Theater
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
Through December 22, $25
212-598-0400
www.abronsartscenter.org
The beginning of Anna Kohler’s Mytho? Lure of Wildness is promising. In the tiny Experimental Theater at Abrons Arts Center, Kohler and Katiana Rangel, playing a younger version of the German-American performance artist, are both naked as Kohler recalls her days modeling at L’Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. “How am I able to stand it?” she asks. “How am I able to stand that way for so long? I guess it’s because I’m so young. I am deemed desirable to be a permanent model because I have the ideal body shape.” Soon Rangel is posing in the art class as Kohler details a particular session when she made lengthy eye contact with one of the students, directly challenging the male gaze of artmaking and taking back control of her body, at least for that moment. And indeed, the first part of the show cleverly deals with aspects of aging, the creation of art, and the concept of woman as sensuous object, both muse and model. But it quickly devolves into chaotic self-indulgence, so when the opportunity arose during a set change, a handful of audience members went running for the exit. Developed at MIT, where Kohler, a ten-year veteran of the Wooster Group, is on the faculty, Mytho? turns into a bewildering muddle of didactic proclamations about Art (capitalization intended), incorporating Robert Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne and Au Hasard Balthazar and Henri Matisse at work in the south of France. Rangel and Alenka Kraigher take their clothes off, Pyramid Club legend Hapi Phace plays a donkey and Matisse (among other characters), Adam Strandberg looks adorable, scents are sprayed overhead, everyone belly-dances, and AutomaticRelease (Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty) projects awkward live video on multiple screens. Director Caleb Hammond can’t find a way in to make any sense of it. And then, after nearly two hours, the cast serves everyone a cup of juice into which Kohler threw raspberries she had just pulled from the pitcher with her bare hands. We were thirsty, but we chose not to partake.