Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

Lauren Weedman
Photo: Jeff Swenson

This was the final weekend for REDCATs New Original Works festival downtown and while it was probably the softest show of the bunch overall, it did contain one big highlight. That was Lauren Weedman, who returned to the black box theater with the latest of her very, very funny monologues. She was last seen here with Bust, a work about her experiences volunteering in the county jail system. This weekend, Ms. Weedman appeared alone with nothing more than a chair for Off. Like her prior solo works, the piece appears to be autobiographical with Weedman recreating scenes that could be from her own life involving both her and the unusual people around her. The focus this time out was procreation, and specifically the pros and cons of various means to achieving it. And while I usually don't go in for this biological clock stuff, Weedman has immense powers of winning one over. During her hour, she hysterically visits an adoption center, discusses contraception with a boyfriend, and visits her lesbian sister to learn about the process of being a parent. This isn't stand up comedy, but more a collection of brief scenes with Weedman herself playing all the characters. It’s great material and her hour long set provided the biggest ovation of the whole festival I’d seen so far.

The rest of the evening was taken up by a solo dance piece choreographed and performed by Meg Wolf and a very short muti-media work from a collaborative including Zackary Drucker, Mariana Marroquin, and Wu Ingrid Tsang. This latter work entitled P.I.G. (short for Politically Involved Girls) was a tongue-in-cheek exploration of transgender heritage and issues. Including both live and filmed material, three performers interact with various characters on screen as part of a mock group therapy meeting that is both comic farce, nostalgic homage, and intellectual soapbox. While I liked the look and feel of it, I thought all of the ideas were so tightly packed into one very small and brief space that much of it flew past me. Nor was there time to connect with a flow or atmosphere of the work. Meg Wolfe was another of the festivals many solo auteur and her dance piece was competent and well-thought out. It was a decidedly minimal exercise with a bare stage, evocative soundtrack and a little lighting. It was perhaps a little to subtle for the final piece in the festival, but it was professionally done.

Of course the other big REDCAT news this week was the announcement of their upcoming Fall season. there's a lot of great things to choose from including return appearances from filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger and the California EAR Unit. However the big ticket item is the West Coast Premiere of Arias with a Twist the collaborative theater piece from Joey Arias and puppeteer Basil Twist. It was great in New York, and will likely be a highlight of the Fall here so plan ahead.

Labels: REDCAT 08/09

Photo: Carole Kim

The second weekend of REDCAT’s New Original Works Festival kicked-off on Thursday with a program that seemed light years ahead of last week’s first installment on a number of levels. The first of the two works on the program was an ambitious hour long piece entitled N¹ directed by video and performance artist Carole Kim. However, it was far from a solo work, involving large contributions from the dancer Oguri, percussionist Alex Cline, and trumpeter Dan Clucas. Kim is accomplished and her experience shone through like a beacon in a festival where others can come off like art school students run amok. N¹ uses projected live video streams of Oguri’s very reserved but fluid movements that were projected on a number of scrims hung at angles over the large space of the REDCAT in a sort of forest of screens. These images are further overlayed with other live, but distorted black and white video feeds of water ripples or any other number of difficult to identify surfaces for a transient effect. Meanwhile, a jazz-influenced soundtrack was added from Clucas and Cline who were located behind and to the side of the audience creating a sense of being encased by the show for the audience. The rather claustrophobic but beautiful hour references the myth of Narcissus but is more evocative than narrative despite its several titled sections and clear shifts in tone. I found it rather satisfying and the whole thing had a polished, professional feel that really highlighted the collaborative efforts of this group of artists.

After the break was a disappointingly brief set from the punk band-cum-art project, Jennifer the Leopard. The four young women that make up the band, Lauren Fisher, Stephanie Hutin, Lana Kim and Marissa Mayer, perform wry, but deadpan songs with video accompaniment that mine the depths of feminism and popular culture. The "band" surrounds itself with a "sub-audience" of supporters with various cheering functions and activities synchronized to comment on each song's content. On this program, the parents of the band's drummer were also included on stage following their introduction of the act, providing a kind of insider point of laughs and commentary about the player's alter egos. The band played five or six brief numbers that were less songs, than brief riffs on ideas and phrases often inspired in the accompanying video material. It works well and produces very funny results leaving a viewer with random tidbits like "quality", "raised French", and "move you legs/move your car" rattling around in their heads. It leads one to wonder about how bits of language get taken over and adapted for new cultural meaning. I felt like the whole thing ended too soon, though, just as it was heating up into something a little bigger than a snarky, but very witty prank. Still, it's a very entertaining show.

Labels: REDCAT 08/09

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

Photo: Mark Tusk/Big Art Group 2008

One of the most salient features of the manic are their charm and ability to sweep up those around them into the fervent, if uncontrolled, good mood even when things are falling apart. Thus it is no surprise that SOS the new performance piece from Caden Mason and Jemma Nelson’s Big Art Group that opened at REDCAT downtown yesterday is perpetually charming and very funny. This is a return visit from the ensemble who appeared a few years back in the same venue with a piece entitled Flicker, and now with another very enjoyable oddity that will travel next to San Francisco. SOS is also nearly three sheets to the wind in its unbridled speed and intensity. Like much of the troupe’s work over the last decade, the work is first and foremost a cultural critique and in particular one that concerns the ways media fit into that culture. The primary tactic involves what the group calls a Real-Time Film technique where the live performance of the cast is shot with a number of fixed cameras and simultaneously projected on a number of screens around the theater. Forced perspective and other decidedly low tech methods are used to recreate the feel of edited video and various camera shots. The point is not always authenticity, but more a sense of disorientation or what Mason, Nelson and their colleagues refer to as being "forced to choose". Images are simultaneously available in a number of formats and its up to the audience to assimilate them or not. Needless to say these choices have implications in terms of meaning and provide some of what the group consider the "transgressive" nature of their work.

There are several quasi-narratives unfolding in alternating vignettes in SOS. The first concerns a group of cartoon animals adrift in the woods in a horror movie knock-off. Self-mounted cameras are used by all the cast members to generate a Blair Witch-sort of experience in these sequences. Meanwhile, a group of “terrorists” operate a public access TV show called "Realness" in which the rebels intend to become pregnant with ghost babies and start a revolution from a landfill ...or something like that. The third segment involves a pair of brand-obsessed vacuous teens having a rapid fire conversation about their consumption which is both filling and emptying their lives. Sound confusing? Oh, yeah. But it’s also highly amusing with its breakneck riffs on just about anything and everything you can name. All five of the male cast members (there’s also one woman) appear in drag throughout and the sheer feminine exuberance soon blurs the gender lines in the work. Slowly things escalate as the sort-of narratives intersect and eventually the landfill becomes ground zero for the delivery of a huge mutant airblown inflatable holiday lawn ornament to a troupe now encased in body-covering carapaces of neon colored interlocking balloons. It’s a striking image and one filled with such over-the-top energy you can’t help but smile. And all in under an hour. I'm not sure if SOS is brilliant, but it's hard not to look at and be drawn in which makes it better than most performance so if you can fit it in this Easter weekend, I highly recommend it. SOS runs through and including Sunday.

Labels: REDCAT 08/09

REDCAT has a very exciting production on stage this weekend from Mexico’s Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes entitled Monsters and Prodigies: The History of the Castrati. The piece premiered in 2000, the brain-child of director Claudio Valdés Kuri and its author Jorge Kuri and has traveled far and wide both in Europe and the Americas, now arriving in Los Angeles four years after the death of its author. It’s a broadly comic and often giddy take on the history of the castrati, the group of young men who typically underwent an orchiectomy in their youth in order to preserve the quality of their high voices, enabling them to appear as heroes and lovers in Baroque operas throughout Europe. The practice continued for several hundred years until the practice fell out of favor at the beginning of the 19th century. A bizarre cast of characters, including the centaur Chiron from Greek mythology, a pair of Siamese twins, a slave, a maestro, a virtuoso castrato, and Napoleon cavort for nearly two hours presenting snippets of historical narrative from this lengthy history, not so much acting out events, but relating them through a series of farcical interactions that include singing, dancing, throwing sand, and horrid costumes like something out of a John Copley-directed operatic nightmare. I don’t want to give too much away, the video clip above may give you more of an idea. The piece is quite funny even if you are not an opera fan, although it probably pushes more than a few buttons if you are and you speak enough Spanish and French to get some of the asides not translated on a screen above the action.

But the reason History is great is not just because it’s very funny. At its very heart, it is also deadly serious. The work has something to say about colonialism and class, as well as the way Western culture is as much about destruction as much as it is about beauty and creation. Just as Western art creates the castrati, a sort of monstrosity not unlike the mythical Chiron, for its own amusement, it just as easily rips them down for its own cultural benefit with the arrival of the age of reason. Napoleon himself arrives near the end of the work, and suddenly the beloved “monsters” of opera become despised and reviled for the same qualities that made them so loved and prized in the first place. In History, Western art is not a laurel of salvation like the one our modern day press has crowned the likes of Gustavo Dudamel with – music as a force that washes clean the masses and soothes the soul. This is an art, like the culture it comes from, which also destroys, creating monsters for ones amusement in a bear-baiting like fashion. There is a modern correlate here as well. While we no longer have the surgically-created castrati of Jean Ambroise Paré, opera still engenders the same desire to view its performers as biological machines, jumping through a predetermined series of exercises that are ascribed somehow to the service of beauty. Take for instance the kind of sniping that occurs when vocalists “under-perform” such as arose this very week around the usual blogs in response to the Villazon/Netrebko performance of Lucia di Lammermoor in New York. Opera, and art for that matter, becomes little more than a sport in a context where flawless vocal technique reigns supreme above all else. History is full of broad fun, but at its core is a poignancy and deeper meaning that are easy to overlook. Kuri's play is a clever trick and a wonderful evening.

Labels: REDCAT 08/09

from Arnold's pièce touchée (1989, 16 min., 16mm, b/w)

It is not news that the Los Angeles Times has long ago ceased to be relevant or publish anything worth reading. The paper has been so decimated over the last few years, there is virtually nothing left to recommend it to anyone. Arts coverage is no exception. And, while there are many fine writers who still work for the organization, with so little space devoted to them, it’s hard to imagine what they do with themselves most days. (And, if you think the L.A. Times web site is any better, you are sorely mistaken, my friend.)

The evidence of this decline is too numerous to detail at this point, but let me offer just the latest example. Sunday’s Calendar section featured an assessment of the REDCAT downtown on its fifth anniversary by three different critics, Mark Swed, Christopher Knight, and Charles McNulty, on the various successes and failures of the CalArts-run performance and art space to date. And, while time was spent on the music, theater, and visual arts programming, not a word was said about any of the experimental film or video programming that represents as much if not more of the facility’s overall schedule. (Dance was also overlooked, but who’s counting?) Of course, not mentioning the film program probably seems predictable in that this is a town with little history or reputation for its interest in film or the moving image.

The excellent REDCAT experimental and avant-garde film program has been co-curated by Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud for all of the last five years and has featured a wide array of international artists who often appear in person in conjunction with screenings of their work. This year alone has featured some of the strongest screenings in the series, including works from Kenneth Anger, Ulrike Ottinger, and Paul McCarthy. Monday night’s program was another fascinating event featuring the works of Martin Arnold who presented several short films over the course of the evening. Arnold is mostly concerned in repurposing material from classic Hollywood films through various editing and processing techniques to create new objects that both expose and question not only the original material, but the whole project of film production as practiced in a particular place and manner. In three of the works, short pieces of film of rather mundane scenes are stretched out over many minutes by a process of quick and jerky repeats within these segments often creating chains of brief oscillations between only a few particular still frames. Suddenly menace appears in the peaceful domestic scene and Andy Hardy’s love for Judy becomes an Oedipal nightmare. It’s Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus writ large. The other film on the evening’s schedule was Deanimated an hour-long Bela Lugosi feature in which many if not most of the actors in the film have been digitally erased from each frame leaving only a succession of empty rooms in the context of rather creepy music. This subtraction achieves much the same goals of the shorter material though in perhaps the directly opposite fashion. It's fascinating work and hearing Arnold and the always interesting Reynaud speak about the material was thoroughly enjoyable.

In any event, the REDCAT, in addition to it's fine galley and performing arts series, continues to run one of the most worthwhile experimental film series in the entire city if not the country as a whole. And while our own local paper may not realize this, you can always read more about it at their website.

Labels: REDCAT 08/09

The California EAR Unit
Photo: mine 2008

It was one of those apocalyptic weekends in LA. The sun was out but you could barely see it through the smoke everywhere, ash raining from the sky. And while the mood was reflected in a wonderful L.A. Philharmonic program led by Thomas Adès, downstairs at REDCAT, the California EAR Unit picked up on the same vibe. Over three nights, the group hosted a Festival of Contemporary Dutch Music that explored some of the most interesting work coming out of Europe today that was often neither easy nor straight forward. Sadly, one of the three programs was canceled because of the fires on Saturday, but Sunday’s program was fantastic – witty, inventive, and often as theatrical as it was musical.

The evening started off with Grab It! by Jacob ter Veldhuis for solo saxophone with prerecorded vocal and video elements. The work explores some of the musical qualities of speech by editing voice samples of prisoners serving life sentences into a dynamic fast paced collage of sound accompanied by a wild saxophone riff. It was a bang-up high energy start to the evening, and although things got quieter, they never got less interesting. The evening ended with another piece dominated by a video component, Yannis Kyriakides mnemonist S for a small ensemble which involved the musicians repeating a sequence of tones laid out in a prerecorded sample not unlike a memory game. Accompanying this was a video projection of a text recounting a 1936 performance from Solomon Shereshevskii in which he recalled a large sequence of highly related syllables. Confusing? Yes, but fascinating to watch and hear.

In between the video there were other points of interest. Considering that Louis Andriessen’s Disco from 1981 for piano and violin was the most staid, the standard for pushing boundaries was quite high. Diderik Wagenaar offered Schigolch a short work of humming and raspy mouth organs directly referring to the character from Berg’s Lulu. The ensemble shuffled on and off stage in formation for the piece, which fit nicely with the next work, Mayke Nas’ Anyone Can Do It. Inspired by George Maciunas’ Fluxus Manifesto, the piece is nothing but truth in advertising. Two volunteers from the audience joined four musicians on stage. The performers have never seen the “score” before the performance and were not allowed to rehearse. All six sat facing the audience and followed a series of directions on video monitors in front of them, crossing and uncrossing their legs, shuffling their feet, pointing and rising up and down. Here, performance has completely supplanted the actual music of the piece in the interest of a universal ease of use and participation. Musical aptitude and skill are called into question in a humorous and not-so-subtle way.

It was hard to pick a favorite piece of the evening, which also included Richard Ayers No. 34b. All of these compositions from the last few years reference a vibrant musical community and the performance by members of the California EAR Unit were both witty and challenging. And while some may grouse about the balance between process and outcome, I found the whole evening very entertaining and certainly thought provoking. It turned out that the challenges posed by mother nature proved to be worth overcoming on this particular evening.

Labels: REDCAT 08/09

The event in question
Photo: Barbara Davidson/LAT 2008

You know those moments when you’re watching a performance and you just know you’re in trouble? You suddenly go from “What is this?” to “Oh, that's what it is” and you start looking for the exits to calculate how many people you’ve got to crawl over to get there. Last Wednesday, I attended the opening of a new multi-disciplinary performance piece from the minds of Meredith Monk and visual artist Ann Hamilton entitled Songs of Ascension at the REDCAT downtown. When the woman in the granny dress appeared working on what’s best described as amateur semaphore, I officially crossed from the land of bemused interest to entrapped certainty.

Monk developed the piece in conjunction with the unveiling of a newly built tower on Hamilton’s property in Northern California. The collaborators have been retrofitting the work to other spaces that weren't necessarily in mind with the original conception. And while there's certainly no harm in that, what's made it to the dungeon of the Walt Disney Concert Hall isn't particularly enchanting. Now, I have nothing against pretension. In fact, I'm rather fond of it. And admittedly I think one has to be in the right place mentally to best access Monk's work. Sadly, last week, I was not there. Not even in the neighborhood.

Monk’s music was front and center with 5 primary vocalists, a small supporting chorus, an ambulatory string quartet and two other additional musicians. Everyone wandered around and back periodically breaking out into what is more accurately described as "movement" as opposed to dance. The music was quintessential Monk in its basic structure with enough non-specific spiritual and quasi-ethnic overtones to make you wonder what the connections are. Unfortunately, nothing quite worked. The piece meanders with no real point or focus while managing to create as many moments of irritation as those of beauty. Vocalists gratingly mock the instruments at times in a way that is supposed to be funny, but isn't. But the music did get better as it went along, though I never felt the piece was substantial enough to create a logic of it's own.

Maybe the tower would have improved things, but down in the bowels of downtown L.A., things just seemed pretty vacant.

Labels: REDCAT 08/09

Members of Elevator Repair Service in The Sound and The Fury

It’s been a rough start to the Los Angeles theater season this fall. The Center Theater Group has been plagued with the Dolly Parton musical 9 to 5 and the rather tedious This Beautiful City at the Kirk Douglas Theater. UCLA Live had to eighty-six the opening production of its International Theater Festival, Barrie Kosky’s The Tell Tale Heart due to reported travel visa problems and the Geffen has been bogged down in another one of those Hershey Felder piano-bio-dramas. So it may be somewhat surprising that REDCAT has stepped in to save the day with what is easily the best thing on stage here so far this fall with an imported production from New York's Elevator Repair Service entitled The Sound and The Fury (April Seventh, 1928).

Now in reality, this is not a surprise at all to anyone whose been following the trajectory of this CalArts run venue downtown in the basement of he Walt Disney Concert Hall since it opened five years ago. REDCAT has repeatedly offered some of the most inventive and thoughtful theater and music events in town by both locals and out-of-towners, often at bargain basement prices. So inviting Elevator Repair Service to reprise their lauded production of Faulkner’s novel here on the West coast is a proverbial no-brainer.

It’s a fantastic production. The company has made a bit of a name for itself recently in producing theatrical events that are as much staged readings as they are plays. The Sound and The Fury is exactly that – the first 100 or so pages of Faulkner’s classic novel performed by a cast of 12 literally word-for-word. While fist person descriptive passages are read by various cast members from a dog-eared copy of the novel, the rest of the group enacts the dialog with all of the “he said”s still intact. Given the stream of consciousness of Faulkner’s work, this is a bold and brazen task for these quite talented actors who play out multiple non-sequential scenes in the same space simultaneously. Most of the actors swap and share different roles throughout passing them around between one another in a way that enhances the sense of the free flow of the narrator Benjamin Compson's memory. That Benjy is severely cognitively impaired and mute only adds to the challenge. There’s an abundance of audio samples added to the performance which all takes place within a single giant room that alternately serves and living room, kitchen, and the great outdoors.

While this may sound incredibly confusing, it works amazingly well. It is both hypnotic and expertly catches both the campy, gothic feel of the book and the sentimental dream of lost innocence. Reaching the end of the intermissionless two plus hours feels both profound and cathartic. The cast is excellent and while different members clearly ascribe to different performance styles, director John Collins somehow allows everyone enough room to play with the material while keeping all of Faulkner’s words intact. Sadly, there are only a handful of performances this weekend, but I hear REDCAT has been busy with sizable audiences for the performances, which is great news. There is one more show on Sunday afternoon which I highly recommend if you have the time.

Labels: REDCAT 08/09