Running and Chcotalking

LeAnne Howe’s one-woman show last Saturday, “Choctalking,” was alternately intriguing, confusing, riveting, and a hard-to-describe feeling of something missing - like a nearly complete jigsaw puzzle missing a vital piece. What stayed with me the most in the days after the performance was the idea of running. Howe was running from her religious schoolteacher, running after a woman in Gaza, running to help in the airport cafeteria in Oklahoma. These different episodes and many others followed each other out of sequence, as if Howe was “unstuck in time,” like Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five. The vignettes returned over and over, becoming more ramified in each telling, reinforced with video clips and audio montages. These multimedia elements were some of the most successful. It’s difficult to make multimedia that adds to an artistic performance, instead of being a distraction.

Running is the main link in “Choctalking.” In the Q and A afterwards, Howe said it was her way into the work - that now, having finished it, she could finally stop running. That’s a powerful image. But the running seems to happen for different reasons at these different times in her life, and I’m not sure if it’s a powerful enough link to tie the whole performance together. I didn’t get the sense that the work made a unified, coherent statement: it felt instead like a bunch of vignettes unstuck in time, loosely tied together. Why did she jump in time from her childhood, to the Oklahoma diner, to Gaza? I was never entirely sure. At the end she burst out in a peroration - I can’t remember the exact words - against discrimination, of all kinds. Again, it’s loosely tied to her experiences as a young girl in the Oklahoma religious school, the Oklahoma airport diner, the people she met in Gaza. But I got the feeling that these things were all contingent - they happened because of the circumstances that Howe has encountered in her life - she was trying to make sense of these circumstances. And discrimination is too vast a subject, too indiscriminate in its crushing power, to be the main insight of these vignettes. She’s almost got it - I feel she’s getting close to the shape of her life - but it still feels to me as if she’s grasping for meaning, trying to force meaning out of the contingencies of life, instead of discovering it.