performance

Young Jean Lee interviewed by Richard Maxwell

I just love artist interviews. I love being able to see into an artist’s mind.

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Speaking of Videos, On the Boards recently launched a new project called OnTheBoards.tv. It’s a paid content site where you can purchase or rent videos of contemporary performance – theater, dance, performance art, etc. For example you can purchase a right to watch the entierty of Young Jean Lee’s excellent and thought provoking “The Shipment.” (see my review here)

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When I saw this at the MCA chicago this past weekend I was not aware that it is a re-enactment, re-creation, “re-activation” of a piece that was originally performed in 1965. I wish I could have seen the original, in it’s original time more than 40 years ago, as such I am grateful I was able to at least see a re-activated version. That would explain why it felt not entirely current, I felt like there was an element missing, but now I understand that feeling to simply be the result of watching a re-doing, instead of the original doing.

Even so, I thought they did a remarkable job of altering the space with their actions, movement and props. The stage was continually evolving and morphing, we were part of their collective reshaping/constructing, and each scene created a full powerful landscape complete with new inhabitants embodied by the dancers.

I think a classically trained ballet dancer would have a hard time seeing any dance at all, but it was perfect for me, despite the fact that it felt a little like an extended exercise. I think any re-enactment will always feel like that, but I will gladly take that in exchange for a chance to see something resurrected from the past I would otherwise not get to see.

NOTE: you can catch it in new york city, it will be at DTW next week, part of the performa 09 biennial.

Heaven is visually quite stunning. If performance simply existed for the sole purpose to be photographed, or if this happened to be a site-specific installation with a live performance component, where the audience was free to come and go and experience it on their own terms, this might have been perfect.

I was very excited to see the ps122 space transformed into something so white, yet plush, a matressy, doily, embroidred, bandaged, quilted space. From the pillars to the audience seating to the onstage sound equipment everything was transformed to fit into this new environment. As the audience was filling-in, the dancers were already in movement, setting the mood, with their slow deliberate and trance like circling of the space. This movement tableaux was quite arresting with the performers moving in and out of your consciousness.

Morgan Thorson’s pursuit of a “a real-time performance ritual” that moves from the “religious to the theatre world” is commendable. However, I’m not sure it worked. I was intrigued visually, I admired the lighting (and the haze machine) while listening to the sublime trance inducing slowcore of LOW (Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker), but overall the performance was a little too stuck on ritual and I wasn’t able to get much more out of it.

In general I think re-enactments, and experiments in liveness are great, but for many of them, when they start to go into religious, or even simply, spiritual territory, as this show does with a few overtones, as long as they are in a theater, along with us (an audience), all of their attempts at authenticity only serve to highlight the artifice of what they are doing.

At first I was surprised by the very formal and literally very colorful exploration. James Dean? Crisp and minimal. Is this really Miguel? If there was any doubt in the beginning by half-way we are in familiar territory laughing along. A threesome follows, and the biggest 3 person party/rave I have ever seen. Extreme catharsis followed by a return to darkness, restraint, structure and even 3 body doubles.

The whole thing seemed extremely theatrical, what with the scripts, repetition, and performance within a performance. I particularly loved the parts where the movements were meticulously narrated. A glimpse into the dancers/performers brain?

Obviously he is doing something right, tonight it was sold out, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the remaining two nights were also.

how ’bout a video? (scroll to the bottom)

Audience interaction – sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. It is especially hard to pull of, within the context of performance. The lecture/workshop format of this piece broke the ice right away.

I think we knew from the start this was going to be interactive, though the extended waiting for something to happen section in the beginning made for an uncomfortable lack of focus, sitting in the round we had nothing to examine except ourselves. I think more than a few of us were wishing the lights would go down, audience interaction is not usually what you had in mind when you decide to see a performance. This was probably my favorite moment of the whole night.

The rest of the night, my interest came more form the anthropologist in me studying the audience, and trying to figure out what makes Lewis Forever tick, than from any specific art making motives they had. I didn’t feel particularly engaged despite the evening ending with frantic dancing and partaking of “fire water” in an anti-rain dance/ceremony.

[The piece is part of a month long residency at the New Museum, so I'm guessing it evolves over time and repeated viewings yield different experiences.]

A cinematic exercise in distractions from dance? I though the piece was wondrously cinematic. The lighting design and the set and the amazing score came together for something baroque and grand. But I had a hard time focusing on the movement so much of the other stuff was vying for my attention.

Starting with the giant green neon casting a sickly light on everything, and the lattice work both blocking my view and casting strong shadows so much so that I knew very little of what was happening behind there. What about the X of lights and the center piece of the left half of the stage – a pair of squeaky pin wheels endlessly turning with some par cans attached to them, going round and round and round and round. Was there dancing oh yes, but I was admiring the whole and not focusing on the movement in particular.

A horse-head clad dancer appeared and disappeared and sent some laughter through the audience. The lighting kept shifting and the sound kept morphing from lyrical to pure noise even to moments that made the walls shake, a lot of the score created by live musicians within the space.

Eventually Sarah’s trademark make the audience annoyed/uncomfortable lights came on, this time from behind, and a few moments later silence ensued. I could finally focus on the dance. I found Michelson’s movement vocabulary exciting to watch, and was thrilled to be able to finally focus on it so clearly, though the silence and harsh lighting made more than one audience member squirm a little in their seats. Eventually the score and the more normal lighting returned and the cinematic grand qualities took over again.

The piece ended with another element I would call a Michelson trademark, the is this over, or will there be a second act after more than half of the audience manages to leave? Oh, and is that unattended running smart car parked outside part of the piece? no, not this time. I don’t think.

This piece seemed less experimental, more polished, formal and grand. It didn’t feel immediate to me but fully finished and presentational. So much so that I am afraid it might be mistaken by some people as high art pretentiousness instead of the genuine inquiry and experimentation that it is.

Yes Yes yes! Do I even need to say anything? Obviously they must be doing something right, the original run completely sold out and they have now extended it through April 19th.

I have to warn you, Rambo Solo is not for everyone, not the least of which is having to sit on the floor on shaggy carpeting for 90 minutes. There were times when I was spacing out while trying to manage my pain/comfort/leg falling asleep ratio. Also, sometimes I gauge a performance by how many people fall asleep, and I saw a few victims at Nature Theater’s latest creation.

No matter!

On the face of it Rambo Solo sounds awful, a 90 minute monologue? of one guy’s obsession with Rambo? The evening starts out oddly enough, a crowded lobby, an extended tour of the theater’s basement, a profound lack of chairs, deep deep shag carpeting, and a distinct lack of space for a comfortable personal bubble.

Then a guy in an orange shirt starts wandering in and out acting a bit strange. Oh yeah, that’s Zachary Oberzan, shouldn’t he be back stage preparing for his role, instead of asking me if I need anything? I wonder what kind of requests he might indulge.

Is this the performance already? (something Claude Wamper-esque?) Eventually he makes his way to the raised platform in the front and the lights dim. Is this still pre-show chatter or the start of the monologue? It’s all so conversational it’s hard to tell.

Wait a minute, the three videos being projected behind him, all feature Zachary, in the same “costume” and are all synced up to his speech? The video was shot at three distinct points of time in the past (this fact betrayed by the progression of Oberzan’s facial hair in each one). How long ago did they start this project? Hold on! Everything is synced, even down to tiny movements such as scratching his beard or forearm, these actions ordinarily done absentmindedly, now it is clear they are choreographed.

Thus begins the delicate interplay between the live actor and the pre-recorded video. This interplay was fascinating to watch. For one, suddenly this was not entirely a LIVE event. For another, there were many times when I couldn’t even see the actor but I would be watching the video instead.

Most of the time the narration was provided by his live voice but occasionally sound effects from the video would fill in for events happening in the monologue, but it worked both ways. There were times when Zachary was only miming a certain prop live, but the video would show an actual prop, and my mind would almost interchange the two. Further complicating the live/video divide is that in both cases he is re-telling a story, at times referencing the original book, and at times reenacting scenes from the movie (and sometimes going into a intellectual discussion of the differences between those two source materials).

Towards the end he even used some members from the audience (so don’t sit in the front if you don’t want to participate) to mimic some extras he used in the video version of retelling the story. Even when the lights eventually went down, a little bit after an odd disrobing though without nudity incident, team NTOK was still playing with us and our expectations for what a theatrical event entails.

At the end of the night, my mind felt suitably massaged, even if my lower back ached, and I even got a hankering to go and try and find a copy of the original book of Rambo. I kind of want to read it now.

Nature Theater is one of the few groups that really engages me intellectually. They are really good at examining, expanding, experimenting with, and including me in their exploration of performance and LIVE art.

<! — No Comment –>  Maybe later, but for now I’m speechless and not in a good way.  As usual, maybe I just didn’t get it?  I’m not a dancer after all, I don’t even know that much about dance, I come from perfomnace art, but art is art isn’t it? 

Anyway, The New York Times liked it. Maybe you will too? LMK, what you thought.

Maybe it was just where I was sitting, I finally had a clear view of the source video, that is part of every Wooster group show, as it was playing in the tech booth, or maybe it’s just that I’m not a big fan of opera, but I felt extremely detached from this production. It felt like the whole thing was going on autopilot and it made no difference to the people on stage whether there was an audience there or not.

I felt the opera half of the cast connected with the audience slightly more, but they, and the story they were telling were constantly fighting the set, costumes, and the myriad of set gadgetry, which, because of their typical Wooster high tech, really seemed to all support the sci-fi half of the story. Nothing about these elements seemed there to support La Didone, which after all the whole production is named after.

After a while I found myself drawn to following the sci-fi story, which was more immediately accessible to me, it was in English and the set seemed to be made for it, while the opera part of the production was wandering around lost, running on it’s own track in the background, and distracting me (from finding out how the sci-fi story would end!).

Sure the Wooster group took great pains to intertwine the action of 1960’s sci-fi film Terrore nello spazio (Planet of the Vampires) with the baroque 17th-Century opera La Didone. They tried very hard to switch it up, to alternate focus between the two stories, and to intertwine them, and they managed to make something, in true Wooster fashion, very complex.

But, once you figured out the key, once you unpacked it, once you started to see glimpses of how the different elements on stage, including crew and orchestra, worked together, was it still complex or just very complicated?

Usually, the Wooster group formula of taking, two or more, seemingly disparate elements and stirring them together, creates something new. This time, though, I think the ingredients didn’t synergize, nothing happened, and nothing new emerged from this experiment.

Seizure inducing (in a good way). The finale had the best costumes I have ever seen in a live production. Amazing bold video art and creative videography. I would highly recommend it. Although all of the calls for Realness by the ultra hyper techno lusting product placement in hypercolor overdrive characters, made me wish for some more of the realness myself. So much of what we see as the performance is mediated, physically and psychologically by a wall of cameras that the liveness of the whole thing is almost lost.