When my time in this life is finished, I could do worse than have the three performers of Kaneza Schaal’s Go Forth accompany me to the afterlife. In perfectly tailored clerics cassocks that accentuate their lithe, dancer’s bodies, Justin Hicks, William Nadylam and David Thomson are our sober yet mesmerizing, even funny, guides through a mythical world set in the unassuming, peeling basement of the Wesbeth Artists Community.
Schaal developed this piece over three years following her father’s death in Burundi, and while Go Forth is an explicit meditation on the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Schaal’s 60-minute series of vignettes inspired by particular chapters of that ancient funerary manuscript has a distinctly African feel. There are great, heaving wails and frenetic dancing, beer is served and jokes and stories are told to the audience gathered in close company on wooden benches.
When I first heard about Schaal’s project, I knew immediately I wanted to see what it was about. I’ve had the unenviable task of burying three immediate family members in a couple of years and I remain struck by how death is airbrushed out of the business of living and mourning largely ignored or considered a shameful demonstration of weakness in our ultra-pragmatic, work-driven society. Go Forth won’t offer much comfort to mourners but neither does the Book of the Dead, whose collection of spells and prayers is meant to aid the deceased’s transition into the afterlife, which required the soul to grapple with gruesome creatures, purify itself and endure a final judgement.
Our rational minds today no longer give much thought to where the soul goes – heaven? a vague spirit world? – and we assume it just gets to wherever it’s going without our help. In many societies still today, however, mourning is an essential stage in the soul’s progress; a noisy, unrestrained outpouring of emotion by the entire community allowing the soul to detach from the world of the living. Go Forth includes a vignette entitled “The Mourners” which is essentially a loud, prolonged wailing by the three actors, and this was the most powerful vignette in the show for me.
The basement space has been painted gold on one wall, with a similarly painted gold door on the opposite wall as if we are in an Egyptian funerary crypt. Dozens of empty bottles in different colors of glass line the same wall as if many libations have been poured here, and there is a large Rwandan ceremonial pot. Four metal sculptures represent the jackal (Anubis, the god of mummification), the falcon (Horus: protection), the monkey (rebirth) and a man. The stage is set for a ritual and we are plunged at times in a tomb-like total darkness. A 35-mm film projector shows scenes of a river, the universal symbol of passage to the underworld. The titles of the vignettes are also projected onto one of the basement columns but the sections seem indistinguishable from each other. All are marked by the trio’s staccato, fevered choreography, an echo of the soul’s struggles perhaps.
In this abstract, ritualized meditation, whose current runs deeper than most audiences will be able to grasp, the intensity of the three performers carries the show: Hicks’ wailing and desperate flailing and crawling; Thomson’s austere presence radiating a god-like authority and Nadylam’s razor-like movements and gaze (I was particularly thrilled to rediscover Nadylam here, whose work with Peter Brook in Paris has been a repeated pleasure for me over the years). The trio demands our attention and respect but also invites our complicity, in an unexpected acapella “Red Red Wine” and a surprising moment of stand-up comedy before the show’s final vignette. Those moments of respite from the cares of the dead are brief but remind us that the struggles of the living have their place in the process of death and dying also. The actors precede every one of their jokes with a Negative Confession, small acts of purification in the Book of the Dead; we may laugh at human nature in these ribald stories but the confessions are a reminder that we must also keep an eye to the purity of our own consciences.
Go Forth may mystify at times (as in the appearance of a woman in the show’s closing minute) and the basement’s compromised sight lines can hinder our full understanding of what we are meant to see and experience, but the ritual urges us to reconsider death’s demands and life’s response to these. Huddled together and passing cold beers from hand to hand in the damp quiet of a Manhattan basement, we are not individual spectators to an abstract notion of death but rather a community gathered to remember the dead, assist his passage from our midst, and recall as well that, sooner or later, death comes for us all.