Fringe Festival: Pig Iron’s ‘99 Breakups’ (second review)

If you were familiar with past Pig Iron productions, you quickly realized this was part of the performance. And you understood why the shows are scheduled for 6:30 p.m., when it’s still daylight and such outdoor action can easily be seen. As these two continued to fight, a man at the corner started crying as his girlfriend jilted him, and an overhead sprinkler showered him with rain.

When the audience came inside the museum, it encountered a rock band, with a lead singer wailing “Everything is breaking up.” Band members started fighting with one another and, within a few minutes, each of the musicians stormed off the bandstand, going in different directions.

The proposition of Pig Iron’s latest offering is that breakups are painful for the participants and embarrassing for witnesses. They are especially disruptive when they take place in a museum, where voices and emotions are usually hushed. As the troupe’s Quinn Bauriedel puts it, “This presents a lot of possibilities to break through the hush, to transgress socially acceptable museum behavior.”

The raucousness of the band scene, echoing in the museums’s rotunda, reinforced the idea of chaos. But that was clearly intentional; the multitudinous moving parts of 99 Breakups required great discipline and synchronization. The audience was divided into groups, each led by a different docent, as they traversed the PAFA’s galleries in patterns that did not collide.

Reflective settings

Each docent had an individual style. Mine, for example, gave biographical information on the artists whose work hangs on the walls. Georgia O’Keeffe, he informed us, had a professional and romantic relationship with Alfred Stieglitz until she moved to New Mexico. After that, they seldom saw each other. Another breakup.

My wife’s guide, in contrast, eschewed comments on the art and chatted about herself. At the end of the evening, she told her followers that they were good people, but she needed to leave them now and get on with her life.

Short dramas took place in various galleries as the different groups entered. One room displayed a reclining woman on a bed in front of the 1814 painting by John Vanderlyn of Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos (one of the first nudes ever exhibited in America). Her partner joined her, whereupon an argument ensued about how their waiter had pronounced amuse-bouche. Their romantic relationship turned into a minefield, proceeding in a gradual and believable manner.

Two elegantly dressed couples made effective use of the Academy’s elegant grand staircase. Elsewhere, an a cappella trio was accosted by their director, who chastised and then fired one of the singers, leaving her crunched on the floor in tears.

The high spot of the evening was an exhilarating pas de deux in which Alice Yorke and Aram Aghazarian struck poses relatable to the paintings behind them, in particular Dead Chestnut by Ross Eugene Braught. The movements were choreographed by Dayna Hanson. The dance finale, in the Rotunda, started with Scott Sheppard and Justin Rose and swelled to an ensemble of 20, with excellent rhythm and precision, although it was overlong.

For another review by Ilene Raymond Rush, click here; for one by Alaina Mabaso, click here; and for one by Carol Rocamora, click here.