Lesbians, Gurdjieff, in a garage

Last week I attended a little performance in the garage of Arwen Wilder and Heidi Eckwall's house. A work in progress, it was conceived by Arwen and co-created by Emily Zimmer and Arwen and Heidi's daughter, Ea (I'm not sure how old she is- maybe 4?) The topic for the play centered on a group of queer women- artists, writers, intellectuals, actresses- who were all weirdly obsessed by the guru Gurdjieff. The night I saw it Corrie Zoll was also in it, although there were other performers on different nights.

I first heard about Gurdjieff maybe 10 years ago when I knew a guy who was really into the teachings- he'd be on these Gurdjieff forums all the time and even went to a conference. Gurdjeff's main thing was that everyone was asleep, and he was all about being more aware of everything you do. He had several schools at various times and one of them was with a group of lesbian women who, at least according to one author, called themselves "the rope". You can read more about the group of women here.

Arwen played the Baroness Elsa Von Freytag Loringhoven, a Dadist and all-around eccentric who wore crazy outfits and allegedly gave Duchamp the urinal he used for his famous piece. Emily played an American writer who belonged to the group (unfortunately I can't remember the name- apparently she was famous enough to have a feminist bookstore named after her, which she resented).

When I asked Arwen how she came upon the topic, she said she was fascinated by this idea of this group of brilliant, strong women under the tutelage of this rather authoritarian man who was constantly insulting them and calling them idiots. Today I was doing a little google searching about the women, and it turns out that Margeret Anderson, who along with along with her lover of one time Jane Heap, formed The Little Review, which incidentally was the first magazine to serialize Ulysses by James Joyce.

Also in the piece was a performance of Macbeth, performed by Ea and Emily. Arwen said the idea for that is that she is fascinated watching her daughter "play" and how that activity is so different that "acting", because when Ea plays, she believes what she is doing 100 percent. Apparently in Gurdjieff's teachings he talked about performance not as theatre really, but as a way of being.

There was also a section where Ea interviewed Emily about her character, which was very delightful. There have been several living room performances in Arwen and Heidi's living room, and there is always an interview section, which sometimes are short but can also go on and on forever, depending on Ea's mood.

Anyway I really enjoyed the performance. I hope that they continue working on it- I'd love to see what becomes of the ideas.