A woman stands in the center of a room, surrounded by empty frames, barefoot and dressed only in a flesh-colored bodysuit— she has made herself vulnerable both physically and emotionally in order to engage with herself and her questions about existence and self with a live audience and a personal hero as her witnesses. Hannah Aine-Smith’s autobiographical solo performance Conversations with Van Gogh is a highly personal and expositional exploration into self that seems to address the audience and Van Gogh in some moments and simply her own mind in others. It is staged as if the viewers are only as real as the never-portrayed artist himself, and though Aine-Smith makes a point to connect with the audience almost constantly, she still feels very much alone in her thoughts.
The show exists in a non-space— a sort of mindscape in which Aine-Smith can jump in and out of frames, laid horizontally on the floor, and in doing so travel through various works of art that she describes, offering insight into the role that art plays in her life, but also into how she sees herself in that art. It is a mechanism through which she is able to sort through her thoughts and uncover who she is and who she wants to be.
The journey of processing her sense of self is an important one, especially as it is revealed that a major player in the past decade of her life has been dealing with depression and anxiety to the eventual (turning)point where she could no longer string words together and process them properly, which caused her to pause and make some real change, taking a break from the stage. Now, in this work, is Aine-Smith’s re-entry point.
Her manner of speech jumps quickly from one thought to the next, but it seems to flow quite naturally. She is tangibly real, and the audience is right there, intimately entwined with her thoughts. In a modern climate where technology has caused people to become less connected face-to-face, instead preferring the safety of the distance that screens and the internet divider provide when connecting and sharing one’s innermost thoughts, this is refreshing and a little scary.
Her specific experiences may be unique, but the feelings that accompany them are far more universal. Feelings of inadequacy, difficulty navigating social scenarios out in the world, and the desire to find something or someone to connect with and relate to are all things that shape and feed into Aine-Smith’s narrative in a way that relates to many on a very human level. It causes the audience to root for her and indulge in her fragmentary exploration of thought. It is this element of the performance that, in appealing to human nature, that causes the greatest impact.
The play is not just an experience of Aine-Smith’s story, it is an exploration within each member of the audience as they seek to connect with Aine-Smith in the same sort of way that she seeks to connect with Vincent Van Gogh. Art reflects reality, and reality in turn reflects and exemplifies art.
Aine-Smith presents herself through a representational self-portrait, depicted through the juxtaposition of cheerios and broccoli, set up below and on top of a chair, all within a rectangular frame. The image is silly, yet tangible— broccoli is presented as a higher form, while cheerios, stolen from a roommate’s cupboard, are what both the artist and the audience relate to most. It is a representation that, like Van Gogh’s paintings, holds great meaning for the artist but can also lend itself to reinterpretation by the viewers in any way they can dream up.
The magic of art is that it can be interpreted and reinterpreted as many times as a person can dream of it, which allows it to be useful in self-exploration and the process of healing, no matter the trauma. In the case of Aine-Smith’s Conversations with Van Gogh, this flexibility does wonders in allowing her to make her way back to the world of the stage in an honest and transcendental way.