CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS

phile under: TBA 2010

In no particular order … 10 odds and ends about TBA10

Posted by: Claudia La Rocco on Sep 20, 2010 at 07:40AM 0 Comments

Culturephile Guest Blogger Claudia La Rocco returns to New York with fond TBA memories.

1. Attention museums of America: Somebody needs to give the Wooster Group a lot of money and permanently install There Is Still Time…Brother. Seriously. This work (about seeing and not seeing) needs to be seen. (And maybe not moved around so much, as evidenced by the opening day technical snafus.)

2. Children of the Sunshine is stuck in my head. Still. Thanks, Jessica Jackson Hutchins.

3. My favorite overheard conversation: Three presenters were discussing Mike Daisey, offering lots of favorable comments about his politically strident piece. Then a pause came, and one of them ventured “But it could be about 20 minutes shorter.” Some nodding followed, and a shorter pause, at which point someone else responded “But are you going to tell him that?!?” Nervous laughter ensued; conservation over.

4. I miss the food already. Wouldn’t PoMo like a visiting restaurant critic …. please?

5. My favorite snarky quote I am allowed to attribute: during another noontime chat, Conor Lovett (can enough good things be said about the man?) was asked whether the French try to claim Beckett, an Irishman who wrote much of his work originally in French. The low-key (and Irish) Lovett, without missing a beat, responded with a mischievous smile "I think the French seek to own him in a way the Irish couldn’t seek to own him … because they (read: “we”) do own him." Every international festival needs to make fun of the French just a little, no?

6. Right after some museum spends a lot of money to acquire There Is Still Time…, can we turn our attention to getting Cathy Edwards a full-time artistic directorship or curatorial position somewhere? Pretty please? This woman is one of a very few contemporary-minded directors who really gets where the field is at. She needs a suitable platform.

7. But, then again, the French can be pretty great. My single favorite audience-artist moment came during Jérôme Bel’s Cédric Andrieux, when the house lights came up and Andrieux watched us watching him watching us…and we were all smiling, like finally, we’d just met the love of our lives…

8. Best art metaphor, courtesy of the Wooster Group’s Elizabeth LeCompte, who said of the agonies of directing live art: “Theater’s like life, ‘Why can’t I get some perfection here?!’”

9. During the first noontime chat, Cathy Edwards said of her programming that she was struck by how “many artists in this festival have created an intimate space for the self to be shared.” There are a lot of ways to contextualize an event like TBA, but that line seemed like the best summation. It’s funny how the quietest works often create the loudest reverberations.

10. I hope I see you all for TBA 2011…

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Tags: performance art, TBA, TBA 2010

TBA 2010: Offsite Dance Project

Two Japanese masters coax the audience beyond the comfort zone.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 19, 2010 at 11:00PM 3 Comments

Slide show provided by Graeme Harrison.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Slide show provided by Graeme Harrison.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Photo provided by Graeme Harrison.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Photo provided by Graeme Harrison.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Photo provided by Graeme Harrison.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Photo provided by Graeme Harrison.

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Photo provided by Graeme Harrison.

Zan Yamashita/Ezra Dickinson

“Lefta foota! Lighta foota! " barked Yamashita, as Dickinson furiously kept pace with his dance instructions, dipping and leaping and falling in a complex choreography.

Every now and then, Yamashita would go slower. “I drew a circle with my pen,” he said, speaking of frustration in the writing process. At another point, he described a haunting memory he had, of seeing a cyclist killed in a traffic accident. He also described his constant quest for individual expression and technical excellence in dance. And then he unleashed another blast of commands.

This piece seemed to be working on at least a couple levels: one, there was the aforementioned artist’s struggle. Two, there was the dancer’s struggle, to keep pace and fulfill orders. The third struggle— whether an intentional element of the piece, or just a function of circumstance—was communication and translation. Though Yamashita was speaking English, his strong Japanese accent and rapid pacing challenged the audience to concentrate harder, to strain further into the classic gap between sender and receiver to actively grasp the message.

“Work for it!” the piece seemed to say. “Meet us at least halfway!”

Yukio Suzuki

“Why make us stand in the rain?” was the unanimous unasked question, as we trekked several blocks from PNCA and huddled under too few umbrellas in the bricked, littered enclave behind Bridgeport Brewery. Yukio Suzuki lay sprawled across a second-story bannister, light hitting his soaking white limbs and shirt, as Wayne Horvitz’s crystalline, haunting soundscape pierced the sheeting downpour.

He was doing something. He was blowing up a white balloon. The shadow of man, bannister, and ever-enlarging balloon fell on the far brick wall. The balloon consumed the head, and we beheld, briefly, a balloon-headed man. The balloon was let go and drifted gracefully to the ground, like a profound thought that briefly expanded and quickly passed.

(Oh, the balloon as poetic objet. Romantic, yet totally unsentimental, due to its simplicity of shape. And with so many symbolic implications! Spherical = universal or whole. Floating upward = transcendence, optimism—or unattainability. Expanding = growth, hope. Popping = fragility, temporariness. The Red Balloon, 99 Luftballons, The Boy In The Bubble.)

Suzuki slung himself over the bannister and began to move along the catwalk toward a wooden staircase. Many of his motions dramatically over-swung, and others jerkily corrected. His overall bearing began to feel very familiar: If he wasn’t depicting a drunken reverie, he could have fooled me.

As he half-fell down the steps, Suzuki seemed the most poetic kind of drunk, interspersing his stumbles with flights of grandiosity. At one point, legs sprawled below him, he outstretched his arms and bobbed his head, stiffly pantomiming a symphony conductor. All the while, the rain sparkled and drenched, under a gradually darkening sky, which, as you can imagine, was wildly cinematic, and probably answered the question “why…?”

Suzuki landed at the foot of the stairs, danced haltingly in the courtyard, and then sprang up a ladder on the adjacent wall. He was on the roof. On the corner of the roof, now shirtless and sinewy, and majestically oblivious, he let out a howl of volatile triumph, and violently heaved down the chimney.

We’ve all born passive witness at times, to other people in the throes of physical or emotional intensity. We’ve held back their hair, or held back their fists, or talked them down from the rooftops and given them a towel to dry off with. This performance evoked those moments, but relieved us of the responsibility to mitigate, letting us simply thrill at the otherworldly spectacle of a human being exhausting himself in a bender of transcendence, danger and despair.

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: Dance, performance, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010

TBA 2010: AndrewAndrew
and Wonderlust

How’d you like The Works last night?
Choose your own review.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 19, 2010 at 10:00PM 0 Comments

Wonderlust’s background was bangin’ and their tights were poppin’—but as performers they seemed kind of green.
(Photo by Guido van der Werve.)

Last night’s show at The Works, featuring Eastern-bloc marshmallow peeps Wonderlust and iPad-wielding Poindexters AndrewAndrew, may or may not have given you what you needed. Culturephile can review these two acts for you, but first you must choose your own adventure:

I EXPECTED A DANCE PARTY
Wow, that dance party was some mad crazy good times. Those DJ’s were almost like…performance artists! The girls wore these matching outfits with head-scarves, and they had these cute little dance moves they would do together, and they even sang for a minute, and it sounded pretty good. Their stuff was really wild—it was like Klezmer, and Bollywood—there were tubas and clarinets and most of it was pretty danceable, but it definitely also had its own flav-ah. And they had projections of slavic scarf-patterns, and like, snapshots of Russian or Polish families sitting around their living room. It was a pretty cool little setup, I must say!

AndrewAndrew wore matching clothes, too, and they were a riot! They played a game of musical chairs, and they spun all these total pop-chart classics, like Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson, which were pretty fun—and I think a couple newer things, too, like some Lady Gaga. They were using iPads instead of usual turntable/DJ type gear, so they could walk around in the crowd. At one point they went on the top balcony, and cued some music from there, which was pretty neat.

One problem, though: the auditorium it was in, had all these rows of seats, and the aisles were sloped, so it was kind of hard to dance in there. It would have been good to have more of a dance floor. But that didn’t stop me!

These two ‘drews kept it so simple, they couldn’t go wrong.

Choose an ending:
-I danced frantically and maniacally!
-I danced delightedly and dramatically!
-I am still dancing!


I EXPECTED PERFORMANCE ART
Hm. Next to last weekend’s Ten Tiny Dances and yesterday’s Drum Machine, this Works bill underwhelmed. Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t last night’s artists basically just DJ’s? And not even with turntables or instruments. Just pushing “play.” Sure, they had matching costumes, but Wonderlust didn’t engage the space or acknowledge their audience, and beyond using iPads (a toy Tender Forever just elevated to a whole new level), AndrewAndrew didn’t show us anything new. And all those people trying to dance in the aisles, obscured our view.

Maybe if Wonderlust had played into the oompa-pa cheesiness of some of their numbers with big manic grins, or if they had maintained a disciplined deadpan, that could have given their very basic clogging steps some meaning and tone. Instead, they kept half-smirking, and glancing sidelong at one another to coordinate clunky dance transitions. It felt a little too “school talent show,” and not in a planned or purposeful way.

To their credit, AndrewAndrew worked the crowd—albeit by pressing some pretty failsafe buttons. “Who likes Michael Jackson? Who likes prizes?” We all like prizes, sirs; but some of us also like SURprises.

Choose an ending:
-I retreated to the bar.
-I went home.

“Wonderlust” with an “o,” is a Finland-based duo, NOT to be confused with “Wanderlust” with an “a,” a Portland circus collective fronted by Fall Arts Issue honoree, Noah Mickens. For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: performance, music, Live, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010, The Works

TBA 2010: Emily Johnson/Catalyst

The Thank-you Bar

Posted by: Claudia La Rocco on Sep 17, 2010 at 10:20AM 1 Comments

Photo: Courtesy of PICA

You know that thing little kids do sometimes when a new person comes into their home, and they want to please and impress the guest so they rush around, showing off their things and themselves?

That daffy, manic energy coursed through The Thank-you Bar, an uneven but compelling dance-theater piece by Emily Johnson, featuring a gorgeous live score by James Everest and Joel Pickard (the two men will perform Sunday night at the Imago; if I were still in town I’d definitely be there). And gradually the shadings under Johnson’s need to please darkened, as it became clear that this work is also about meeting (and destabilizing) expectations on another, more volatile level. Johnson, who grew up in Alaska and is of Yup’ik descent, tells the story of being ethnically outed by a friend in grammar school, and then denying it to her frightened and maybe hostile classmates “to save my own skin.”

These tangled identity politics somehow don’t subsume this surprising work, which hops between moods and modes of storytelling. The (very small) audience first sits in a semicircle, watching Everest and Pickard build a looped score layer by layer. It’s a wonderfully gentle beginning, setting the tone for all sorts of show and tells, communicated through words, music and movement (she is a sharp and surprising dancer, a pleasure to watch). At one point Johnson wheels out a tiny makeshift igloo built of brick-shaped paper lanterns, which she hands out to audience members; we hold them as if holding her imagination in our laps. Later she tells a story of the blackfish, spinning a metaphor of survival and cultural endurance.

At times I wanted The Thank-you Bar to settle just a bit, for Johnson to take a breath and trust in the work’s quieter strengths. The brief, late entry of a fourth performer seemed unnecessary clutter; likewise some of Johnson’s reconfigurations of the space were unwieldy, offering too little payoff. But it’s hard not to be charmed by Johnson and her collaborators, and impressed by the delicate balance she strikes; I’d like to see more, soon.

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: Dance, performance, Live, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010

TBA 2010: Radoslaw Rychcik/Stefan Zeromski Theatre

In the Solitude of Cotton Fields

Posted by: Claudia La Rocco on Sep 16, 2010 at 09:50PM 0 Comments

Thank god.

For a moment there, I thought I was going to get through an entire contemporary performance festival with no full frontal nudity.

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: Theater, performance, Live, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010, life drawing

TBA 2010: The Extreme Animals Sit Down

Music Is A Question With No Answer,
delivered content with no context.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 16, 2010 at 01:00PM 2 Comments

Photo: Courtesy of PICA

It might be time for The Extreme Animals to reexamine their assumptions.

It’s been almost a week since this show and there’s a reason that I haven’t already posted: I hate panning shows—but The Extreme Animals sat down on the job.

“It’s amateur hour in there,” said one loyal passholder who’d escaped to the beer garden after watching the Animals cue, crash, and reboot Youtube videos, floundering through a half-baked introduction about pop culture. “Everybody wants to ‘go green,’” said Jacob Ciocci, “but my new thing is I wanna go ‘dark green’—it’s like the goth version of going green.” Polite laughter. “There’s a thing in life right now where, everything’s very intense. I call it the ‘new intensity.’” Pause. (Quick—someone dub this guy a “creative” and give him an Eyebeam fellowship!)

Now, I don’t mind “pop,” and I don’t mind Youtube. And I’m pretty fond of wild sociological theories. But in this case, rather than using these tools to build a unique experience, the Extreme Animals repeatedly juggled and dropped them. I blame creatives like Michael Rioux, the man who made #8 of Ten Tiny Dances, for making it look too easy to pop off with the perfect irreverent comment and engage a whole audience. It’s easy for creatives like Rioux, but that’s a function of studied mental agility and years of experience. Their genius enables their spontaneity—not vice versa. It seems like Ciocci got this twisted.

Eventually, the Animals got around to the musical performance, a manic mishmash of samples upstaged by a screaming screen of pop-culture collage and Atari pixel-porn. I know the Beastie Boys were sped up to sound like chipmunks. I know one guitar was played. I know a drum machine was manipulated—but the audience, by and large, was not. One welcome lull, underpinned by a hard-hitting triphop beat, fixated on footage of step dancers wearing white gloves that left glowing trails. This didn’t necessarily make a point, but served as some sort of comedown drug with a slightly more tolerable trip.

When it was David Wightman’s turn to shine with his shredding guitar project Fortress Of Amplitude, he showed considerable chops, looping tricky metal riffs and then harmonizing over them. But Wightman’s mad skillz could not redeem the overambitious presentation, which failed to finish the promised narrative about youth- and celebrity-worship and left plenty of Portland hipsters convinced that they could BS as well or better. Like the falling blocks in a tetris game, the barrage of stimuli kept evening out to null, and eventually piled up to a clunky “game over.”

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: performance, Live, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010, The Works

TBA 2010: Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Re-Viewed

Romeo and Juliet … take two

Posted by: Claudia La Rocco on Sep 16, 2010 at 10:00AM 0 Comments

Photo: Courtesy of PICA

My first day in Portland, I wrote about my interest in seeing Nature Theater’s Romeo and Juliet again, an opportunity for reassessment that doesn’t come around as often as you might think.

Well, I saw it again last night.

And…I still don’t entirely know what I think of this R and J, which features a long series of dueling monologues, delivered by two actors, in which the play’s details are badly remembered. So much for clarity through repetition. I should see it a third time, I probably won’t understand a single line; I’ll be too busy battling my memories and expectations.

Several of my original complaints remain—mainly, as my friend and colleague Alexis put it with wrinkled nose last night at dinner (Olympic Provisions, yay!), that the show is “Technically impressive. And light.” And I still found Robert Johanson’s stage presence more convincing and expansive than Anne Gridley’s (who I’ve liked very much in other works), though both are terrifically funny in their absurd—and, at moments, absurdly touching—send ups of bad Elizabethan actors and the half-baked but deeply felt ramblings of various people trying to remember just what the hell happens in the iconic play.

But I was more moved this time by the work’s heart, a bumbling meditation on vulnerability and desire which the actors argue their way through when they finally find themselves facing the audience at the same time. This is the piece, I thought last night. The rest is a laborious framework, one I’m not convinced is necessary.

But. I’m not unconvinced, either. What can I say, I’ve seen about 15 works and written almost 20 posts this past week; the circuitry is beginning to unravel. Long live art (even if badly remembered). And critical confusion.

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: Theater, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010, The Works,

TBA 2010: John Jasperse Interview

Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat Out Lies

Posted by: Claudia La Rocco on Sep 16, 2010 at 09:23AM 1 Comments

Photo: Courtesy of PICA

Conducting an interview with John Jasperse is sort of like watching one of his dances. Both are likely to send your brain off into all sorts of satisfyingly far and specific reaches; and yet there’s something surprisingly open and gentle about what you experience.

We spoke earlier this week about Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat Out Lies, which I saw late last year in New York and which opens here tonight. A dance for five performers, with a commissioned score by the marvelous Hahn Rowe, the piece is in some very general way akin to Maria Hassabi’s work, in that it marries a gorgeously precise choreographic sensibility with an unsettling ambiguity of meaning or message.

“All of that stuff about sexuality, objectification, misogyny—at certain moments the show is like a Whitesnake video,” he said, laughing, in talking about the dance’s preoccupations with certain themes. “We own that we are doing that, we’re not trying to simultaneously say, ‘Yes we’re using this material but we’re somehow above it.’ When irony is present as a protective layer, that protective layer is saying, ‘Well yes I’m doing that but I don’t really mean that.’ It’s defensible in a kind of way, what the relationship is. Here it’s much more slippery.”

(As I’ve already discussed, I’m prone to adoring slippery art…)

Yesterday I spent about an hour with the Wooster Group film, There Is Still Time…Brother, which also thrums with images of violence and sex, and asks similar questions about what we choose to look at, and why. Like the Woosters, Jasperse uses various film histories and tropes as source material for Truth.

“Somehow there’s something about it that becomes more real in its artifice than if it were real," Jasperse said of his interest in film, including one brutal and beautiful section in which a slow-motion brawl between a man and a woman unfurls in exquisitely choreographed fashion. “What does it mean that I’m enjoying a depiction of violence? You become uncomfortable, and your discomfort relates to your engagement in it."

Ultimately, how we choose to deal (or not) with this engagement is a political matter, one that Jasperse relates to the many disparate but interrelated crises our society is now faced with.

“People don’t want to engage with that; they want the magic genie to wave the wand, and the world will be somehow different and we’ll fix the problem,” he said. “Nobody wants to acknowledge or wrap their head around what that might mean about our identity as a people and as a nation … if you can’t figure out what the solution is, some people are much more comfortable not asking the questions.”

Other people ask those questions a lot. And then all the world becomes a stage. Or is it the other way around?

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: Dance, performance, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010

TBA 2010: Gare St. Lazare Players Trilogy

The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable

Posted by: Claudia La Rocco on Sep 15, 2010 at 08:54AM 4 Comments

On Monday, Mike Daisey’s Agony and Ectasy stretched for two and a half hours. And last night, The Beckett Trilogy clocked in at close to four. They don’t call it time-based art for nothing.

I’ve already praised the actor Conor Lovett and director Judy Hegarty Lovett for their marvelous production of Beckett’s First Love. Their Trilogy shares many of the same virtues (and is even more of an endurance test, one Lovett and his adoring audience passed admirably); this is perhaps because, as the Irish actor said during Monday’s noontime chat, he and his wife share a philosophy to “travel light…let the words lead you.”

We’re a little more than midway through the festival, and it’s at this point that one typically starts to see (invent?) all sorts of connections between various artists. And so last night, while bobbing up and down in Beckett’s strange seas, I thought of Lovett’s words in relation to something Elizabeth LeCompte of the Wooster Group said at her chat, that “the technology is the text.”

Like the Woosters’ TBA offering, or Maria Hassabi’s, the Gare St. Lazare Players Ireland leave a lot up to the audience.

“Judy often will speak about not setting on a particular interpretation,” Lovett explained. “If the actor and the director choose an angle, there’s not a lot for the audience to do.”

This, in the end, is how I felt during Daisey’s fist-thumping monologue about the seedy underbelly of high-tech giants like Apple. He made his point. And then he made it again, and again. And we watched, and nodded, and received on our way out a little note explaining how to email Steve Jobs and make the point some more.

I have no beef with that point. It’s an important one, and he made it with quite a lot of humor and skill. But, as art? I’ll take the Lovetts and the LeComptes, every time.

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: Theater, performance, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010

TBA 2010: Atlas/Basinski
vs Reeves/Sverrisson

Culturephile compare-contrasts
two non-narrative film-music collabs.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 14, 2010 at 06:00PM 0 Comments

Photo: Courtesy of PICA

Atlas/Basinsky film bares almost all.
(Photo courtesy of PICA.)

View Slideshow » Photo: Courtesy of PICA

Atlas/Basinsky film bares almost all.
(Photo courtesy of PICA.)

View Slideshow » Illustration:

Skuli Sverrisson plays along—or sometimes doesn’t—with Jennifer Reeves’ When It Was Blue.
(Photo courtesy of PICA.)

They say lighting doesn’t strike in the same place twice. But on Friday, and again on Monday, two layered, strobing, hyperstimulating art films lit up The Works–and resonated with stirring soundscapes by modern maestros.

Friday’s film, an untitled live video mix by venerated filmmaker Charles Atlas, was accompanied by experimental-trance demigod William Basinski. Monday’s epic,When It Was Blue, was created collaboratively between director Jennifer Reeves (Sundance, Princeton, MOMA) and Skuli Sverrisson (Lou Reed, Blonde Redhead).

Palette
Both pieces layered textural stills, over clips of live footage—and in both, the overlaying textures were so fast-changing, they created a film-strip-style flickering effect. In A/B, many of these foreground textures were speckles, and some were digitized fractal patterns (think screensaver). In R/S, however, the textural elements had a more naturalist feel. Many featured multicolor plashes of watercolor paint, some, the parched craquelure of dry soil. To say that one was naturalist, and the other modern, would be broadly appropos.

Both pieces interspersed black-and-white footage, with color, though Blue seemed to cover more of the spectrum, with some sections as resplendent with rainbow hue, as the paintings of Pavel Tchelitchew.

Themes
Several seeming themes emerged in A/B: Beauty. Alienation. Torture. Control. Impending doom. Manifested doom. An interlude of brotherhood, the self, humanistic triumph—followed by more doom. Black-and-white film heriones with electrodes hooked to their heads, the iris of an enormous eye, and much later, the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb—each took center-screen. The sheer volume and intensity of images, stimulated this watcher to the point of universal numbness. Buddhist enlightenment, or sociopathic detachment? Hard to say. But that mushroom cloud seemed light-years away.

In contrast, by the end of R/S, I was irrepressibly weeping. Maybe after all the footage of brooks and rivers and oceans, my ducts simply succumbed to suggestion. But I remember being gripped by an inarticulate, sentimental, transcendent sort of grief. “Ocean big,” I thought. “Green and deep and sad.”
“Seals swim so smooth, make me cry,” thought eye.

Musical Maneuvers (In The Dark)
Both musicians tethered their explorations to long, low, ambient synth strains, and both scores wafted ephemerally alongside their respective films. But in A/B, Basinski’s musical compositions seemed strictly ex machina—-emanating from a laptop he’d brought on stage. Meanwhile in R/S, Sverrisson played live guitar as the rest of the prearranged score piped in via the PA.

Please Note: If I got this wrong, I’m not surprised. Both musicians sat in dim light, while the audience squinted and strained to see what gear they were using. Sverrisson had a dappled lighting effect, so it seemed like he was amidst trees.

While Basinski kept his music—albeit varied—flowing throughout, an uncanny twist to Sverrisson’s performance, was that he (and all music) sometimes stopped as the footage continued to play, with its own ambient bird-calls and water-whooshes. Conversely, there was a long period when the film went black and silent, and Sverrisson continued to play in darkness ’til it resumed. The remarkable thing was—it took a while to notice these changes. Like a master magician, Sverrisson marshalled audience attention wherever he wanted it to go.

Sense of Humor
A/B: A reclining Daffy Duck, and later a rotating Mariah Carey, could not possibly be taken without a chuckle.
R/S: None. Inasmuch as it’s possible, this film was a totally introverted, asocial experience. The closest the piece came, to a joke, was a brief flash of educational animation, with expanding concentric circles referencing an earthquake’s epicenter. But humor would have seemed particularly pointless, in such a stunning profusion of nature. Jackdaws don’t need jokes, to cackle.

Readers, did you watch these two perfect storms? What did you take away?

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: performance, Film, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010, The Works

TBA 2010: On the Boards Responds

Artistic Director from On the Boards responds to Claudia’s review of Gloria’s Cause

Posted by: Claudia La Rocco on Sep 14, 2010 at 01:30PM 1 Comments

Last week I saw Gloria’s Cause, a work-in-progress by Dayna Hanson. I really didn’t like it.

But criticism ain’t arithmetic (thank god). For me the relationships we have to art works are pretty much like those we have with people, and the love of my life might well be the bane of your existence. With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to invite the ultra-smart Lane Czaplinski to respectfully disagree with my take on Hanson, which you can read here.

Here’s what he had to say:

The specter of the Woosters definitely looms large for anyone trying to make experimental performance, and having Liz in the audience and their installation a few flights of stairs above the Winningstad Theatre where Gloria’s Cause was performed is downright eerie. But even the mighty, mighty Woosters (and I mean this sincerely… For You, The Birdie is on my personal list of top 10 performances of all time), often crumble under the weight of their own achievements.

I think there’s a lot more being developed here than just the quoting of a bunch of downtown techniques from twenty years ago. The fact that the show is in the Winningstad in the first place shows the savvy of Dayna and her collaborators, who were originally slated to perform in the Someday Lounge which is a much more relaxed and informal cabaret context for showing a work-in-progress, before they were moved to the larger professional theater. The move didn’t seem to hinder the company’s ambition in their quest to create a sort of rock-musical-meets-dance-theater work about how our great country has shat on a lot of people historically and has ceased to stop doing so. (full disclosure: On the Boards is a commissioner and producer of this work, and I’ve had the privilege of participating in creative meetings and rehearsals)

The clichés about developing a new production are well-known. “It needs a lot of work,” says Producer/Critic #1. “Yeah,” chimes in Producer/Critic #2, “and it needs to be at least thirty minutes shorter.” How will artists ever be able to create works that play larger spaces and tackle complex subjects, though, if they’re always being shamed into stripping away devices, clarifying every single intention and reducing show length to the same tightly wound sausage? If anything, Gloria’s Cause can now go further, plunge deeper and maybe become even bigger because of the work done thus far. There is nuance in the writing that is becoming clearer and more powerful as they continue to find the right tones and shading for making their characters and stories more dimensional. Dayna’s choreography has always displayed a sort of cool and steely refinement, and while I certainly think the show can hit this mark by the time it premieres in Seattle in December, it is really early in the process and the dancers simply need more reps. The music rocks but they’re still trying to strike the right balance between dialogue and sound. Oh—the show still hasn’t been fully lit and Dave Proscia is a fantastic designer. I’m excited about where the show is headed.

Cheers to PICA for not underestimating the capacity of their audiences and giving them the opportunity to peer into the process of creating a new performance.

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Tags: Dance, performance, performance, performance art, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010

TBA 2010: The Wooster Group

There is still Time… Brother

Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 14, 2010 at 01:00PM 1 Comments

Illustration: Courtesy of PICA

Planning on seeing Wooster Group’s mindboggling media experiment? Well, There Is Still Time…Brother. And I recommend that you do.

A sensory smorgasbord of live characters, screens-within-screens, furniture, trash, and even dioramas (including toy dinosaurs, which seem to be surfacing everywhere as a postmodern icon), this Wooster Group masterpiece is inexpressibly novel and unflinchingly provocative—but it also sets the technical bar at a level that most “interactive explorations” can’t possibly step to.

In case you didn’t read guest blogger Claudia La Rocco’s rather glowing synopsis, the device is thus: Viewers are surrounded almost 360° by a giant curved screen (there’s a slight gap at the room’s entrance), and swiveling stools provide all-around viewing. The entire wraparound tableau hosts several “shows,” each with its own actors and audio, but all are knit together, and occasionally a character will break frame and move into another “show.” All the action is playing at once, but most of it is blurry and muted, most of the time. But one bright spot gives the audience full audio and picture—literally, a focus.

Now here’s the wilder part: the audience member who sits on the centermost stool, decides by swiveling, which scenes snap into focus, and which ones melt back into the shadows. There’s plenty to choose—anything from Paris Hilton porn, to a chip-bag being crinkled, to a monologue in progress. Audiences respond, then, not only to the action, but to the lead audience member’s choice of content. When they move, do you wish they had lingered? When they linger, do you wish they would move already, and switch the scene? This engagement is the piece’s true theme.

SPOILER ALERT: I now want to touch on content. If you don’t want to know ’til you see it, then swivel away.

The Wooster Group is so confident that no one can match their mastery, they have a character expose their tricks, both philosophical and technical, as part of the piece. On screen, a ginger-haired man very energetically explained how a cluster of twelve outward-facing cameras, filmed an inward-facing set that encircled them (see photo). He went on to touch on a profound truth: third parties always curate what parts of the world we see.

For example: the “show” that most consistently showed war, was an innocent plastic diorama of soldiers in a forest, and it was placed at the screen’s far edges, straddling the spot where the screen cracked—implying that some central aspect of the coverage could be missing entirely. In the diorama, villagers were replaced with soldiers; forestation, with devastation. The man stationed across from the tiny tragedy, was revealed to be shooting at it with a toy gun. “How many casualties?” he yelled to an offscreen presence.

I stayed long enough to see certain parts of the piece twice, and even thrice—but oddly enough, I never got to see the female character complete a thought. (And ironically, I didn’t try to take the center spot and make it happen.) Evidently an opinionated internet radio show host, she launched into the occasional prattle, between lots of “downtime” applying makeup, sighing, and staring into space. At one point, she fellated a partner. But whenever she would open her mouth to speak, the swiveler would tune her out, in favor of the war-hobbyist, the friendly casual guy, or one of the other background happenings. While I don’t want to apply the rigors of feminist philosophy here, it did feel disturbing to see the audience “turn off” the female character, presumably because she seemed like a nattering hag, and then “tune in” to her sexual exploits, as well as the Hilton porn, and even the friendly guy’s crude drawing of a naked woman. Combined Wooster and audience choices, painted women as a distraction—tongue-wagging in various dismissible ways, while foreign nations are bombed and burned. Another illustration of exculsionary curation at play.

It’s hard to leave Brother, and the minute you recoup, you want to go back until you’ve seen it all. When you consider that there are at least five fields of view, each containing 20 minutes of footage, it entails a minimum of 100 minutes of commitment. And that doesn’t account for the pesky center-stager flipping channels—which could easily quadruple that. At which point, you resign to the cruel truth: you’re never gonna see the whole picture. Just like life.

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: performance, Film, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010, Wooster