There are long moments in Rob List’s “Play by Ear” where you could imagine an alternate title for this 70-minute work, maybe something along the lines of “Still Life: Man With Radiators.”
The radiators, of the elegant old iron type, belong to the Chocolate Factory, where “Play by Ear” had its premiere on Thursday night. The man is Mr. List, a quietly masterly American artist, long based in Amsterdam, whose appearances in New York are far too infrequent.
In this one he takes his time. The Chocolate Factory, in Long Island City, Queens, tends to offer its artists generous residencies in its charmingly idiosyncratic white-brick theater, and you get the sense that Mr. List spent a good many hours simply soaking up the space, waiting for it to tell him when and how to make his next move — playing it by ear, as it were.
This waiting and listening is present throughout the performance, which Mr. List opens by making one of his delicate charcoal drawings, rendered surely with both hands on the creamy white floor. As the thicket of lines takes shape, it resembles the shadow of a man, head, torso and legs ending in a narrow point, as if the light were slanting from an angle.
Mr. List, a trim man with a silvery beard, later crouches, his back to the two rows of audience seating that are pressed up at the far end of the theater. We have time to watch his continual small adjustments and occasional witty touches. (He’s a fan of old-fashioned theater magic: at one point his hand, presumably, presses against the inside of his suit jacket, causing it to flare as if blown by a breeze).
Or we can watch the traffic cruising past outside, dark outlines punctuated by lights, or the woman sitting not that quietly at a computer in the room beyond the theater; life goes on, the open doors remind.
I watched “Play by Ear” without looking at the program, and took it in as a resolutely abstract work. Yet the program note gives us a marvelous narrative:
“Things are getting difficult in Pygmalion’s studio. The artist has fled. The muse, now on her own, dances around to keep from freezing up. There’s a noisy neighbor.”
All of these things happen; Mr. List departs, having deposited a dancer, Constance Neuenschwander, in the empty space, where she skitters and buckles about, her long, golden hair coming unbound, her breath growing labored.
This is after Tian Rotteveel has appeared in a garish rainbow shirt for a solo of his own, set to old Hollywood soundtrack snippets and full of impotent ta-das and abandoned beginnings. He is perhaps the “difficulty.” (He also created the wonderfully subtle sound design.)
Difficulties can be marvelous. And in the end “the artist” returns, to sing “East of the Sun (and West of the Moon).” On Thursday he was joined by an uninvited guest: a large cricket. Absurdly big and dark in the white space, it offered another moment of magic — one of Mr. List’s impermanent, indelible marks.
“Play by Ear” continues through Saturday at the Chocolate Factory, 5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens; (212) 352-3101, chocolatefactorytheater.org.
