'Corbu' Explores Race Artfully

William Pope.L has crawled the 22-mile length of Broadway in New York, eaten copies of the Wall Street Journal, and tied himself with sausage links to the doors of a Chase Manhattan bank wearing only a skirt made of cash and urging passersby to pluck the bills away. Last Thursday, the Peter Ivers Visiting Artist at the Office for the Arts brought seven crying, spitting, racial slur-shouting baby heads to the Carpenter Center in “Corbu Pops,” a performance that was both humorous and disquieting.

William Pope.L is a multidisciplinary artist known for his work in performance and public interventionist art which often deals with themes of race and consumerism. Influenced by movements such as DADA, the unsettling, yet intriguing “Corbu Pops” defies boundaries.

“Artists like to give their talks the shape of a liquid, pour them into a container, to ‘fill,’” said Pope.L in a talk before the performance. “Mine either spill over or peter out.” If the same metaphor is applied to the effect “Corbu Pops” had, the performance splashed the container off the table.

Placed in a corner of the Carpenter Center lobby, the set was a large and angled board painted with a ghostly cliff face of melting mouths, eyes, ears, and noses. Melancholy organ music played in the background as the student actors wearing over-sized baby masks with large glasses struck blasé poses watching the audience watching them or contemplating a spot on the floor or the ceiling. Questions of the viewer-performer relation were further raised by Pope.L’s shifting positions.

The artist first posed beside each of the babies, slowly touching them and sending them quietly behind the cliff. He then crouched in front and watched the rest of the performance with the audience and one remaining baby. The ensuing 10-minute segment produced laughs as well as winces.

“Corbu Pops’” insistent use of the word nigger was arguably its most poignant motif. The “white” babies, who wore the expression of an embittered, elderly man, repeatedly shouted the racial slur at random. The first baby to do so popped its head through a hole in the board, babbling incomprehensibly and occasionally saying the word “nigger” very clearly. She was joined by a second baby who took an angry tone with his gibberish and exclamations of “nigger.”

Two screaming babies followed and eventually two more joined them. Their disagreement was silenced when one baby snorted a great throaty wad and spit it right into another baby’s face. The babies all spat at each other and then turned, and thumping loudly on the board, they implicated the audience in their argument, spitting at the crowd which stood ten feet away.

This spit sequence was followed by a painfully loud pout session in which six babies gradually turned whimpers into sobs, and then into wails. The noise music score by Mark A. VanMiddlesworth ’10, who is also a Crimson Arts editor, was especially effective here. It provided a melancholy contrast to the intense action on the set and added to the general tone of irony and discomfort. The music escalated in volume with the wailing as the babies stretched their masks in agony, their faces seeming to melt like the faces in the painting. One began to howl like a coyote. Eventually the crying died away and the babies receded into their holes, leaving one remaining.

Considering the fact that the babies mostly spoke nonsense and their sneering expressions never changed, “Corbu Pops” Singers Madeleine A. Bennett ’11, Adriana I. Colón ’12, Julia T. Havard ’11, Zhanrui Kuang ’12, Jia Hui Lee ’12, and Hannah R. Lewis, a student at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, were able to convey intense emotion through only their voices and limited head and hand movements. Their attribution as singers was something of a misnomer, however, meant rather to highlight the role of the voice in the performance than to indicate actual singing.

In the last scene of “Corbu Pops,” a sole baby depended almost entirely on her voice to deliver a convincing, poetic monologue regarding forms, reflections, awarenessm the present, past, and future. But her poetic speech was punctuated by passionate, intermittent ejaculations of “Nigger!” She too then receded beneath her hole and even left the room. The door closed as she continued to scream from another room until she and the music faded. Emotional and perplexing, the performance drew no clear conclusions, but maybe that was not the point. Instead of instilling any plush feeling of resolution, the “Corbu Pops” Singers bombarded their audience with semi-intelligent gibberish loaded with resonant social commentary and indecipherable meaning.

“I’m suspicious of things that make sense,” says Pope.L. “Maybe I’m afraid of it. False security.”