We are good at getting stuck. At least, that is what the actors in Ioana Jucan’s “Cabinet of Cynics: The Future” stated about our habits as humans in their performance at Granoff Center on Brown University’s campus. We as humans, they argued, are good at getting stuck in our habits, our spaces, our relationships, and our wants. We are especially good at getting stuck in our wants. This seems counterintuitive, that our wants and potentially our goals actually hurt us in the end. Shouldn’t our wants propel us forward in the search for more?
This “search for more” may be the issue at hand. In the opening quote by Diogenes, the quest for more is depicted as being against existence. When we search for more, our search becomes our sole occupation. We forget about our existence in the now and instead focus only on our potentially brighter futures. However, we are never able to reach these brighter futures. Our ideas of the future become like the green light at the end of the dock in The Great Gatsby: seemingly attainable, yet always keeping in the distance. We see always the hint of this future, yet in our search for more we can never quite reach it. It is not that our wants and goals are unattainable, it is simply that they are never ending. Once one is achieved, we move quickly onto achieving the next one, and thus the ideal future we see ahead of us is never realized.
This idea of an unattainable future was demonstrated by the performed “Madness Sale”. The “sale” consisted of giving each audience member a coin and telling them to make a wish. The audience was then expected to toss these wishing coins into a sheet that was manipulated to move like rippling water. This “sale” then was selling the audience wishes. They were selling the audience promises of the futures they so crave, yet by calling it madness were insinuating that the wishes they were giving them were futile. The wishes meant everything to the individual audience members, yet the wishes meant nothing to their existence. Therefore, this ritual of coin wishing could be considered madness.
The “Madness Sale” as well as the “Needs and Wants” sections of the performance required the use of audience participation. The “Needs and Wants” portion asked the audience to read aloud from newspaper headlines that included the word “need” in different forms. By asking audience members to participate in the performance, the actors thus asked the audience to change their relationship with the actions that were being performed in front of them. Instead of being passive observers, the audience suddenly became part of the show and their actions became imbued with more significance. It was as if the audience’s very presence was central to the message of the piece. This audience involvement also served to create a more intimate connection between performers and audience members because everyone was now invested in the actions. Instead of serving as critical eyes, the audience became another actor to aid in questioning society’s perceived needs for the future.
All of this cynicism about the future could only lead one way, and eventually the performance transformed into a seemingly apocalyptic sequence that detailed the burning of people, homes, and of domestic objects. Of course, the internet was still alive and well during this apocalypse in order to update everyone on the current situation. This apocalypse ended with a scream, as if to verbalize everyone’s anxieties and fears about the future. Even after the actor stopped screaming, the sound seemed to stay in the small room. It lingered, causing everyone in the audience to become a little on edge and worried about where this performance was leading. Was there an answer to this anxiety? Was this apocalyptic future inevitable? Instead of answering these questions, the performance ended with a brief statement: life is movement and movement is joy. From this statement we can deduce that life is joy, living is joy.
In order to achieve this joy in life, in order to live life in the right way, this performance seemed to be advocating constant movement, constant change, and a constant flux of ideas. Didactic? Yes. Accurate? Maybe, but it does give us something to think about. This performance gives us permission to question our perceived “needs” and to figure out how they contribute to our anxieties about the future.