uBung (Practice)
There was a time in my life when I saw an old man in the face of every baby and a little girl in every elderly woman. I was pregnant, and this compulsive perception wasn’t pleasant.
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Where I saw that glass as half-empty, Belgian writer-director-performer Josse De Pauw sees it as half-full in uBung (Practice). A three-year-old piece developed under the auspices of the Belgian company Victoria and performed here in Chicago for the last time ever, it features actors between the ages of 13 and 15 delivering the dialogue onstage for De Pauw’s black-and-white film, projected on a screen behind them. Though the title and a repeated line that practice makes perfect suggest that these children are in training for a venal adulthood, in fact we don’t see them as incipient grown-ups but instead see the adults as needy, rather charming kids. It’s an intriguing idea, this juxtaposition of child and adult actors in adult situations, but in the end not nearly as “confrontational and beautiful” as De Pauw says it is in a program note.
As a result uBung isn’t much of a challenge. Because De Pauw sees his adult characters as children, there can be no tragic flaws. And though you might think of this as a comedy whose aim is forgiveness, he doesn’t set the stakes high enough to produce genuine relief at the characters’ essential blamelessness.
