Ben Kassoy provides a nuanced and humorous tackle psychological sickness in his one man present at Emory’s Schwartz Heart. (Pictures courtesy of the artist)
“[Y]ou suppose you’re dying. However you’re not,” begins Ben Kassoy’s poem “The Humorous Factor A few Panic Assault.” His one-man present of the identical title, which ran at Emory University’s Schwartz Center for the Arts on Friday, September 19, opened with a recorded studying of the poem. And the poem is humorous — so is the present. In the long run, nevertheless, probably the most affecting moments of The Humorous Factor A few Panic Assault generated a kind of embodied, kinesthetic empathy between viewers and performer via which we collectively skilled how psychological sickness or trauma manifests as an sometimes terrifying bodily sensation.
Kassoy and his director, Joanna Simmons, have structured the present as a mash-up of some completely different types. Half comedy routine, half literary studying, half dance and half improvisational theater, its generic multiplicity created narrative instability. At each flip, Kassoy exploited that instability to undermine the viewers’s certainty about which elements of his efficiency have been set and choreographed, which have been improvised and which can have been rising in that very second as a spontaneous psychological well being disaster.
For instance, through the opening sequence, Kassoy carried out in silence to his recorded poetry studying. The viewers listened to and couldn’t assist however snigger alongside together with his previous recorded self in response to strains corresponding to, “Over your shoulder, you hear your roommate spelling your final title to the largest hottest [paramedic] of the bunch, who’s sporting suspenders like a firefighter-themed stripper.” On the identical time, on a semi-darkened stage in entrance of us, Kassoy slowly sank right into a chair, visibly withdrew inward and clutched his cranium.
He then exited slowly, his fingers masking his face, solely to re-emerge moments later underneath brighter lighting, sporting a jaunty knit beanie and cracking inside jokes about Emory College with the massive contingent of school, college students and alumni in attendance.
From the outset, subsequently, Kassoy hinted that his poetry could also be extra lyric than confessional, much less an outpouring of the soul than a fastidiously crafted and stylized self-fashioning. With the Emory bit, he recommended that — although this efficiency was one in every of many — it was additionally a singular occasion, made for this night and this venue in collaboration with Emory-based artists. Dance school Julio Medina and Gregory Catellier created the choreography and lighting design, respectively.
Though The Humorous Factor A few Panic Assault is a one-man present, Kassoy was not the one character contributing to the story. His sister, whom he took pains to reassure the viewers remains to be very a lot alive, made an look in Kassoy’s recollections of their relationship and in one other recorded monologue. Through the after-show speak again with Medina, Kassoy stated that sitting in a chair onstage and listening to the recorded opening of her comedy stand-up routine — or “stood up” routine as she calls it as a result of, so she says, she was stood up by a date simply earlier than the efficiency — is one in every of his private favourite moments as a performer. “I’m sitting there listening to her and considering to myself, ‘They [the audience] do not know what’s coming,’” stated Kassoy.
Kassoy additionally launched one other character, his mom, with a personalised ringtone — a kitschy digital flip-phone cowl of Abba’s “Mamma Mia.” When he answered the cellphone, the viewers heard his mom’s voice in one other recording. He takes her name through the present, he defined, as a result of if she calls and he doesn’t reply, she worries, after which he worries about making her fear. “We’re Jewish,” he stated knowingly, eliciting a presumably equally understanding snigger from the viewers.
Kassoy’s relationship together with his mom turned one more instance of how his present subverts conventions — this time, nevertheless, round cultural and social id. In one other recording, Kassoy’s mom expressed emotions of guilt at being the “trigger” or “supply” of his panic assaults; not as a result of she was a stereotype of the overbearing, guilt-tripping Jewish mom determine however as a result of typically psychological sickness, like many different sorts of sickness, runs in households. Psychology — like physiology — is an advanced mixture of nurture and nature.
Certainly, removed from haranguing him right into a state of escalating anxiousness, inside The Humorous Factor A few Panic Assault, Kassoy’s mom — who was current within the viewers for this explicit present and whom Kassoy invited to hitch him onstage for an ovation afterward — was a comparatively grounded, sympathetic and extremely self-aware character. As Medina famous through the speak again, Kassoy himself was the one placing somebody — the viewers — via a typically uncomfortable social encounter.
One of many types mashed up within the efficiency was dance, and The Humorous Factor A few Panic Assault was a social dance that ranged from the cringeworthy awkwardness of a junior excessive cotillion to the joyful commingling of amateurs and virtuosos at a street-dance cypher. Kassoy led, and the viewers adopted.
Kassoy defined through the speak again that he has been dancing, each in lessons and performances, since he was a toddler. “I didn’t do all that performing as a result of I used to be good, although,” he stated. Moderately, he performs as a result of, despite the fact that he hates practically each minute of preparation, whereas he’s onstage and within the moments instantly after, he experiences a “lightness” — a bodily and psychological euphoria.
Medina’s choreography for The Humorous Factor A few Panic Assault didn’t present the viewers with a chance to guage whether or not Kassoy’s evaluation of his personal technical talents is correct. It did, nevertheless, showcase Kassoy as a more-than-competent break- and hip-hop performer and as somebody who strikes with the heightened spatial, temporal and bodily consciousness of a lifelong dancer. Kassoy leveraged that potential to drive residence the purpose that, throughout a panic assault, you suppose you’re dying since you really feel, in your physique, such as you’re dying.
Additional, by protecting the dance method and the types themselves accessible to a basic theater-going viewers, Kassoy and Medina sustained the present’s general thematic concern with anxiousness and different sorts of psychological sickness as a truth — versus a consequence — of life for many individuals: one thing comparatively regular that may be managed and handled, quite than one thing distinctive to be expunged, whatever the price.
In One thing Humorous A few Panic Assault, connection — to our personal embodied senses and to 1 one other — is concurrently supply and solace for anxiousness. Moderately than pessimism in regards to the human situation, nevertheless, the present expresses a tentative religion within the therapeutic potential of shared expertise, whether or not it’s a cellphone name from one’s mom or sitting at nighttime with a gaggle of strangers and watching a bit of efficiency artwork.
::
Robin Wharton studied dance on the Faculty of American Ballet and the Pacific Northwest Ballet Faculty. As an undergraduate at Tulane College in New Orleans, she was a member of the Newcomb Dance Firm. Along with a bachelor of arts in English from Tulane, Robin holds a legislation diploma and a Ph.D. in English, each from the College of Georgia.
