DAU, which sounds exactly as “arrived” (Dao 到) in Chinese Mandarin, has arrived in Paris yesterday — while at least it was supposed to. It’s a cinematic art project, also an immersive installation about the life of Soviet scientist and Nobel Prize winner Lev Landau.
Spending over a decade to develop and realize the original idea which firstly appeared in the director’s head in 2006, DAU was supposed to have its premiere at Berlin last October, but the application was refused by the police authorities because of security concerns. Last night, when I came with a friend of mine with our “visa”, the tickets to the show, in front of Théâtre de la Ville, we were told to come back another day, by the same reason in Berlin: prefecture de police of Paris turned down the show. (While at noon they sent us emails saying that visitors who booked to enter the show at 12h and 15h would have to postpone their visit to 18h. In general, we saved almost a whole day for the show but in the end saw nothing.)
The only thing available last night was the tiny part in Pompidou center, the apartment-like cage where 2 actors having their dinner inside. As your can see in the video, we visitors were like invisible peepers standing closely to one another outside the cage, barely can hear a word from the actors.
This reminds me of Spike Jonez’s “Being John Malkovich”.
Standing in the dark, watching 2 strangers doing something unpredictable, I felt myself being like John Cusack inside John Malkovich’s head for the first time, creepy and curious. What happened in front of us was real, but nothing to do with us, so close and so isolated as well, like Malkovich’s body with the Cusack’s soul. For the first time, I sensed myself being just part of a body, very tiny and very replicable. (I also thought about the meerkats in Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi”, the animal gathers in thousands on the floating island, mysteriously quiet but somehow concentrated on something unrevealed.)
The behavior of the audience was more interesting than the performance, although it was the performance which made us act like that. We were standing still, being silent and emotionless, even holding our breath — wasn’t it monumental, like the Moai on Easter Island? Our stare was eternal, because the question we asked remained unanswered.
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