Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

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

Sandra Bernhard

Sandra Bernhard returned to Los Angeles last week with her latest show, I Love Being Me, Don’t You?, and what struck me most about it, besides being some of her best live work in years, is how profoundly complex her routines have become. Her shows are always riotously funny and razor sharp. That is nothing new. The format hasn’t changed much either. She has a unique blend of comic one liners, narrative storytelling, and musical performance that is uniquely her own. She was again accompanied by a band and displayed serious musical chops opening the show with Bobby Womack’s Across 110th Street and closing with a medley of “Lady” songs. She weaved in and out of stories as outlandish and farcical as they were pointedly relevant. There was plenty of the skewering of (our) celebrity culture that Kathy Griffin (whom I love dearly as well) would give up her first-born to pull off with this much flair. Irony, and I don’t mean the Alanis Morissette kind, abounds, and Bernhard’s arch vocal mastery of a phrase drives the whole set.

What was different to my ear was the breadth and depth of her web of allusions. Bernhard never shies away from complex cultural references, but I Love Being Me, Don’t You?, may reach farther than she has previously in terms of what she expects the audience to get from politics of the early 1970s through wannabe celebrities in the pages of today’s lesser respected tabloids. There is a risk that some in the audience is left behind, and to my ear more than a few were in Thursday’s show. The double edged commentary of her performance of Mocedades' Eres Tú was brilliantly oblique. But the way in which these references build in to a greater agenda is remarkable. Bernhard has a revolutionary streak despite all of her homebody protestations, and her calls for progressive defiance wrapped in a smile and a knowing disco allusion is much more than it seems on the surface. At other moments, there are these amazing tonal shifts infused with nostalgia, sorrow or perhaps anger that rivals the kind of narrative tricks Garrison Keillor is known for. The centerpiece of the current show is an extended monologue about her being stood up by a stoned friend for a concert and becomes a meditation on loss and the political and cultural struggles of our own times. All of this is wrapped in a slick musical pastiche of Cat Stevens’ “Sad Lisa”, Scott McKenie’s “San Francisco”, and Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”. The piece is sublime in the way it transverses an emotional landscape. It’s this ability to produce laughs and tears in such close juxtaposition that makes Bernhard one of the greats. The shows continue at REDCAT downtown through the weekend, but at this point tickets are mostly available via returns so count yourself lucky to see the performance if you’ve got them already.

Labels: REDCAT 10/11

There is no one quite like Sandra Bernhard. Her particular blend of comedy and performance art have helped make her a comic legend and endeared her to legions of devoted fans. She’s well known for numerous film and TV roles and has released several recordings, both comedy and straightforward music over her quarter century career. But her live, cabaret style performances will always stay near and dear to my heart and are the appearances that most distinguish her from those around her. That unadulterated, bracing wit and razor sharp observation of a world full of misguided priorities makes an evening with Bernhard unlike any other. Luckily she’ll be bringing her latest show I Love Being Me, Don’t You? to REDCAT starting this Thursday. It's an ideal spot for the show and it's certainly bound to be a highlight for the month. The show has already been extended due to popular demand into a second week through the 18th, and tickets are going fast. There’s also a recording of the show made in a previous outing in San Francisco that’s available on iTunes. Luckily, Ms. Bernhard took some time from her busy mom-on-the-go schedule to tackle the Out West Arts 10 Questions.

1. What’s the inspiration for "I Love Being Me, Don’t You?" the new
   recording and show that you’ll be bringing to L.A. this month at the
   REDCAT?
   

   
   The world around me and the world within me are always my major inspirations.



2. How are you coping with the whole digital revolution?
   

   
   It's a love/hate thing. I don't like to see people wandering down the street detached on their iPhones unaware of people and places and experiences they are missing out on, but I do like to reach out to people in the quiet of my home and bridge many miles.



3. Music has always played a large part in your performances. What makes a song ideal for you?

   
   If it is a song I can put my mark on, and a touch of irony, if it tells a good story that I can weave in and out of my own - that's a good song.
   



4. Hollywood comes calling (again?) about a Sandra Bernhard reality TV
   show. Nightmare or dream come true?
   

   
   Neither, I simply have no interest in exploiting my life in that manner.



5. What should I be reading on my summer vacation?
   

   
   I just read a great book, In the Garden of the Beasts by Erik Larson. It's a historical novel about Nazi Germany.



6. What, if anything, has your mother taught you about comedy?
   

   
   Well, my mother is an original and an artist and a real character. Her humor comes out of being all of those things, she is a natural.



7. Who would you like to see in a remake of Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!?
   

   
   Myself and Angelina Jolie



8. What are the absolute necessities when you’re working on the road?
   

   
   All of my fabulous homeopathic remedies, bath products, great candles, a down pillow, and organic fruits and vegetables.



9. You’ve conquered so much of the world. Where would you most like to
   perform, but haven’t yet?
   

   
   In Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam



10. What becomes a legend most?
    

    
    Someone who stays true to their muses, and writes down every idea that might lead to a great song, story or painting.

Labels: 10 Questions, REDCAT 10/11

Mark Menzies and Sofia Gubaidulina Photo: mine 2011

Los Angeles has been host to one of the world’s greatest living composers this week, Sofia Gubaidulina. Her story is almost as fascinating as her music. Born in the Tatar Republic of the USSR in 1931, Gubaidulina later studied music in Moscow in the 1950s receiving support from the likes of Shostakovich who knew a good thing when he saw it. He reportedly also knew that the young Gubaidulina’s vision would not win her accolades in Stalin’s world, and she spent the next few decades struggling as did other composers for not conforming to a prescribed artistic agenda. While creating her bracing and unconventional sound world, she worked in other venues producing a variety of film scores to get by. Eventually as political realities changed, Gubaidulina was first allowed to travel abroad in the mid-1980s and with the advocacy of such artists as Gidon Kremer, her international reputation took off. Now in 2011, she is one of he most unique and uncompromising musical artists working, and her appearances are rare and special occasions to be savored. She is in Los Angeles in part for the performance of Glorious Percussion, which will be included in a program along with a Brahms symphony with the Los Angeles Philharmonic this weekend.

But before this, there were four shows in three days dedicated entirely to Gubaidulina’s works performed by the faculty and students of CalArts at the REDCAT space downtown. The shows covered an overwhelming array of her work, touching on most of her major recurrent themes and techniques. The pieces ranged from solo and chamber works to full-scale orchestra concertos all performed under her watchful eye. The excitement during these shows was frequently palpable with young musicians in awe of working with a living legend and receiving direct feedback from her. There was a special feeling that suggested this was much more than just a concert series, but a collaborative labor of love and mutual discovery.

Gubaidulina’s sound world is marked by its own logic. She is fascinated with percussion as well as ethnic folk instruments; and even in her writing for traditional western instrumentation, she will tend to treat most instruments as if they were percussion, pressing the sound they produce to the boundaries of what they are designed to do. Bassoons wail with a reedy strain and piano keyboards are pounced upon with forearms. She writes works featuring unusual combinations of instruments as well, such as 1977’s Lamento for tuba and piano or her 1975 Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings featuring four cellos and three basses. Musicians who don't often see virtuoso pieces for their particular instruments have a love for Gubaidulina's tendency to shine a light on their particular corner of the sound world. Perhaps the most striking example of this to my ear was the Duo Sonata for Two Bassoons from 1977, which was performed by Archibald Carey and Julia Feves in the Sunday evening program. The two got a workout playing contrasting material filled with multiphonics and microtonal scales. And although her music is filled with spiritual overtones not unlike those of Messiaen, it can also be abrasive and disquieting at times.

Mark Menzies, Christopher Rountree and the CalArts Orchestra Photo: mine 2011

But Gubaidulina is not without a sense of humor and play. The first evening featured 14 miniatures from 1969’s Musical Toys that resemble Kurtág’s Jatekok. These are somewhat serious small games, however, and even music that is ostensibly intended for children can reveal a darker undertone. The first program of the series also featured two animated short films featuring Gubaidulina’s score for the tales from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Here, Kipling’s jungle takes on a surreal quality where a sense of danger is omnipresent even in the more lighthearted moments. Gubaidulina is equally unafraid to highlight her musical influences and her debt to Webern and Shostakovich among others bleeds through time and again. She plays games with other composers more directly, which was evidenced in Monday’s program with Willy Waltzing in the Style of Johann Strauss, which, as promised, tilts some of the most user-friendly of all works on their heads. That same evening brought the composer’s take on Bach and a fascinating piano, bassoon and viola trio, Quasi Hoquetus.

Over the course of the four programs, the musical works grew in complexity and orchestration from solo and chamber works to the three major concertos on Tuesday’s program. And appropriately, the building tension paid off with a huge reward in the closing full orchestra performance of Gubaidulina’s violin concerto Offertorium with soloist Mark Menzies and the full force of the CalArts Orchestra. I was most taken with the wide range of styles and structure over the three concertos that evening, which began with the 1978 piano concerto Introitus. Here the piano solo is intentionally non-virtuoso providing a meditative backdrop of chords to more flashy outbursts from individual players and groups in the larger orchestra. Richard Valitutto gave an intense performance of this most unassuming of solo parts. After this, the cello concerto Detto II flipped the relationship from Introitus with Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick taking over a very expressive solo part that settled in contrast to the chamber sized-orchestra group that struggle to find their peace in the onslaught of the soloist, never quite finishing any of the thoughts they start. But the highlight of the evening—and the whole festival—came with the concluding performance of the richly textured Offertorium. The staccato and jittery violin is often swept away in dark waves of sound from the larger ensemble which was enthusiastically conducted by Christopher Rountree. Huge crescendos are met with stuttering anxiety and individual instruments from the orchestra often get to speak their mind. Menzies’ playing was athletic and viscerally engaging. Here the full force of Gubaidulina’s ideas about faith and music are on display in a work as moving as anything Messiaen wrote. It can be surprisingly lyrical in slashes, but it is filled with the sacrifice suggested by the title as a more general rule. It was thrilling to watch the force of this sound fill the small REDCAT space, and the conclusion was met with a sense of jubilation both in the audience and the face of the composer who embraced many of the players. At times, it was hard to believe that this sweet looking, unassuming older woman had produced such magnificent and sometimes dark and challenging music. But not only had she done this, she had often done so in the most untenable circumstances for a large part of her life. And for at least three days, L.A. and the musicians of REDCAT were lucky enough to have her in their midst sharing a significant part of her legacy with all of us in the flesh.

Labels: REDCAT 10/11

Ioane Papalii in Lemi Ponifasio's The Tempest: Without a Body Photo: Lemi Ponifasio

It began with a sudden deafening blast of electric feedback. From there the next 90-minutes were filled with disquieting electronic noise—grinding, chirps, and static—to accompany the events onstage. A dark world revealed a number of archetypal figures, some dancers, some not, including a young, hunched woman with dirty small angel wings who would periodically shriek at the top of her lungs for a world of woe. This is part of The Tempest:Without a Body a dance/performance piece from choreographer and activist Lemi Ponifasio and the collective MAU, which he helped form in New Zealand in 1995. The work is receiving its U.S. premiere in Los Angeles for two nights only, April 2 and 3 under the auspices of REDCAT, which has packed up shop for the show and moved temporarily to digs in the historic Million Dollar Theater on 3rd and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. (If you've not seen this great old L.A. landmark, it is reason enough to see this show.) As you might gather from the description, Tempest is at its very core distressful and unsettling, which it is intended to be. Ponifasio and the artists, activists, scholars, and working people who make up MAU have created a work covering a huge range of issues including the state of social justice in a world wracked by terrorism.


Ponifasio, Samoan by birth and living and working in New Zealand, has rapidly ascended to the upper echelons of the choreography world in the last decade with appearances around the globe. His work is visually stunning, and like the best of Pina Bausch, often relies in part on participants who aren’t necessarily dancers and whose movement is about other issues than athleticism. The Tempest: Without a Body (which you can see a sample from above) draws on a wide array of figures and the movement itself can be slow and minimal at times. Among these figures are the aforementioned angel, men who move on four limbs like animals, slow moving Promethean figures painted in silver, and others whose movement and manner are influenced by Maori and other pacific island dance traditions. From the minute the show gets started with its burst of sound you feel the sense of uncertainty, the same one that is all too familiar in one’s day-to-day life in this modern age. The audience is also invited to view the many different characters on stage as references to those in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The angel could be Ariel, and the older man who “smashes” what looks to be a plank, but turns out to be nothing more than a chalk-like powder may be Prospero. There is another man with body tattoos and a full facial moko who recites a political text about the use of unlawful detention who could be seen as a reference to Caliban by European audiences. (This part was played in earlier versions of The Tempest by Maori activist Tame Iti, who has withdrawn from the North American performances in protest over the US participation in the No-fly zone over Libya, and was replaced by Charles Koroneho.) But, Ponifasio is not looking for something that clear cut or easily allegorical. Instead, the performers and dancers fade in and out of the dark often dramatically lit from behind as if they are the proverbial “Children of the mist," the Tuhoe people of New Zealand.

What I’ve mentioned so far only begins to scratch the surface of the philosophical and intellectual underpinnings of the work with Ponifasio making reference to subjects as diverse as the work of Walter Benjamin and the Waitangi Tribunal. How this all actually translates onto the stage which is dominated by a large hanging grey wall on the left, is hard to know. But The Tempest: Without a Body is a rare and wonderful thing. It is certainly unlike anything else you’ve seen before and it does have a magisterial and ceremonial feel at times. Ponifasio has the amazing ability to create an entire world unto itself that abducts the viewer into it without having to explain everything. The show is unsettling and like its theme, keeps the viewer on edge with a fearful anticipation amidst its beauty at all times. It's a rare evening and one that is not easily forgotten.

Labels: REDCAT 10/11

Emanuele Arciuli

On Thursday night, REDCAT, CalArts' downtown home to the adventurous, welcomed Italian pianist Emanuele Arciuli, for a one night only solo piano recital. Arciuli is a champion of new music having worked with a variety of living composers on works commissioned for him. What’s more, he’s developed a reputation as a proponent of contemporary American piano works and has even written a book on the subject. That book is in Italian of course, his native language, but as Americans should know by now, we tend to learn more about ourselves from outside observers than anyone else. And if you want to put an even finer point on it, his interest in Native American culture has led to several commissions from Native American composers, a number of which he premiered at The Smithsonian Museum in 2008. One of these was included in Thursday's program in addition t the world premiere of segments of another new commission. Needless to say, this what not your everyday piano recital program.

But let’s start at the end. The show was anchored by Ives’ “Concord” Piano Sonata No.2. With its four movements dedicated to various figures associated with Transcendentalism including Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau. It’s a mammoth work with so much history and American culture stuffed into it that it’s easy to see how it paved the way for all sorts of 20th Century music. Ives takes a whirlwind tour of the end of the 19th Century in his scope quoting Beethoven and Wagner and the sonata can sound like almost anything at different points from Messiaen to ragtime and everything in between. Arciuli took a very direct and visceral approach to the piece giving some fleet and knuckle-busting attacks on the first and second movement. He could make the most of more reflective moments as well, but this was a performance focused on the nitty-gritty of holding together a sometimes large and unwieldy flurry of music into a cohesive, moving whole. His virtuosity was impressive throughout.

What preceded this was a concise summary of some of the music world spinning out form Ives' work. First on the program was James Tenney’s Essay which directly references the written essays Ives wrote to accompany the original publication of the “Concord” sonata. Tenney takes off from Ives by borrowing and then rearranging certain notes from the sonata which are then plucked by the player from the inside of the piano in this case. The exploration of the internal, and non-key production of sound continued with Raven Chacon’s Nichi’Shada’ji Nalaghali. Cahcon is interested in exploring the sounds of the piano in nature or the sound the piano makes in and of itself without actually being played. An electric amplifier is connected inside the closed piano as keys are silently depressed while Arciuli alters the tones and distortions coming from the amplifier. It was a jarring change from much of the other pieces of the program suggesting a very different way to think about music as a passive phenomenon of nature than one actively produced by a musician.

The other Native American composer on the program (the first being Chacon), Barbara Croall, followed with two movements from a new work in progress Gichi-Gamiing. Like Chacon, Croall is interested in the relationship between music and the natural world and these two movements, which were receiving their world premiere in this performance, take inspiration from Lake Superior. The impressionistic work is built on themes from tribal sources, but also invokes the land it comes from. It neatly paralleled the third “Alcotts” movement of Ives’ “Concord” sonata. The first half of the evening closed with Frederic Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues which is a tricky and skewed version of familiar American blues riffs on the piano with a touch of discordant and virtuosic flair thrown in for good measure. Rzewski incorporation of popular music themes also harkens to Ives' use of similar material in the "Concord" sonata as well as his demands on the virtuosity of the player. Arciuli kept up the energy and made incredibly difficult passages come off with ease. It was a memorable evening for those in attendance and a reminder about the richness of a uniquely American musical heritage, even if it did come by way of Italy.

Labels: REDCAT 10/11

Ari Fliakos in The Wooster Group's Vieux Carré Photo: The Wooster Group

The Wooster Group returned to Los Angeles this week at the REDCAT performance space downtown as part of their ongoing multi-year residency there. After a number of successful performances under their belt at REDCAT already, Elizabeth LeCompte and her troupe of players presented a U.S Premiere of their most recent production, an adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Vieux Carré. The Wooster Group has a special way with most materials whether their lineage is great or common. They are expert at making big points by fusing or juxtaposing texts from both categories in the same space at the same time like 2008’s performances of Cavalli’s La Didone. And much about the look of the group’s take on Vieux Carré is certainly familiar from its stripped down staging atop and beside two large rolling platforms to the use of multiple video screens and a variety of visual and audio collage techniques. In fact this may be the piece’s largest weakness in that even by Wooster Group standards, Vieux Carré looks overly familiar and downright conventional.

Ari Fliakos and Kate Valk in The Wooster Group's Vieux Carré Photo: Nancy Campbell/The Wooster Group

The story is one that took a long time for Williams to tell. Vieux Carré is one of the playwright’s “memory plays.” It follows a loosely autobiographical story of a young writer’s artistic and homosexual awakening during his youthful days living in a decrepit Depression-era New Orleans boarding house filled with a cast of eccentric characters who by turns are alternately both predatory and supportive. The writer, played by Ari Fliakos, is not unlike Williams' other autobiographical young writer, Tom Wingfield, in The Glass Menagerie, looking for himself in the most desperate of circumstances. But while Williams only hints at Tom’s sexuality in that play, Vieux Carré pulls no punches with an explicit narrative where the unnamed writer finds himself in any number of sexual interactions with the other men who drift through his world including Nightingale, his TB-infected next door neighbor. The frankness of the depiction of sexuality here may be even more surprising considering that while Vieux Carré received its unsuccessful New York premiere in 1977, Williams had worked on it as early as 1939 with the final product never seeing the light of day until the world had substantially changed around it.

LeCompte and her troupe deal with the sexual content of the play directly with Ari Fliakos and Scott Shepherd, who plays both Nightingale and the beautiful, threatening, sexually ambiguous Tye McCool. The two men spend most of the first hour on stage in little more than jockstraps, Shepherd’s characters walking about with a large dido protruding from the few remaining elements of their costumes. It is a funny gesture that simultaneously clarifies the homosexual desire that permeates every moment of the show and mocks the melodramatic way in which Williams sometimes handles the subject. Some of the sexual fantasies of the writer that are only alluded to in the script, are acted out in much greater detail on the many video screens where live video feeds are altered and processed in such a way as to replicate pornography in a video collage of different video channels. Above the action on the disheveled prop-strewn stage two smaller monitors appeared to be playing excerpts from the early cinematic oeuvre of Joe Dallesandro. The material is delivered in the troupe's preferred arch style with a variety of sound effects added to the amplified voices.

But while the show looks great, and the performances of the three principal players Fliakos, Shepherd, and Kate Valk are remarkable in the multiple roles they all handle, I felt like something was missing. When you get write down to it, The Wooster Group's Vieux Carré is pretty much the play Williams wrote, nothing more, nothing less. And that leaves the production vulnerable to some of the script's excesses including a second hour that drags and a feeling that you've seen this before. It was almost as if there was a missing layer—another text or different perspective—that should have been intruding on the proceedings but strangely wasn't. Certainly, the use of video and sound processing helped heighten the sense of dislocation in a play that may exist only in the memory of its characters. But Vieux Carré for all of its strengths seems like only half a concept. It's is undoubtedly from the minds of The Wooster Group, but I would argue its not among their best work either. The show runs through December 12 at the REDCAT.

Labels: LA Theater Reviews, REDCAT 10/11

Paul McCarthy's "Santa Claus" as seen in Wunderbaum's Looking for Paul

Just when I thought 2010 would end without me seeing a naked man in a pirate mask have the pickle he’s penetrating himself with bitten in two by another actor covered in ketchup and hay, I am reminded of life's little surprises. For a show about the politics of public art and social conflict that starts out with a statue of a gnome holding a butt plug, I guess the former scenario seems like a natural place to go. The most audacious occasion of the year in theater may well be a performance entitled Looking for Paul presented by the Dutch theater collective called Wunderbaum who are completing a three-week residency in Los Angeles with these performances at REDCAT downtown. The troop is known for challenging works that don’t shy away form confrontation or politics and often arise from a chaotic collective process. They've been here before in 2006 with a decidedly tamer show called Lost Chord Radio about the American West. This weekend's performance is quite a step up from that on just about every level.

Looking for Paul starts innocently enough with a woman who looks very much like Wunderbaum troop member Maartje Remmers but whom the audience is told is actually an everyday Dutch bookstore and cat owner, Inez van Dam. Ms. van Dam has a bone to pick with legendary Los Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy. During a rather tongue in cheek slide show presentation on her beloved hometown of Rotterdam, Ms. van Dam eventually arrives at the source of her conflict and purported desire for revenge: a 20 foot bronze sculpture by McCarthy purchased with public monies by the city and placed directly outside her home and business. The catch is that McCarthy’s creation, entitled “Santa Claus” features a whimsical gnome holding a bell in one hand, and a giant butt plug in the other. It’s hard to miss and Inez van Dam tells us that this avant-garde artwork by a highly regarded international artist is pretty much a constant buzz kill. In the story that follows, Ms. van Dam befriends the members of Wunderbaum and is then brought to Los Angeles with them as part of a three week residency, paid for in part by public funding here in L.A., where she and the troupe have decided to forgo the performance originally planned for their REDCAT appearance, Venlo in favor of a new work, Looking for Paul in which issues about public art, funding, social justice, celebrity, and the world of international art are all taken on simultaneously.

As is probably apparent by now, Looking for Paul thrives on blurring the line between the nugget of truth and a huge amount of arch put-on to flesh out their tale. It's a play about the creation of the play itself. The four actors in Wunderbaum plus local actor/activist John Malpede whom they recruit for the project on their arrival, proceed to read a script we are told is culled from e-mails sent to one another over this three week period describing the development of Looking for Paul. This extended dialog, delivered by the five performers seated in lawn chairs at the foot of the stage, is often riotously funny in its broad swipes at just about everyone including McCarthy, the art world, Los Angeles politicians, the culture of celebrity, and Lady Gaga. The troupe describes its research process by which they interview several Los Angeles theater players to learn more about arts funding in the U.S. and to obtain material for the show itself. This self-referential comedy escalates as Inez aligns with the actors for a commando PR “revenge” campaign against McCarthy while wildly struggling for something, anything to do for their upcoming performance at REDCAT. Arguments ensue, dreams of Hollywood stardom rise and fade, the politics of art are debated, and delicious food is consumed all over town.

In the end, the troupe agrees to reenact a purported performance from one of McCarthy’s own recent video works as the conclusion of Looking for Paul. The five actors reappear in trademark McCarthy masks for a version of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with all of the scatological, consumerist critique associated with McCarthy’s video work. Chocolate, ketchup and (what I assume is fake) feces are smeared everywhere and over everyone as mostly naked actors copulate with haystacks and each other screaming out for "room service" with just a little bit of Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” thrown in for good measure. And this is where we came in. It’s simultaneously homage and parody and one that both upends and recapitulates the very debate over public funding of potentially offensive art laid out at the start of the piece. The piece undeniably looks and smells like McCarthy's work, but it is simultaneously peppered with references to the L.A. story just spun out before the audience. And just as an added layer of irony for the evening, Mr. McCarthy was in attendance at REDCAT on Thursday when I saw the show. What he made of all this, I don't know since he himself is a character in the L.A. narrative part of the evening as member's of Wunderbaum actually contact and meet the artist as part of their preparations.

Wunderbum’s Looking for Paul is a meta-theatrical experience that revels in its ambiguity and gleefully blurs the line between the real and theatrical artifice. It raises intelligent questions in an unexpected way and wisely never takes itself too seriously. But it is undoubtedly a serious performance and for anyone with an interest in contemporary art it should be required viewing. There are two more chances to see Looking for Paul: Friday, November 19, and Saturday, November 20.

Labels: REDCAT 10/11

From Ralph Lemon's How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? at REDCAT Photo: Ralph Lemon

Los Angeles is extremely lucky to have the work of artist Ralph Lemon in performance at REDCAT this week. His latest piece, How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?, opened with the first of four performances on Wednesday at the black box theater downtown. It is fresh, exciting, and perhaps one of the best dance pieces seen in L.A. this year. Of course, to call How Can You Stay a dance work woefully misses the point. Lemon has always worked in a wide variety of forms, both performance based and otherwise, and while his six member dance troupe does occupy the largest part of this evening there is a lot more going on.

In fact there are almost too many things going on to wrap your head around. Lemon and his troupe, Cross Performance, are addressing themes of personal loss, death, and the limits of art in expressing these things. In fact Lemon, who appears in the first and last segments of the show, makes no secret of the specifics of how he personally fits into this conversation. Two central figures in Lemon’s life, his partner Asako Takami and collaborator/subject/muse Walter Carter, both died in the interim between his last major work, 2004’s Come Home Charley Patton, and the debut of How Can You Stay this year. Lemon details some of the personal and artistic details of this period in live commentary to the film “Sunshine Room” that represents the first part of How Can You Stay. In addition to these personal recollections, Lemon also discusses elements of Charley Patton and how the new work developed from it. “Sunshine Room” also includes footage of Walter Carter, a former Mississippi sharecropper born in 1908, and his wife Edna who are enlisted to re-enact scenes from Tarkovsky’s 1972 science fiction film Solaris, another seminal work about death and what follows it for the living.

If you’re getting the impression this is heady stuff, you’re right. But it’s provoking, challenging, and suggests far more questions than it answers. As "Sunshine Room" ends, the dancers appear live on stage and delve into a somewhat formless flailing that has the appearance of an improvisation. This uncoordinated lunging picks up where Charley Patton left off with Lemon and his troupe looking for a new language of movement. It would be fair to argue they may have achieved one. The choreography feels exciting and unpredictable. Lemon describes the movement at one point as intending to mimic ecstasy, and he has a point. It can be physically exhausting to watch, but the energy is unique. At one point a dancer wails into a piece of clothing held to his mouth. Later, another stands on stage alone and wails with body-wrenching sobs, her back to the audience until she reaches for a tambourine which goes unplayed. In the conclusion to How Can You Stay, video projections of Lemon in a hare costume (another of the work’s central motifs) intermingles with the white ghostly images of animals until they all disappear only to be replaced by Lemon in the flesh. He and a female dancer enact a series of slow, more methodical stances until he lies on the floor. The final spoken words of the evening include Lemon proposing answers to the very questions he has spent the prior 90-minutes asking – Yes, Yes, Whoa, and Yes. In the face of the endlessly unbelievable arrival of death, there is little else but to go on living, Lemon seems to suggest. How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? is complex and fascinating to watch mostly because it so artfully poses the questions that often serve as their own answers. I highly recommend it, and runs through Sunday the 14th.

Labels: REDCAT 10/11

After an inspiring and provocative opening performance at REDCAT from Sardono Dance Theater last weekend, downtown’s home for experimental performance and film was right back at it this weekend with another fascinating show. This time the black box theater hosted the Radosław Rychcik/Stefan Zermomski Theater ensemble from Poland and their bracing production of In the Solitude of Cotton Fields. The original French play by Bernard-Marie Koltès was written in 1985 and like much of the author’s work, is still largely unknown to most American audiences, although many of his play’s have been produced in Europe under big-name directors like Patrice Chéreau and Peter Stein. Koltès’ plays focus on loneliness and power relations owing much to artists like Genet and Artaud. His texts are often lyrical and are less concerned with a naturalistic narrative than a sense of relationships between characters and what they represent. In the Solitude of Cotton Fields consists of two characters, a "dealer" and a "client", who engage in a negotiation over a proposed transaction. However, who is proposing what to fulfill which desire is not entirely clear, allowing for a variety of interpretations.

The Stefan Zeromski Theater production directed by Radosław Rychcik takes a Polish translation of the text with two men: the dealer as a hustler and the buyer as a john. Gamesmanship and struggle as a metaphor for male homosexual desire is rather a worn trope, but given Koltès’ view of himself as an outsider as a gay man and his overall debt to Genet, it seems fair in this context. We’ve seen a lot of this on local stages lately including a thematically very similar The Twentieth-Century Way by Tom Jacobson that premiered at Boston Court Theater in Pasadena prior to a much noted run at the New York Fringe Festival. But director Rychcik takes Cotton Fields one step further by setting the entire play in the context of deconstructed rock show. The two performers Wojciech Niemczyk and Tomasz Nosinski appear side-by-side in black suits with white shirts and skinny black ties. A black curtain parts at the opening to reveal each man in his own spotlight behind a microphone dancing to the rhythmic live electronic/punk performance of the Polish collective, Natural Born Chillers. Dialog is delivered, and sometimes screamed into the microphones without ever being sung. The whole performance turns the latent homosexual desire ever-present in rock performance on its head by placing it front and center and directly implicating the audience in that none of the characters’ dialog is ever addressed to anyone else than the audience.

It was a loud show, complete with earplugs distributed at the door, and the amount of movement and physical dancing called for made the show much more than a straight play. In the end, although it’s never clear who is zooming who, the “client” completely strips long enough to gain the first and only gesture of connection from the “dealer”. And while the ending is more ambiguous, the whole thing is sealed with a kiss. In the Solitude of Cotton Fields is one interesting and attractive show. We’re lucky to have it here during its string of U.S performances from the Radosław Rychcik/Stefan Zermomski Theater. And with the ever-dwindling number of venues for this kind of material in L.A., it would be sad to miss it. There are performances at REDCAT through Sunday night the 26th.

Labels: REDCAT 10/11

I Ketut Rina, Sardono W. Kusumo and Bambang “Besur” Suryono Photo: Steven Gunther/REDACAT 2010

Thursday was the opening night of the Fall season for REDCAT, Cal Arts' black box theater in the basement of Walt Disney Concert Hall. Of course, REDCAT, as Executive Director Mark Murphy reminded the crowd at the evening’s reception, is a multi-disciplinary space with a theater used for both performance and film as well as a gallery space for visual art. Thursday included the opening of Not Only Time: Zhang Peili and Zhu Jia the newest exhibit in the gallery, and as if to highlight the interdisciplinary approach of the theater, the Sardono Dance Theater presented a world premiere dance work, Rain Coloring Forest in collaboration with lighting designer Jennifer Tipton, composer David Rosenboom ,and video artist Maureen Selwood. The dance troupe's leader, 65 year old Sardono W. Kusumo, is a dancer, painter, actor, and all around artist who works primarily out of Indonesia but who has made regular appearances all over the globe. And much like its creator, Rain Coloring Forest is much more than a dance piece. The work is structured around several giant canvases, some as tall as 30 feet, painted by Sardono in the tradition of Tibetan "Tanka" works and hung from a metal frame. The “trees” are raised from the floor at the opening of the work and dominate the stage throughout. Of course like a real forest, they rarely look the same from minute-to-minute thanks to the work of Jennifer Tipton, whose lighting design work is all over L.A. stages this month. These giant scroll paintings transform from a frightening nighttime forest to a friendly woodland glade almost imperceptibly.

But the collision between artistic media doesn’t stop there. While there is certainly movement from Sardono and two other male dancers during Rain Coloring Forest, a lot of it involves interacting with other painted canvases which the dancers drape or enfold themselves in at times. Furthermore, in the final sequences of the work, Sardono creates yet another painting on a canvas stretched across a slanted panel of the floor. He rapidly throws paint across the slanted canvas which is then raised as the paint runs down, gravity blurring the image as he and the other dancers, who are now masked as if Adam and Eve, watch in amazement.

This is certainly somewhat unusual fare and to be honest I couldn't tell you about the meaning of it all. Sardono has an interest in a variety of political and environmental issues, and Rain Coloring Forest appears to reflect on humanity’s relationship to nature. Dancers appear from the forest of paintings wrapped in canvases or huge costumes of shredded material as if to resemble wild creatures of the forest. Other canvases snake along the sides of walls to take over the stage. The movements are rarely conventionally graceful and are often accompanied by deep throat based vocalizations. Sardono himself appears atop the blank canvas he will later paint as a dishevled and uncoordinated creature, regarding his limbs, hands and feet as if they were new to him. Slowly he learns to walk upright and welcomes the forest around him. He then litters the stage with mounds of shredded material paving the way for the entrance of the masked Adam and Eve. In addition to this activity, a near-psychedelic soundtrack of sampled groans and wails is recorded and played again and again with the assistance of David Rosenboom. I was rather taken with Rain Coloring Forest both in spite and because of its unfamiliarity. It may have been many things besides dance, but it was always thoughtful.

P.S. : I want to give a special shout out the the overweight Eric Bogosian look-alike two rows in front of me. Nothing says boorish like justifying your incessant talking during the performance by noting that you were bored and attend "lots" of dance events. Charmed, I'm sure.

Labels: REDCAT 10/11