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Sonya and Layla Go Camping performed at MTA on July 11

There is probably no film that invites an allusive, meta-reimagining of its content as seductively as Celine et Julie Vont en Bateau does. This occurred to me during robbinchilds’ savvy remake of Rivette’s masterpiece, Sonya and Layla Go Camping—a performance work that adds new relevance to the movie’s landmark inventiveness. My memory of Celine et Julie is sketchy (I saw it twenty-five years ago at the Bleeker Street Cinema), and aside from the trancelike boating climax, which robbinchilds redoes with antic enthusiasm, I could not say for sure what the precise correspondences between the two works are.

Nonetheless, from the performance’s onset, where Sonya and Layla dialogue via walkie-talkie on how the script should go, and suddenly decide to communicate in Morse Code, but then realize—with customary New Wave deadpan—that their walkies don’t have Morse Code buttons, it was immediately apparent that—just as with their provocative cinematic source—fresh takes on authorship, gender, improvisation, not to mention experience itself, were in store.

Punning, lexical stopgaps, and rhyming riffs that match rhyming patterns of movement give the choreography its head. Sonya and Layla’s collaborative planning is repeated and dramatized in a French-style film that is shown—which, in its café-time pacing, serves to establish the work’s overall rhythmic structure. God is introduced as an idea and then as a nude boy with giant hand mitts whose movements are at once imperious and amateurish—retro hand chairs are also utilized as metonymic props which seem to imply the transferability of divinity.

This piece posits camping as community—and thus asserts that community itself can never be other than a varying and unstable construct. There is a campfire dance to the beat of campers chewing on celery (or, carrots?), which prompted in me the unsettling thought that our commonalities of body and emotion actually do very little in way of bonding us to one another—in other words, a striking reversal of the usual meaning of supper. And so I was left feeling restless and quite grateful to robbinchilds and Mt. Tremper Arts for momentarily rousing me from my rural, all-too-continuous, fireside fantasies.

Marx Dorrity is an ESL teacher and vegan who believes it is not too late to save the planet.