Still life

Photo synthesis in Franklin Park

by Marcia B. Siegel

If you'd happened to pass by the Franklin Park Playstead late in the afternoon on a couple of July and August weekends, you would have seen nine people in heavy, old-fashioned clothes setting off across a field in a group. If you'd thought there was something strange about them and had glanced back a second later, the group would have appeared in exactly the same place, the same attitudes of walking, as if they hadn't moved at all.

Ann Carlson's provocative performance piece Any Day Now was part of a festive tribute to the Emerald Necklace, Frederick Law Olmsted's grand chain of Boston parks. The summer-long series of installations and events was organized by Vita Brevis project of the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Any Day Now grew out of an old photograph, circa 1915, of citizens peering into the bear cage that was part of a pocket-sized animal habitat in Franklin Park. Carlson recruited nine local dancers to re-enact the scene, with the costumes and hats, the baby carriage, the postures and moods of the photograph. Over the two-hour course of the piece, they crossed the Playstead field and ascended the road to the now-ruined bear cage, reassembling for the photographic tableau four times on the way. I don't know what Carlson had in mind, but the performance gave me a lot to think about.

One great thing about cities, as Olmsted knew very well, is the opportunity for all kinds of people to live and recreate together. His parks artfully helped nature create simple but beautiful settings where a kind of human ecology could wend its way. As soon as I took in the slow-motion mode of Carlson's piece, I noted the individuals making up the group: three women of quite different ages and classes, six male business types. Their near-stillness allowed us a luxury people watchers never have in real life, the chance to study the intriguing gestures and encounters that flick past us all the time.

The nine characters stayed together as they advanced across the field. The young parents lifted the baby out of its carriage once or twice to show others who gathered around. Two men engaged in a long conversation. People nodded or tipped their hats to acquaintances and strangers. Some of the performers conveyed a vivid sense of how folks behaved 80 years ago. Some were really stiff, concentrating on minute weight transfers and correct profiles.

I wanted to know more about all of them, but their stories never got any deeper. Every 20 minutes or so they inched into the photo pose and held it for a long time, then resumed their traverse. The photographer had arrested them forever, had showed us who they were and nothing more. But as the picture repeated, my questions multiplied. Their costumes were black and white, like the picture, but were the originals in color? Was there wind the day the picture was taken, or sunshine? When I realized there wasn't going to be a narrative progression to the piece, I started to think of my own glances at different actors as snapshots I was taking. The performance became a reflection on time for me, rather than a picture in space.

At silently-agreed-upon intervals, the group changed from slow motion to a normal sauntering pace. Once, they sat down on benches and rested. They left their companions and walked over to talk to spectators. Carlson herself, in jeans and T-shirt, roamed the periphery, explaining the piece to curious onlookers.

The best part, for me, was mine. Getting ahead of the group as they approached the wide stone staircase leading up to the bear cage, I explored what I found in the thin, gloomy hemlock woods at the top -- a bear's play yard bounded by a semi-circular stone wall with curved iron barriers on top, and a rusty iron fence, all overgrown with vines and weeds. Two big dancing bears were carved in the center of the wall along with the date, 1912. I thought about animals in captivity, then and now. Did the bears stay in these open enclosures all the time, all seasons? Were there other animal "exhibits" in this place before they built the modern Franklin Park zoo on the other side of the road?

The actors gathered at the disintegrating fence for their last pose, looking in at the weeds and the vanished bears and the members of the audience who were poking around the ruin. All of it was there, in the present. And then they touched their faces and slowly turned to accept our applause.