Brecht - Butcher

I've read a lot of Brecht plays and essays about theater, but I haven't seen too many productions -- maybe a couple unremarkable productions of Mother Courage. Seeing Lear DeBessonet/Stillpoint's production of St. Joan of the Stockyards at PS122 opened a window to some of the nuanced ideas in his play: the insidious cycles of supply/demand in commerce in the hands of greed-driven capitalist; how quickly the innocence of an idealist falters in the face of real hunger; the extent to which an institution will go to incorporate and subsume icons of purity to manufacture a narrative that appeals to the masses. But the ideas were presented in this production without much dimension. It is very difficult to isolate what the missing ingredient is in a show, because usually it's not a single identifiable thing.

Debessonet's production featured many many elements of fine artistry. The stage space located the audience in two sections, on opposing sides of the stage-alley, which was bookended by cul-de-sacs of playing area. An intricate and elegant multi-level set design featured a lot of moving industrial parts to indicate factory/butchery, stock market, stockyard, and a clear plastic greenhouse as Mauler's private lair. Gorgeous lighting as well, used to isolate actors on the runway, and also light up the entire room so the audience was forced to watch itself as well as the play. There was live music played by a kind of Christian folk-rock trio. There was dancing. There was stylized acting and innovative staging. There was an enlightening and moving theatrical experience bubbling to the surface.

But somehow all of the energy of the different performance elements, despite their clarity of intention, failed to coalesce and build on each other. And when it comes down to it, what was missing was a very fundamental thing that got mired in style: the heart of the play was not being communicated, leaving all the embellishing layers to ring hollow. The actors were obviously talented, skilled and committed -- excellent at executing vigorous physical sequences and spitting out the text with verve. But they had not digested the play in the deepest part of their gut. I was talking to Banana afterwards (over a bowl of ramen) and we agreed: for that vaudevillian high-octane performance style to work, the actors have to be able to really act, feel and connect with the text first. Then the richness of the layered performance can reveal and illuminate the story successfully. But without that groundwork, you are dressing something that hasn't yet been manifest. This isn't fancy talk here, not some uber-intellectual theory or anything. On a basic level, if you're sitting in a play and cannot absorb the text, barring a language barrier, there is something amiss in the performance. You can have high quality ingredients, but without mixing them thoroughly enough or cooking it properly, you will have a half-baked cake, no matter how much icing you put on it.

I know it seems like all I do is criticize and complain about theater productions, but really, I'm not trying to diss on anyone or anything (except for when things are truly clumsy and irresponsible). But it's no secret that it is really really hard to make a show that is really good, where the text, movement, aesthetics, concept, execution, story and heart are all integrated into a synergistic experience. When that does happen, there is nothing more thrilling.

An Unfulfilling Banquet and a Pregnant Respite

I admit that I was enchanted when I first saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and I also thought Zhang Ziyi was super hot. Now, I feel murderous at the thought of watching another teardrop roll down Zhang's snow-white cheek to a Tan Dun score. The Banquet, which kicked off this year's New York Asian Film Festival (this year taking place at the IFC and Japan Society!!), was an epic Chinese period film gone terribly awry. The plot was loosely based on a permutation of Hamlet: an ousted Prince ( who had spent his years in exile at some performing arts center honing his dance, mask and poetry skillz, as all ousted nobles should!) is called upon to return to his kingdom upon the death of his father-emperor, but in the time it take for him to escape the arrows of his assassins, his former lover/stepmother (the ambition-driven conniving Zhang) has re-married his now-emperor uncle (her brother-in-law) and assumed the throne as Empress once again. Through predictable fluid fight choreography sequences (rife with splattering blood, people running through the air, fabrics swooshing and swooping) saccharine slo-mo close-ups of the emoting actors spouting off histrionic maudlin dialogue, the already limp story is mired in utterly meaningless gorgeousness; by the end, it was difficult to stifle laughter or retain a shred of care for the characters. We would have left if it weren't for the free booze at the post-screening party, for sure... Though I am keeping my hope up for the rest of the festival line-up.

My weekend cinema experiences were somewhat redeemed by Judd Apatow's Knocked Up, which for all its raves in the NYT and TONY, was essentially a sweet but highly unbelievable film about two people who should never have hooked up hooking up, getting pregnant, and then (for unexplained reasons) deciding to keep the baby and simultaneously attempting to develop their romantic relationship. WTF? Despite its implausible premise, the film is endearing and heart-warming without venturing too far into sentimental Hollywood cheeseland. It was a feel-good movie that bridged chick flick and dumb-guy-comedy (of the Will Ferrell variety) with plenty of stoner jokes, and a very realistic shot of a baby coming out of a lady's pochi.

Silents Speak More / Save Me from lolcatz

I've been on a silent movie kick of late with Tmonkey, a welcome relief considering my language skills have been rapidly deteriorating since my introduction to the world of lolcatz, an extremely disturbing phenomenon which need not be expounded upon here... (except I'll just say that it makes me seriously fear for our society, as it sinks further into meaningless, saccharine infantilism)

ANYWAY, it all began when I'd netflixed the French film Irma Vep, starring the gorgeous but surprisingly kind of vacant Maggie Cheung. Tmonkey claimed to have seen the movie before, but he did not seem to remember any of it. Irma Vep is a film about making a film based on another film, taking a rather pragmatic and exasperating look at the process of film-making (with all its idiosyncratic power dynamics, drama and chaos). The moment this film became interesting to me was when they showed clips of the original silent movie that the filmmakers in Irma Vep were attempting to re-create: Louis Feuillade's 1915 silent serial Les Vampires.



This was absolutely fascinating. Through the same highly-stylized acting that I associated with the American silents, but entirely different in aesthetics from Chaplin or Keaton movies, here was an intriguing, dark thriller-mystery: a reporter's dogged pursuit of an enigmatic band of thieves calling themselves the Vampires have been terrorizing Paris. Merciless killings, kidnappings, secret tunnels, underground performances, poison ink pens abound. Totaling 7 hours (I think we're only at hour 2.5) this enthralling film experience proves how great story-telling in the cinema need not depend on text-language.

This sent us off hunting for more from Feuillade, when Tmonkey happened to receive an announcement for an event at the Morgan Library: a screening of the famed 1919 silent German film in five acts Das Kabinett der Doktor Caligari accompanied by live music by Richard Marriott's Club Foot Orchestra.



A psychological thriller about a man who is probing into the truth behind the sudden and violent murder of his friend and rival in love. His pursuits lead him to a madman-psychiatrist who has trained a somnambulist to murder. Through surprising plot revelations and riveting gestural performances, this film toys with the audience perspective/perception of in/sanity; I began to see this film as a sort of progenitor to Jan Svankmajer's truly grotesque psycho-horror live-action Lunacy. I wish Svankmajer would do something with lolcatz to completely pervert and obliterate that inane cute culture. That would be something to see. Oh that just reminded me of this video Banana sent me a while back.



Oh god help me, the lolcatz are taking over my brain! I am in ur Kabinett vomiting Cheezburger!?

Life as a Labyrinth

Basil Twist's latest project, Behind the Lid, reaches in so many directions it's hard to know where to begin. The audience (limited to something like 20 per performance) is gathered into a small, dark holding area at the beginning of the show. Blue lights turn on and then voiceover, layered with live voice. Something about the process of decay as in actuality a process of crystallization, those living things that succumb to the course of time and die, sink to the bottom of the ocean, where they are refined and purified, and brought into high relief, awaiting the moment they will be brought back up to the surface of the water by a pearl diver (the artist), to be examined under the light of day. So begins Basil's journey through history -- a personal history, a history of the world through the last century, a history of the theater, a history of the human imagination -- as reflected by the late Lee Nagrin, director, playwright, singer, choreographer and visual artist who was considered one of the first prominent female artists who worked experimentally to combine mediums in performance.

Co-created by Nagrin and Twist over the last 9 years, the work travels through perspectives, history and space -- literally -- as the audience is first guided through a womb like tunnel by Twist himself (who appears throughout the play as himself!) and a puppet of Nagrin to a stage where we see the holocaust take place; then the audience seating bank glides forward into a new playing area (reminiscent of NTUSA's What's That on my Head?!?) this time, the setting for the Macah Indian Reservation, where Nagrin connects to a greater spirituality of the indigenous people of the Northwest -- then into the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan -- and on and on. Through a variety of inventive ways, the audience is led or is actually physically moved through time and space (at one point to a outdoor stage built around a tree in the East Village courtyard), catching somewhat choppy vignettes and meditations of Nagrin's life, dreams, and treatises on art. We are immersed in her world, through her paintings, through the ubiquitous sound of her voice through recordings, and in the final scene, the image of her face is perfectly projected onto the face of the Nagrin puppet, creating an eerily life-like representation of this woman, sitting amongst the stars in the vast beautiful universe.

Without having much prior knowledge of Nagrin -- essentially only what was in the playbill, which explained that Nagrin herself had passed away only a few days after the show opened -- the ever-surprising and shifting modes of theatrical story-telling and expression were richer than Twist's previous dazzling underwater Symphonie Fantastique, and the content more varied and profound than the ambitious flying monstrosity Red Beads. As an evening of theatrical performance, it was sprawling, inventive, yet somehow detached. Much of the story was told through snips and clips of fragmented text, which created an impression of a scene rather than a chiseled dynamic story. But as a homage to the life of a great artist-pioneer, Behind the Lid resonated beautifully.

Constraints

Last week I went to see Nina Winthrop & Co.'s Constraints I, II & III. I didn't know anything about this company's work, except that I vaguely recall seeing one of their photographs displayed on their website as part of BAM's Next Wave last autumn (and I already told you how that went...). The reason I went was partially work-related; apparently, the choreographer had created the second of her Constraints while in residency at Morishita Studios in Tokyo -- ah, international collaboratioarf, I mean, collaborarf, a-hem, excuse me, collabarf, cough cough, collaboration. Sorry it's just a sensitive subject for me, both the "international" and the "collaboration" part. ANYHOO I went with a bunch of my co-workers.

Let me focus on what I thought were positive things first: The costumes, designed by Naoko Nagata conveyed the idea of constraint -- in I, the American dancers were dressed in jagged remnants of business suit material, anchored to their bodies by straps and belts. In II, the Japanese dancers were in colorful swaths of fabric, which, somewhat kimono-inspired, were tied to their bodies by sashes. In these dances that seemed to be about our tendencies to restrain oneself, the costumes worked towards epitomizing that idea, and very stylishly at that.

OK otherwise there was not much more there for me. I don't want to write about how inconsequential the American dancers were, especially compared to the Japanese performers who at least had stage presence and verve shining through the vapid choreography. There seemed to me that there was no exchange going on between dancer and choreographer -- no deep necessity for II to have been performed by Japanese dancers (if at all). This unfortunate evening was salvaged by (total non sequitur) great xiao long bao at Joe's Shanghai.

Technology Kills Art?

Koosil-ja's latest version of mech[a]OUTPUT sounds great on paper. A multimedia work from the dynamic Korean-Japanese-American choreographer/singer re-de-constructing the classic noh play Dojo-ji from a feminist p.o.v. and live performer-technology interaction with video (a la Wooster Group), live 3-D game space, live music and a swinging digital bell.

Dojoji itself is based on an old Japanese legend in which a love-lorn woman spurned by a monk chases him into a temple where he hides inside a bell, at which point her jealous rage turns her into a gigantic serpent and she coils herself around the bell breathing fire and roasts him alive. Alternate versions have the temple monks' fervent prayers releasing the woman from her earthly attachments and ascending to heaven, or sometimes she is the one who hides herself away from the world in the bell where she transforms into her reptilian-monster self, and ultimately just slithers away into the river. yowzers. The noh play, of course, with a super-refined and rigid performance form passed down through centuries from performer to performer, is a slow, intense display of subtle emotion. As is the "Japanese" aesthetic of wabisabi focus is on restraint, and that which is NOT apparent, as much as it is about what is. To the western layman, noh would probably be intolerable to watch and boring as hell.

With such fecund material and willing and skilled collaborators at hand, it is difficult for me to admit that mech[a]OUTPUT was a exciting as someone's master's thesis. There was no seamless marriage between concept and art -- there was high concept, flapping dryly in the wind, and there was great skill, embodied in Koosil-ja's heartrending voice and fierce physicality. But the two seemed never to meld or complement each other, leaving both heart and brain to drift off. It also didn't help that the transitions were handled with utter clumsiness and artlessness. Perhaps with the aid of an editor or director, these elements could have been shaped into a theatrically satisfying event. But as is, it was output to be forsaken.

Berlin, Berlin

I'm back, I'm back, I'm back from Berlin. A sprawling flat city that somehow reminded me of San Francisco pre-internet days: grimey and laid-back, funky and functional. I did not have much organizational time to plan out my theater-going itinerary, so it was basically pure luck that I found in my Ex-Berliner mag that the latest from Constanza Macras/Dorky Park was playing at The Prater in Prenzlauer Berg. Following a gorgeous Russian meal at Pasternak, I went to stand in line for an available ticket to the sold-out show of I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE PART TWO.


You may or may not recall that Dorky Park was the company that made one of my top 3 show in 2006 so I was excited to see this new one, and compare it to my experience of the other show. And, well I wouldn't say I was disappointed, but I do feel like I have now seen a clear isolation of the creative formula -- and like anything magical, once you see its mechanism clearly, a certain mystique and ineffable wonder wear off. back to the present, which I saw at DTW last year, was an explosive, sweaty, wild, youthful, funny, sexy collage of pop-culture and personal narratives. I'm not the only one presented a similar series of vignettes, at times invoking that same kind of indie-rock energy, but with a smaller cast. And the focus seemed to be on intimacy -- the strange desires and contradictions we experience one-on-one with each other, and as an individual within a group. There were vague references to Twin Peaks, violent dance duets, a massive cream pie fight, and a balls-to-the-wall karaoke singing session, a bizarre and beautiful contortionist Gail Sharrol Skrela pitting will against body performed by the intense Hyoung Min Kim. Unlike back to the present, this piece seemed to lose its steam and arc. back to the present, with all its randomness and schitzophrenic jumping around held together energetically and moved from a fun-kitsch to something more grounded and profound. I'm not spent a lot of time circling in a holding pattern, and by the time the amazing Korean singing burst out, the piece had lost my attention. Partly it could have been that I missed Part One, and also, the theater had become unbearably hot and uncomfortable. It certainly felt like the piece could have used an editor.

The following night I went to see another performance -- I'd come across a flyer for Mustafa-Woyzeck at the Theaterdiscounter. The theater was on the ground floor of this amazing building in Mitte. The show, which was, granted, entirely in German, seemed to be a very superficial deconstructed look at Buchner's incomplete play through the lens of a Turkish-German DJ. Language and jet-lag aside, the music was uninventive, the actors unengaging, and they certainly did not earn the final image in the show: a big pudgy Woyzeck pouring a bucket of blood on himself. Oh that just reminded me of another horrible Woyzeck I saw at St. Ann's Warehouse last year -- Daniel Kramer's London "rock and roll" production was, asides from the stark opening image, a dreadfully predictable and oversimplified plastic version of one of the most influential plays in Western theater.