I decided to see 60 Minutes of Opportunism knowing precious little about Ivana, her work or this particular piece, just taking the words and image from the Basement’s brochure as my guide.
The seating is raked up one end of the space, with a long and empty vista ahead. Into this walks Ivana, wearing a green top, black trousers, carrying a backpack and with a pouch on her chest. A microphone dangles by her hip. She has a faraway look in her eyes. There is a continuous beeping sound. I like her look and composure as her voiceover begins to reveal the premise of the performance.
Ivana has been asked to make a show in which she is physically present on stage, rather than behind the scenes (she is a choreographer) and with no use of film. Not trusting her ability to dance well enough, or not wanting to, she subverts this request into a text-based piece which requires the audience to look at her and listen, to imagine scenes, to visualise her dancing, to take a journey with her.
The text is punctuated by the repeated refrain ‘I want to take this opportunity to…’ Opportunism has a negative connotation. She’s taking advantage of our patience as an audience and offers a playful challenge. The piece is series of suggestions, commands, jokes, asides and thoughts. Ivana controls the voiceover and switches between this and her live voice via her chest pouch. High-heeled shoes are taken from the backpack to help us view her as a dancer; longer legs, more feminine. She holds a ‘dancer’ pose. The shoes don’t stay on long. She pretends she’s got a bomb in her backpack. She smokes a cigarette, despite having given up. She sings us a song to her own Karaoke backing. Although little happens in terms of movement or action there are plenty of images conjured through the writing. There is a clever wit at work playing with the relationship of performer to audience, of self-representation and the audience gaze.
In essence she plays with the conventions of what we expect a performer to do. The Ivana whose voice we hear is somehow different from the one on stage. She says this is the first time she’s been on stage since 2002, yet the physical Ivana is touring the show and has performed it fourteen times (I admit I looked that up on the interweb). That it doesn’t become pretentious or boring is evidence of the thought and skill that have gone into its making and to Ivana’s confident, disarming performance.
Covering herself with a black cloth, she begins to crumple. The narrative becomes more internalised and revealing now that we can’t see her. She, however, can see us.
At forty minutes in, and acknowledged by Ivana, it is the right time for something new to happen. From the rear door, other black cloth covered people appear and adopt fixed poses. It’s like a railway station concourse full of static commuters – uniformed, homogenous, rendered invisible. One becomes a mountain for Ivana to climb. The audience needs a change of viewpoint and she needs to overcome her vertigo. The cloths are removed to reveal the characters beneath; volunteers who hold their poses beautifully and with great strength of character.
By the end of the show I feel I have got to know Ivana, to like her style, her voice and her mind. When she finally meets our gaze, puts her eyes into ours, it feels like an act of friendship and a thank-you rather than a smug establishing of authority. It has been an intricate and intimate hour of self-centred opportunism that didn’t alienate the audience. We hear repeated beeping again… is the bomb about to go off?