Love Research
I wanna know what love is: A Midwestern transplant attempts to find out what New Yorkers have learned about the big L
TimeOut New York, October 2002
By Carlene Bauer
It's the 11-minute love man!" Karen Sorensen called out to a stocky thirtysomething guy on a recent Saturday in Tompkins Square Park. Had she recognized a one-night stand? No, he was just one of the 129 New Yorkers Sorensen has interviewed about amour for Love Research, a performance-art piece she'll perform Thursday 14 through Sunday 17 at Collective Unconscious Theater. When they first met, Sorenson gave him two minutes to name the things he loved. He rambled on for an additional nine-hence the nickname.
Sorensen, 29, spent the last six months absorbed in similarly intimate conversations with total strangers. Every Saturday, in Tompkins Square Park or at Grand Army Plaza, she set up a table and chair, à la Lucy van Pelt, and recorded the responses of passersby to such questions as "Could you love your enemies?" and "Who are your love heroes?" For their efforts, Sorenson gave each interview subject a rose. In her performance, Sorenson will play back parts of her interviews and muse on her reactions to her subjects' ideas of love-not to mention the oddness and openness of these interactions with strangers.
Sorensen was struck with the idea for the project after moving to New York from Chicago last October. "I was really lonely when I first came here," she says. "It's difficult overcoming the distance between you and other people-it's very intimidating. One thing that struck me, though, was that when you're on the subway, there's this intimacy, but everyone has to adopt an indifference because you can't acknowledge that you're physically as close as a lover. The city is that packed, and yet people act like they don't feel that you're close to them. I felt that was frightening and hard to overcome."
Not only would Love Research push her to overcome that fear, it would enable her to learn other people's ideas about that many splendored thing-which was particularly useful since Sorenson was facing a year without her fiancé, whom she'd left behind in Chicago (they've since married). "That was a huge thing in my mind: How do you make love last?" she says. "For me, the piece was preparation for that. Not that I came up with solid answers, but I have a deeper sense of what it means to love a lot of different things."
This isn't the first time Sorenson has picked people's brains for a performance. In 2000, she created a show about alienation in the workplace, called Labor Power, out of interviews with fellow staff members at a French restaurant in Chicago. This time, though, she was dealing with strangers, and what she found surprised her. "I was really amazed by how willing people were to share," Sorenson explains. "One of the reasons why I wanted to do the piece was because I was feeling uncertain about how much you could trust people on the street. But I feel very hopeful after having done this." "It's not every day that you get called upon to spontaneously define the Great Something," enthused one subject, a writer. "We talk constantly about sex, but we never talk about love," concurred another, an actor. Sorensen says it wasn't unusual for interviewees to hang around after giving their answers to debate the topic of love even further. But not everyone was buying it. "Once, a guy came up to me and said, 'I don't believe in love,' " she recalls. His T-shirt, however, said i LOVE ny, and she didn't hesitate to point this out. "Oh," he replied, "That's irony."
