Pages Out of Order

Yoshiko Chuma is a force of nature. If you ever met her, you'd know exactly what I mean. The intensity, velocity and passion with which she communicates is sometimes too much to handle. So I was surprised when, in the cab over to DTW, Yoko told me that her work is consistently finely crafted, deliberate and clean. I'd sat in on one rehearsal for Page Out of Order: M at the Mabou Mines studio maybe a month ago. I was mesmerized by the repeating and intensifying sequence of two men manipulating two tables, throwing them at each other, catching them, sliding over and under them -- interspersed was some text about national/cultural identity. I was excited to see the piece in its entirety, with the huge 8' x 8' cubes I'd heard about, and the video projections. Plus my friend Saori is in the show, and she is just such a phenomenon to watch.

I have to say that... I just didn't get it. I didn't get it. I didn't get it. Maybe it was the frame of mind I was in. But... There were a lot of things going on: two, and at times maybe three (?) projectors showing clips from b/w film (presumably Macedonian films, since the theme was Macedonia, and the piece was built through Yoshiko's experiences traveling and working there); the aforementioned texts about national identity and repetition/overlapping; dancing through, between, under these massive skeletal cubes; swaths of cloth manipulated to become different articles of clothing as well as wrappings for corpses; a live band which included of three amazing Japanese traditional instrumentalists and the kick-ass vocalizations from Sizzle Ohtaka, whose is also a benshi, or narrator for silent films; and Yoshiko performing a solo herself, while being masked and unmasked by screened cubes, projections, her shadow turning and writhing against the muslin.

For all these delicious elements, I could not for the life of me, find a way to piece them together in a way that made any cohesive sense to me. I left feeling as if I had just not studied enough Macedonian history, or Macedonian film history (sorry Kyoko-san) to fully appreciate what was being done here. But hey, let me in for God's sake. I'm not a dummy. Granted I am not a dance fanatic either, and maybe my theater-trained brain is too rigid to appreciate the internal logic of this work -- but if a piece begins with text or language, I do expect there to be a discernable thread, linear or otherwise. I read the reviews about PAGES being a commentary on art and political upheaval etc. but that's too broad, too general for me. (And it's like some kind of RULE now, that performance has to be political in order to be noteworthy at all). That's my main complaint about dance, actually, is that more often than not, there is no journey. For all the movement, the work is a static expression as opposed to something that moves, grows, unfolds and changes... OK come on, fight with me.

Cry for me, Tiger

I didn't know anything about Tears of the Black Tiger (or, Fah Talai Jone) when Irwin bought the ticketsfor the screening at Film Forum. And anyway, no review or preview could have aptly prepared me for this techni-color "pad thai Western." After witnesing all the cheesy cinematic techniques (in the suspension prior to a shoot-out, the gunslinger in the foreground is dollied across, creating the illusion of a pan against a painted sunset; or the hyper-violent shot of a slo-mo bullet shattering the villain's mouthful of teeth before splashing his brains out upon the vivid green grass) executed with such unabashed conviction, I was shocked to later learn that the film had been made in 2001 (not the 60's or 70's?!). I found the film remarkably without camp or irony for a contemporary film... or maybe the irony was so thick I didn't realize I was swimming it in. It did not compare to Sholay, the 4-hour epic grandmother of all Bollywood movies (a former police commissioner whose family is murdered and arms chopped off by a local bandit hires two petty thieves and rollicking buddies to save his town), but still, today I found myself thinking about the sequence in which two cowboy-bandits swear their loyalty to each other by:
a.) pouring some clear liquid presumably alcoholic into two glasses;
b.) slicing their wrists open and pouring their blood into the aforementioned glasses;
c.) chugging the concotion, then twirling around each other in a joyous dance, all in front of a grand statue of a Buddha.
Sabai-dee, dudes.

Catching up on films

I see a lot of movies, and though many are forgettable, there are some I'd like to keep track of. From the recent past (autumn/winter 2006):

The Flower of my Secret (Almodovar)
Very Almodovar... saw this with Kayoko + Ryo the same night as:

Half Nelson
which i thought was excellently acted

other movies I liked in 2006:
Babel, Little Miss Sunshine, Lunacy, The Meaning of Life

wait this is boring to talk about movies everyone's seen and talked about already...

Last night I watched BE WITH ME on dvd. even though Irwin was falling asleep during it after we argued over where the film was taking place for about 30 minutes, I thought it was beautifully shot. All the segments of food preparation were amazing. the lack of speech was great. the storyline of the deaf-blind woman was incredible. I couldn't stand the repetitive and predictable piano score, which, for a film with hardly any dialogue, really stood out, unfortunately. The film often teetered towards the maudlin (assisted by the aformentioned piano), i was about ankle-deep in mush, but that is a completely subjective thing, i think. I enjoyed the pace of the film, and the time and manner in which it unfolded.

Children of Men

Saw this tonight with Irwin. It ain't no Garden of Eden. But it was a kind of re-creation myth for our times. A post-apocalyptic survival movie which portrayed a world that is frighteningly similar to the one we live in now, except the veil has been lifted, and there are no boundaries to the violence, xenophobia, desperation. A world in which ALL FOREIGNERS have become illegal aliens and are routinely capture, imprisoned in refugee camps, tortured and so on. There is a resistance movement that is corrupt or at least divided. And a portrayal of the refugee camp as a miniature/underground city, it fit the description of the prisons in ---- god i can't remember, there was an article i read about a prison in a country in the middle east or south america (???) where it was practically a full-blown city with an economy and ecology of its own... where was it? anyway

The things I liked about it: the brutality and seeming incidental nature of violence and death. A focus on the world, a system, rather than the story of the individual. That the film does follow a journey, but the portion of that journey as presented in the film is incomplete -- that is, the journey has already been in motion and will continue to be in motion before and after the film.

The ending: I could tell there must have been multiple versions of the ending. Part of me wanted to see the ending with no redemption. Just a pan out as Clive Owen is dying in the row boat, and the woman and baby, left alone in the choppy waters disappearing into the fog... I'm sure people would have had a fit if they ended like that.

grade: A-
irwin's grade: 94 (out of 100, which would i guess make it an A)

Happy 2007! Routine Hearing at HERE

As a HERE Artist in Residence, I will present my own play in the Culturemart Festival next week (Jan 12 & 13). I'm also supposed to go see all the other HARPies' shows, which, honestly, I don't see how that is supposed to be feasible, considering everyone is going to be in rehearsals up til the day of their own show.

Anyway I managed to go see David Morris and Juliet Chia's show last night (Jan 2), Routine Hearing. I was not expecting to enjoy this work -- only because I'm not such a fan of audience participation, nor am I a fan of overtly political work, which I had the impression this would be. But I was pleasantly surprised to find myself genuinely engaged and excited by many of the ideas they were exploring. Though I found the program to run rather long, and there were some logistical kinks to the structure, the fundamental ideas about the physiological process of hearing/listening were fascinating. Some things I learned: regardless of whether you are right or left-handed, your right ear (and left brain) are wired to be receptive to language. Due to selective hearing, many times we will pick up on changes in tone/emotion rather than changes in content of text. According to a scientific study that monitored numerous staunch Democrats and Republicans, they found that while the subjects were made to listen to political speeches, the area of their brains used for LOGICAL REASONING was NOT engaged. Extrapolate from that -- the current bifurcation of our political system is resulting in people making decisions on moral grounds instead of thinking things through and digesting new information logically.

So the thing about the performance was that there were no performers -- or rather, the audience members were the performers. We all had to sit on chairs on a grid on stage, and with CD-players in hand, press play when instructed. With 10 different variant CD's, it was unlikely that the person sitting next to you would be listening to the same thing. We were instructed by the woman's voice on the CD to physicalize our listening, in an attempt for us to become more conscious of our own process of listening. Lean forward when drawn in. Lean back with arms folded when disgusted. Cup the right ear and turn to the left when ambivalent. Turn to the right and look behind the chair when distracted. There were three sessions during which I listened to maybe 7 or 8 different audio tracks, ranging from Rush Limbaugh to Francis Fukuyama to Stephen Colbert, a wide spectrum of conservatives, neo-conservatives, and radical left, and all throughout this, we all worked at physicalizing our hearing.

The surprise pay-off at the end, was that we'd been videotaped the whole time, and they replayed our movements in fast motion to classical music (projected onto the floor of the stage), so we could see what kinds of floor patterns, gestures and choreography out listening created. A dance for political hearing.

The CD players limited aggressive movement (maybe podcast next time?), and the whole exercise was rather long. Many audience/participants were either confused, reluctant, or just plain got tired after a while. Nevertheless, this piece (play?) did unearth questions about our process of not only listening but participating in a democracy. It was strange to be the observer and observed all at once, very meta... But in a way that is what participating in democratic society is about, right?