In 1998 a friend gave Tania Bruguera a copy of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, knowing that she was interested in “power issues, how power negotiates space and how power communicates,” Bruguera says. “I read it five times in a row and still didn’t understand a lot of things. At first I saw it in terms of power relationships between the two main characters. Now it seems more emotional, about a dysfunctional relationship.” She’s wanted to stage Endgame as a participatory installation ever since, and each of her six pieces at Rhona Hoffman includes a maquette of a space she plans for this staging, illuminated by tiny lights in the darkened gallery. She wants viewers to walk through several spaces to lie on beds and poke their heads through holes in a wall, where they’ll see two actors in a central circular room: Hamm and Clov, the play’s dying man and his servant. Her Endgame will be performed for 12 hours, but viewers will decide how long they’ll stay.
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As her international reputation grew, Bruguera continued to return to Havana to present new pieces. But when she offered these works of political and social commentary elsewhere she found that “foreigners saw only my aesthetic strategies.” Hoping to rediscover the collective approach and the integration of art and society she’d found in Cuba, she began to encourage nonartists to produce works in response to hers. For The Body of Silence her performance had consisted of surrounding herself with raw lamb meat, to suggest submissiveness, and writing an unofficial history of the Cuban revolution, then licking the text off the paper. In London a Scottish man took off from that idea, reciting a poem by Robert Burns, while in India a Muslim teenager did a play about dowries. Interactivity is meant to achieve a similar result. Startled by homelessness here–“in Cuba, usually if you’re homeless a family takes you in”–Bruguera did a performance in which “you had to leave your ID to get in and had to take the tests immigrants take to get your ID back.” All these performances depend on context, but what attracts Bruguera to Endgame is that the setting is vague and the “communication and affection beween the two guys seems timeless.”
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