Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

The ninth edition of REDCAT’s New Original Works festival kicked off on Thursday. And if the opening weekend of this three week festival is any indication, this may be one of NOW’s most ambitious programs yet. Of course, the festival is all about exactly what it says, brand new works often in various stages of development. That can mean a raw unpolished feeling to some of the pieces, but it can also indicate a powerful unexpected energy. And while it is not a competition in any way, Thursday’s program started off with a piece that will be hard to beat in terms of depth, vision, and ferocious impact.

That hour long piece was from Los Angeles’ own Poor Dog Group, the experimental theater collective founded by former CalArts students in 2008. The work, The Murder Ballad, is different in scope from their former projects focusing more heavily on dance elements than prior outings. However, the understated impact, and the piece’s brazen, pointed reflections on race, sexual identity, and authority are more potent and succinctly put than just about anything I can remember in recent memory. The Murder Ballad takes its title from the lengthy blues song written by Jelly Roll Morton at the start of the 20th Century and only recorded by Alan Lomax in 1938 with the help of a little alcohol and 7 aluminum discs which captured the New Orleans legend. The performance is stunning and serves as the soundtrack for what is largely a dance piece with minimal spoken elements. The episodic tale, rife with curse words and explicit sex recounts the story of an African-American woman who murders a woman she has discovered is cheating with her man. She is eventually tried, sent to prison for life, and starts up a sexual relationship with another woman while there. Despite the obviously salacious elements of the story, there is a certain inevitability to the story as well, like Greek tragedy. It’s a sense that all of the things that happen to us are still somehow predetermined and that there is a beauty in that itself.

There are only two performers – the enthralling dancer Jessica Emmanuel who poses, struts, and almost flies throughout the entire length of the piece, not so much acting out the events of the song as suggesting the underlying unexpressed context like some modern day listener reflecting on how little we’ve changed despite our efforts to convince ourselves we have in the last hundred years. This all takes place on top of a white tarp with matching rear projection screen that occasionally provides live streaming images captured from above. Her lithe, at times nearly naked, form is periodically accompanied by a near comic counterpoint from actor Jesse Saler. He radiates sexuality just as easily as Ms. Emmanuel, soaked in his polo shirt and briefs with his large thighs providing a certain counterpoint to her lighter more delicate frame. The contrast in and of itself draws on issues about sexual identity and power relations that the piece, of course, doesn’t attempt to answer as much as explore the deeper meaning in Morton’s often funny, frequently explicit tale.

The works that followed covered very different areas in a more is more sort of fashion with varying degrees of success. The collective Opera Povera took on Pauline Oliveros’ To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation. The 1970 work was intended to capture Oliveros’ own response to the burgeoning feminist movement of the time drawing parallels between the two women in terms of the effect patriarchy had on their histories. The wordless hour long “opera” is scored mostly for sighs, gasps, and sobbing noises that were performed here by co-creator of the production Juliana Snapper and Carolyn Shoemaker. The staging that Snapper and Sean Griffin conceived further wrapped the elements in Oliveros’ score into the history of Cheryl Crane, the daughter of Lana Turner who would later stab and kill Johnny Stompanato in what she said was an effort to protect her mother. If this sounds like it’s getting complicated, it is, and the staging involves a handful of other characters as well who aren’t always clearly outlined. Cast members at times appear to be Solanas, Monroe, Turner, Crane, and others. Sometimes these references are taken seriously and others not, which is in the spirit of Oliveros’ music. But I’ll admit the references become so complicated that by midpoint it was harder and harder to maintain focus on the inexplicable stage events. And while the notion of the sobbing and gasping that fill the score were mesmerizing, the show did sink under the weight of its own pretentions in the end.

The closing work was Susan Simpson’s Exhibit A, a Los Angeles influenced fantasia of the mid-20th Century. Again electronic music elements were combined with an often comic theater performance that reflected on the 1948 draining of the Silverlake reservoir, the modernist utopian architecture of Richard Neutra, and Harry Hay and the history of the Mattachine Society. Simpson was fascinated by the parallels in the utopian mind set that informed Hay and Neutra as well as science fiction from the period that she had come across in papers at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at USC. Exhibit A takes off to space from there, imagining Hay, Neutra and others as part of an outer space exploratory cell headed for planet Edendale, Silverlake’s original neighborhood name. The characters are represented by huge wooden puppets that interact with the live jumpsuited cast freely. Landscape flies and is reformed with little warning. The piece dabbles in surreal kitsch and history freely, producing something that doesn’t take itself too seriously but loses steam before its conclusion. The connections are made, but the larger point seems diffuse and uncertain here. Still it’s a collision of great, local materials that begs out for further development.

It was the kind of evening one hopes for at the festival overall – works that overdose on ambition as opposed to those that feel like they have nowhere to go. The REDCAT curators are off to a spectacular start on this front this year, so be sure to check out the next two weeks of programming downtown.

Labels: NOW Festival, REDCAT 11/12

Thursday brought the concluding weekend of REDCAT’s 8th New Original Works Festival to downtown best theater venue. It was a triple-bill with some of the weekend's most ambitious and satisfying work. First up were two dance pieces both featuring the talents of Michel Kouakou. The African-born choreographer started off the evening with an intriguing if somewhat oblique solo dance entitled Sack. The title is used as a noun here and there is in fact a sack, bound in rope and suspended from above that swings back and forth as the lights come up. Kouakou lies below while another man stands, bare-chested, with his shirt front pulled up over his head as if he has a hood on. Over the course of the piece as Kouakou begins his rapid, slinging movements, several other darkly clad bystanders arrive and take the same position in their own lights with shirt fronts pulled over their head. Kouakou dodges in and around these people and the sack until he eventually unties the rope and begins weaving it between the other participants as well. The visual references here clearly suggest the last decade of the Iraq war and torture. The sack could be easily be a body or part of one, and the hooded figures invoke images of torture victims that most Americans grew sadly familiar with during the years of George W. Bush. But the political overtones are otherwise oblique and Kouakou’s choreography seems as likely to be struggling with some internal psychological demons as public political ones.

After a brief pause, the evening took off on a very different track with Victoria Marks’ Medium Big Inefficient Considerably Imbalanced Dance. Kouakou joined five other dancers, which was the highlight of this year’s entire NOW Festival. The work was remarkably polished and had a sense of being complete. The six dancers would often pair off into smaller, unequal groups and much of the motion had the feeling of being off-kilter or imbalanced. Dancers start off in one direction, but then appear to have second thoughts resulting in awkward almost comical poses. It reminded me of some of the best international dance projects I’ve seen at REDCAT in recent years, and it was difficult to avoid being completely mesmerized by the activity on stage. All of this was accompanied by a minced-up soundtrack of bits and pieces from d. Sabela grimes that served as a perfect complement to physical movement cleverly mimicking uncertainty in several directions.

The show and festival ended with the most ambitious work of the whole festival, a brief puppet opera called Zoophilic Follies. Like all opera, the artistic collaborators here make for a very long list in their own right. The musical composition is credited to Daniel Corral with a libretto by Sibyl O’Malley. The show was directed and designed by Caitlin Lanoff and Danrae Wilson. Together Corral and Lanoff comprise Tandem, a puppet theater company that has presented a number of well-received projects around the country. For the musical performance Tandem collaborated with the well known local tenor and new music aficionado Timur Bekbosunov and his band The Dime Museum. This small ensemble was joined by four vocalists, including Timur, who sang the principal roles. So with so many collaborators in the mix, not to mention costumes, lights, and the rest of the puppeteers, there was an awful lot of energetic and often funny business going on.

The story is that of Daedalus and his relationship to the royal family of Crete including King Minos, his bull-loving wife, his daughter Ariadne, and the unfortunate product of man-bull love, the Minotaur. Daedalus, sung by Timur, acts as a sort of narrator to the events that unfold familiarly starting from Poseidon’s dealing with King Minos and ending with the death of the Minotaur. The story unfolds not just through the vocal performance of the four principals who branding giant featureless masks to represent their characters, but also through some smaller scale puppetry with dialog, including the building of the labyrinth. The libretto is comical and wryly knowing with a variety of contemporary inside jokes directed specifically at the audience. This is not the Crete we might think of from the Greek debt crisis, Dorian Wood’s King Minos tells us. There are some lovely songs here and it is hard to ignore the musical energy of the piece. And while there were several balance and amplification issues, the rough-hewn feeling of the performance complemented the DIY sensibility of the work. Zoophilic Follies also doesn’t manage to overcome the primary narrative obstacle of the story – while Daedalus is the protagonist of the story, the events that drive the narrative action of the piece belong almost entirely to everyone else. Daedalus remains mostly a footnote retelling how he helped, or didn’t, get all these other people into their own relative hot waters. But visually and energy wise, Zoophilic Follies cries out for further development and performances. You can attend one of them on Friday or Saturday this weekend at the REDCAT downtown.

Labels: NOW Festival, REDCAT 10/11

REDCAT’s NOW Festival rolled into its second weekend on Thursday with what turned out to be a promising and often exciting program from two artists with ties to CalArts and their many collaborators. The evening started off with the always visually arresting work of Rosanna Gamson and her World Wide troupe of dancers and actors. The 25 minute dance piece, entitled Layla Means Night, bore many hallmarks of Gamson’s prior projects. It is undoubtedly a dance work, but there is spoken dialog, live music, and numerous props and set design elements that push the performance into something more. The work is a riff on Kitāb alf laylat wa-laylah or One Thousand and One Nights. The performance opens with a blond woman in a red dress angrily slicing oranges and juicing them as a man in a suit closely monitors her from behind. Soon we learn through a narrator that the name Layla is also the Arabic word for night. Gamson, as like other adapters of One Thousand and One Nights is more interested in the frame story of Scheherazade spinning her nightly tales to her new husband in order to prolong her life and avoid the fate of the numerous newlywed virgins the king has killed before her. And from the outset it is clear that this story will be about women in general and that an everywoman, Layla, is as relevant as Scheherazade whose name is never mentioned in the work.

But what feels new here is Gamson’s interest not just in Scheherazade, but the sexual politics of the frame story’s background. The show’s opening narration explains how the king came to be betrayed by his first wife and had her killed before traveling the world with his brother and eventually deciding that all women would be just as unfaithful to him. The male narrator is joined by multiple tall female dancers dressed in elegant evening wear as the story unfolds about the king’s serial murder of virgins the morning after their wedding him. The narration is taken over in part by a woman in a white dress who is standing in for Scheherazade and addresses her stories not to the king, but to her own younger sister, played by a young girl in the performance. As she begins to prolong her life through the repeated tales, the subsequent stories in Layla Means Night aren’t given plots but are replaced with choreographed segments for the dancers. Gamson doesn't take everything too seriously here, though, and the ongoing narration is as likely to undercut events with a smile as it is to make a larger meaningful point. There is a real power and beauty in the piece which seems to unfold in multiple directions simultaneously despite its brevity. There was a sense that this is a first step in a larger project, but it was a great way to start.

After a break, the audience returned for an hour-long, one-act, three-character play by Robert Cucuzza, Cattywampus. Cucuzza’s name has long been associated with some of the most terrible of enfants in the theater world including Richard Foreman and the Elevator Repair Service (ERS). So that Cattywampus is a campy poke in the ribs of theater history is to be expected. The target here is August Strindberg’s late 19th-century tale of sexual and class politics Miss Julie. But Cucuzza has broadly adapted the tale, moving it to a modern-day Pennsylvania car dealership. The middle class front office worker Julie, is seducing car detailer Donnie at the expense of his flirtation with Chrissie who appears to just have stepped off the set of Jersey Shore with feathered hair and all. There was musical accompaniment throughout the entire performance, reinforcing the proceedings with blues and folk inspired plucking. It’s a great and rather edgy idea that is going for laughs more than intellectual insight. However there is a delicate balance here. Lower class American stereotypes will only get you so far these days without seeming obvious. Cucuzza avoids this pitfall by preserving much of the commentary on sexual power dynamics, and the physical grappling and explicit language certainly go farther than Strindberg’s play did. The show is peppered with some unexpected dancing that will remind viewers of ERS shows. And all three actors, D. J. Mendel, Jillian Lauren (Julie), and Jenny Greer (Chrissie) were marvelous, never overplaying their hand with the material. But above all Cattywampus is sharp-witted with a keen perspective and, with a little more development, could be a major success in a much broader context. This weekend’s program will run again Saturday night.

Labels: NOW Festival, REDCAT 10/11

CalArts’ REDCAT opened up the 8th installment of the New Original Works Festival this weekend. Over the next three weeks, the theater will host eight sets of often local and frequently young artists showing off the latest and greatest they have to offer. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be familiar faces over the next three weeks, or that some of the pieces haven’t been seen elsewhere in earlier versions. But many of the artists are enjoying a big platform for their work in the great REDCAT facilities for the first time. The shows are widely varied, and given the newness of some of it, not all of it works. But it’s the sense of adventure and experimentation that’s part of the fun.

The highlight of the first week’s program, which I saw on Thursday (although it will repeat on both Friday and Saturday), was Marissa Chibas’ comical and fleeting Clara’s Los Angeles. Chibas was notably seen at REDCAT in her solo work Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary in 2007. This new work is much lighter, although it stems from a serious concept. In response to out-of-town friends who would repeat the old canard that Los Angeles has no history, Chibas was inspired to create Clara, a 1920s flapper who awakens in 2010 Los Angeles recalling the night she last went to sleep in 1926 after a Charleston contest at the Ambassador Hotel. These events are laid out in a silent film that makes up most of the performance. Clara finds that she best fits into the modern world when she is recounting stories from her own time. Soon the flesh and blood Clara, who has been seated in the audience watching the movie all along stands at the bequest of her filmed self, and with the assistance of a musical trio who have accompanied the film, she recounts numerous facts about Los Angeles of the early 20th Century, particularly the large role that peoples of Latin and African descent played in shaping the city’s early history. There was still a feeling of the piece being under development and some of the tonal shifts between the comic and more didactic elements could feel heavy-handed. But it was a potent reminder of part of the city’s history that even many Angelenos have forgotten.

The evening opened with a large scale multi-media puppet piece from Cindy Derby called Edward’s House of String. The short narrative used a full scale humanoid puppet with some noticeable obsessive compulsive traits who soon finds his world enmeshed in string not long after he receives several secret gift boxes of thread from birds in a nearby tree. It’s a Kafkaesque tale that wavers between eerie and whimsical. There is an original music score composed by Ellen Reid that was performed live with the action. Additionally, Edward’s world is surrounded by four large clouds that serve as projection surfaces for related stop-motion animation. I thought the puppetry of the protagonist was well done making Edward seem lifelike independently of his handlers. But at the same time the show was frustrated with inadequate lighting and problems of scale. Like a lot of puppetry, some of the fine detailed movement is the most visual interesting material. Edward’s House of String is filled with these, but they were difficult to see in the REDCAT from a distance with so little light. Given that the wordless narrative relies on this physical pantomime, the performance was needlessly difficult to decipher.

Week one also featured a partially improvised interactive audio visual work from Lucky Dragons which included music from Luke Fishbeck and video from Sarah Rara entitled Actual Reality. This twist on the expression “virtual reality” escaped my understanding here, although the minimal music, processed electronically from five flutists, a bassoonist and percussionist could be pretty at times. Behind the players was a large video image that transitioned from several minutes of a large spinning flute, to stills of flowers and a newspaper photo both of which were covered in small points of oscillating colored light. Although each performance will vary based on the interactive elements of the piece, Thursday’s performance reminded me of a more-psychedelic 70s minimalism with its tweeting and largely unvarying sounds. The show can be seen through this weekend, and if you can’t make it, you may want to check out either of the promising programs over the next two weeks.

Labels: NOW Festival, REDCAT 10/11

Ayana Hampton
Photo: Blackantphotography

The doldrums of July in Los Angeles can be a difficult time for fans of live performance. Luckily it’s REDCAT to the rescue with the latest installment of the New Original Works Festival which annually welcomes a variety of local performers to display their wares over a period of several weeks in the modern black box theater at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. This weekend featured the first of three programs and while neither the festival nor the individual programs are in any way a competition, hands down the “winner” of the evening was Ayana Hampton. A CalArts grad with a variety of web-based and small independent credits to her name, Hampton appears as the star and raison d’etre for The Ayana Hampton Show, a hilarious 40 minute blitzkrieg of commentary on race, sex, fame, and politics in the form of an ersatz variety show. It’s a big production with a back-up band, The Morning After, and a trio of dancer/singer/drag artists, The Lustrous Blackup Dancers. Hampton goes for the throat with abandon in a maniacal series of characters from a stoner mom, to a frustrated young actress, to Michelle Obama. There are several rock songs mixed in here, all with over-the-top funny, vulgar, and blisteringly smart commentary about being the odd one out in a culture that uses that oddity as a primary source for fetish. Much of the material in the performance has been developed in smaller formats and then restructured for the evening, which can be found recorded on Ms. Hampton’s website. Now arguably, these funny bits may not add up to the most polished or cohesive whole. However, the sheer amount of guts and energy clearly demonstrate a great big and very smart talent making The Ayana Hampton Show a calling card not to be ignored.

There were two other performances on this weekend’s bill. First was a multimedia work entitled [ab][ac][us] from a collective of performers and video artists who go by the name of Early Morning Opera. The piece featured a single character, Paul Abacus played by Sonny Valicenti, and a dancer/camerman, Garrett Wolf. Behind the performers were a series of five screens hung in a single sloped column approaching the floor. Abacus launches into a long modernist monologue about the dropping of borders in a new world order as if he’s some slightly out-of-whack motivational speaker. Writer and director Lars Jan derives the elements of Paul's diatribe from a variety of 20th-century figures ranging from the likes of Edward Tufte and Joel Osteen to Carl Sagan, Benedict Anderson, and Buckminster Fuller. Meanwhile images, maps, and video feed of Abacus’ own performance are projected on the screens above. It was an attractive experiment, but one that didn’t seem to be quite as edgy or maddening as one might expect from its content. Kind of like Network without the shouting. It seemed to function more like a review of a graduate degree screening exam reading list than a performance piece. But it was billed as a work-in-progress, so later versions may have more to say.

Sandwiched between these efforts was a short dance and performance excerpt from Sheetal Gandhi entitled Bahu-Beti-Biwi or Daughter-in-Law, Daughter, Wife. Gandhi borrows traditional folk music and dance elements to construct an exthibit of the trials and perspectives of several South Asian women who may or may not be related. They range from an elderly grandmother to a child begging her mother to access elements of a more Westernized culture she idolizes. While there is a lot of bird mimicking movement and the slow rain of white feathers from above, Gandhi mixed things up with some short character monologues fleshing out these characters. And while I like the character studies a lot, the excerpt was just that, as if a much bigger picture was only being peeked at in one brief moment. But the overall night was a good start for the festival that will continue over the next two weeks and will feature a number of interesting works including new material from comic and actor Lauren Weedman in the first weekend of August. So there may be a cure for the summertime blues after all.

Labels: NOW Festival, REDCAT 08/09