A (Not Quite) Review of Martine Gutierrez’s China Doll, Rated R
by Noah Witke Mele
This piece was originally written for Barbara Browning’s Performative Writing course for the week on galleries, where we wrote accounts of attending a gallery from the perspective of a fictional critic. This assignment was essentially interesting considering the fact that it was during a time in the ongoing pandemic when not much was happening in-person. I dug the work back up this spring for Taylor Black’s Performance and Technology course, for a Non-Performance Performance Review, where it found new life after a year’s distance. All in all this strange little piece of writing has been a delightful experiment in describing something that is not quite performance by dwelling in what it means to be “not quite” something. Funnily enough I now have a gig as a performance critic, and this could be marked as my first foray into that kind of writing.
Noah Witke Mele makes and writes about performance. More often than not they are thinking about postmodern dance, science fiction literature, and affixes. Noah’s performances have been presented at Judson Church, Phantom Theater, Movement Research, Lost Nation Theater, deep in the Vermont woods, and on Brooklyn rooftops with mediocre views of Manhattan. Their writing hasn’t yet appeared anywhere of note (unless you count tucked into the desk drawers of loved ones), but is scattered in caches across the internet, sometimes under pseudonyms. Currently Noah writes performance reviews for Eye on the Arts.