TBA: Where There’s Smoke
OK, disclaimer first. I was asked to actually participate in a piece by NYC’s Claude Wampler called PERFORMANCE (career ender). With all of the other things on my plate, though I was excited by the prospect, I had to back out. In hindsight I am glad I did as this was the lowpoint of the whole festival. Though knowing in advance that some folks in the audience were potentially ‘plants’ I was skeptical when not much was happening, I tried to keep my observations about what was going on to the down-low position. Though when the tall guy sitting next to me kept interjecting comments duing the show, and the woman sitting in the wheelchair with glittery makeup started waving her arms a bit earlier in the show than seemed exciting enough to, I knew something seemed un-parallel to the actual goings on. Basically the show is a deconstructed rock-n-roll songbuilding paradigm for spectacle and memory. How a ditty can be learned in one sitting and remain, however irksome, as a lingering set of patterns of rhythm and harmony. Through the use of video “performers” projected on to a set of instruments, and smoke machines (lots of the puffy white stuff), the audience imagines the players. Yes, its billowing smoke filled The Studio at the Gerding Theater as if we were about to witness a rock opera in small quarters. I did very much like the way you could almost see the performers as ghostly on stage with the effects caused by the smoke, it was a bit eeries and intermittent. But what we got was a repetitious sound check that went on about 45 minutes too long, and the piece was only an hour! Of course, as you might expect, the semi-clad performers who were in the video come out and jam live and the locals who were also in the audience pop to the stage to shake-shake-shake their booties. I enjoyed the build-up of going through the side entrance of the theater and into the annals of its basement, though the undulating motif used here was just uninteresting in the long run.
Zoe Scofield and Juniper Shuey’s The Devil You Know Is Better Than The Devil You Don’t was stunning to watch. There were elements of colorful tribalism, mixed with pure movement and superb lighting. The dancers, all female except for a sole male who had a wonderful solo, moved in near perfect unison. Only a single dancer seemed slightly out of tune, but they were about syncopation, and achieved it, beyond the effects of makeup, costume and video which was also used to an ethereal effect. The dancers breathed swirling movement without relying on the same old adages of a lot of modern movement. They didn’t fall to the floor with a thump or crawl like fools. They simply used their bodies to project a flock of similarly directed bodies in space, like birds perhaps. It was wonderful to see their colorful plummage unfurl, gently and to their own drum. The falling materials, like soft snow in the dark became a flickering slow motion that tripped the mind as the dancers moved down stage.
Postscript: Unfortunately I thought the Young Jean Lee performance was at Lincoln Hall at PSU, so when I showed up there and realized it I darted back down to the PCPA’s Winningstad Theater. I got there at 6:39PM, but they had closed the doors for the 6:30PM performance. I asked if I could sneak in or watch it from another remote location and I was shown to the assistant stage manager who gave me a phone number for someone to call to ask if they would let me in and I got a voicemail so I decided it was probably best to let my tail ride between my legs as they were clearly very strict about the admittance to this show. So, instead I got a 6″ tuna on wheat at Subway and typed this.