‘Alone: un/tethered’ takes the audience on an immersive journey
Loneliness, we’re often told, is an epidemic in this country. If we discount being online as any kind of replacement for in-person human interaction, vast numbers of us are living lives untethered from the types of human circles that kept us sane for millennia.
As a topic, though, loneliness is a challenging thing to illustrate on stage. It’s not an event, an action — a tangible thing you can create a script around if you want it to be anything more than a series of statements about degrees of loneliness. For many, it’s a state, like depression, that resists easy characterization, exhibition and explanation.
Into this creative conundrum steps Gwendolyn Gussman, founder and artistic director of the HOLDTIGHT performance art company. Her new work alone: un/tethered is being performed this weekend at Denver’s Newman Center and is the second of a planned trilogy that includes last spring’s together: un/tethered and the upcoming mother: un/tethered.
This production defies any clear description. It has elements of theatre, dance and movement, strong audio-visual components and immersive interactivity with the audience. But Gussman’s main goal, as it was for together, is to create a space and a feeling that transcends that of any typical performance. As such, it skirts along the edges of what we might expect when we enter a hall to be entertained and creates such a vivid emotional tableau that applauding at the end almost seemed odd.
That’s no knock on the production itself, which is stellar. Gussman and the creative team found an ideal home in the Newman Center’s in-the-round Byron Theatre. There’s plenty of space for the audience members to sit apart from one another (as we’re instructed) and enough height for an enormous set piece to stretch from floor to ceiling. Comprised of the same heavy rope used to connect the audience and cast of together previously, here it’s stretched and twisted into a kind of fanciful willow tree that looms over all.
The rest of the space is spare, with just a few wooden platforms equipped with mics from which Gussman holds forth on topics ranging from tree facts to childhood trauma.
Fittingly, Gussman is alone on stage here, accompanied by Sound Designer Nicholas Caputo on keys and effects.
Gwendolyn Gussman in ‘alone: un/tethered | Photo: Martha Wirth
Two disparate acts
The performance is about 90 minutes with no intermission and consists of two sections. The first is Gussman alone, emerging from darkness at the top of the show. Her wordless vocalizations spoken into the mic are live-looped alongside Caputo’s background instrumentations. As Caputo told Toni Tresca in Westword, the soundscape is meant to mimic the audio environment of the womb.
Combined with the darkened, circular theatre, the effect works nicely: a warm, calming world that suggests more new-age retreat than a show. Before the start, audience members are given a small booklet, where we’re encouraged to jot down thoughts about being alone.
But as Gussman begins to relate anecdotes from her own life, the alone theme seems to veer off track. How, I wondered, were the musings about the willow tree evocative of the suggested leitmotif? Reading from her mother’s diary at the time of her birth about a close call in the NICU is affecting, but I didn’t get the connection. Since she makes the birth story a major focus — wrapping herself up in four long straps while turbulent sound and music shake the stage — the disconnect seemed substantive. What are we seeing here?
There are a number of sections in the first part of the show where Gussman is dancing and moving in a slow, angular fashion with a lot of hand movements and extensions. No matter the skill, the lone dancer can only hold an audience’s attention for so long.
And then, the second act: She sets the solipsism aside and welcomes the audience down to the stage. It’s a stark switch that changes the tenor of the show tremendously and illustrates Gussman’s goal of moving from aloneness to belonging. She has us write more in our booklets, other activities are suggested and the faceless audience becomes a community in its own right.
With Gussman at the center as a sort of Earth mother, the feeling of warmth was palpable and welcome. At the same time, that retreat vibe made it seem like we’d soon break for lunch and come back for a yoga session or something. I left somewhat baffled by the whole thing while still acknowledging that it prompted some intriguing thoughts of my own as well as with my daughter who accompanied me.
HOLDTIGHT plans to present the third part of the trilogy, mother, sometime in 2025, with a combined performance in 2026 in Denver and New York.
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