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A Walk in the Park: David Levine's Private Moment and Ethical Participation in Site-Based Performance

2019; Volume: 38; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ths.2019.0007

2166-9953

Sean Bartley,

Theatre and Performance Studies

A Walk in the ParkDavid Levine's Private Moment and Ethical Participation in Site-Based Performance Sean Bartley (bio) I: Context (Cruel Intentions) Two young women share a picnic along the Gapstow Bridge in Central Park on a warm Sunday afternoon. Kathryn, dressed in a chic black suit, oversize sunglasses, and a massive black sunhat, brushes the hair of Cecile, dressed in pastels with a cardigan tied across her shoulders. Cecile is stretched across the picnic blanket on her side and is propped up on her elbow; she munches on a grape. When their conversation turns to a mutual admirer, Kathryn abruptly jerks her confidant's hair back. When Cecile admits she has "never even got to first base with a guy," Kathryn suggests they practice kissing on each other. After a relatively tame smooch with eyes closed, Kathryn removes her sunglasses, looks directly into Cecile's eyes, and utters the movie's most famous line: "Ok, let's try it again. Only this time, I'm going to stick my tongue in your mouth. And when I do that, I want you to massage my tongue with yours. And that's what first base is." Many members of Generation X will immediately recognize this iconic kissing scene, first performed by Sarah Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair, from the 1999 pulpy teen drama Cruel Intentions. When the scene was shot for the film, this grassy section of Central Park, nestled alongside the Pond and Bird Sanctuary, was closed to the public and populated with a handful of extras in the distance. But when it reappeared in David Levine's Private Moment, which ran on Saturday and Sunday afternoons for six weeks during the summer of 2015, dozens of everyday park-goers surrounded the action, largely unaware that two actors were reperforming the Cruel Intentions scene (figure 1). On the Sunday after-noon I attended, more than fifty picnickers and sunbathers shared the small [End Page 117] section of park with the kissing women. One couple set up their towels and relaxed in the sun less than fifteen feet away. Hundreds more passed the scene on a nearby concrete walkway in the few minutes I spent watching. Besides the two actresses, only four people seemed cognizant that a self-conscious theatrical event was taking place on the picnic blanket: myself and three others standing and watching the scene from a safe distance, clutching our programs, and applauding politely, if discretely, at the completion of the scene. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Audience members watch a Private Moment scene. Photo courtesy of David Levine. Commissioned by the Central Park Conservancy and curated by Creative Time as a part of Drifting in Daylight, a series of public art projects at various locations in the park, Private Moment, according to its program description, "takes iconic Central Park movie scenes and infiltrates them back into their original locations, quietly transforming the park into a backdrop where any given moment could be read as a film."1 Their verb "infiltrates" suggests a furtive, secret process of transformation. Performers repeat these site-based scenes on continuous loops for six hours. Though Levine had hundreds of major-release films with Central Park scenes to choose from, Private Moment features just eight: Bullets over Broadway (1994), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), Marathon Man (1976), Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968), The Out-of-Towners (1970), Six Degrees of Separation (1993), Portrait of Jennie (1948), and, finally, Cruel Intentions (1999). A map of the park highlighted the scenes inside the Drifting in Daylight [End Page 118] program and labeled them "A" through "H" moving from north to south. According to my activity tracker, I walked more than seven miles to see all eight scenes in one afternoon. In each location, the phenomenon I noticed at the Cruel Intentions picnic held: If there were any audience members at all searching out and watching the scenes, aware that Levine had staged these dialogues for their enjoyment, they were dwarfed by the number of everyday park-goers who, if they noticed these encounters at all, read them as part of just another normal day in Central Park. This essay seeks to document the...