wade in retards

Fall is officially upon us. I need a light jacket or sweatshirt now. And the performance season has commenced. Which means a lot of manic running around for me.

To kick off the fall, I was fortunate enough to see Jeremy Wade's latest -- a group piece (a quintet to be precise) from the Bessie-winning American choreographer based in Berlin: ...and pulled out their hair at Joyce Soho. Apparently this piece was originally slated for PS122 but for unclear reasons made the move to Soho instead.

The first five minutes of the piece absolutely thrilled me.

When we walked in, there was one man standing on the white marleyed, white-walled stage. He was a rather big man, a rugged handsome type, dressed in a white short sleeve button-down shirt and black tie and slacks. He stood at the edge of the marley and surveyed the audience coming in with shifty eyes, twitching shoulders, and insipidly creepy grin. At times convulsing, and other times leering, he was the very image of a barely checked homicidal child molester or a developmentally impaired sexual deviant of some sort. After a while, 4 others entered upstage left, stumbling haltingly. Those were two women (in short black skirts and white blouses) and two men (in white button-down short sleeves, black shorts and suspenders), all, like our first man, somehow not completely in control of their physical and mental faculties. The group altogether seemed to form a school or society of degenerates, indeed, a grotesque portrayal of our own culture.

Throughout the course of the piece, this team of squealing, drooling freaks tumbled, stumbled, clambered, wrestled, fought, fucked, sniffed and embraced each other, at times demonizing, and at others, coddling each other -- as if they were the purest representation of the human id, bursting with uncontrollable desires. At one point, the performers faced the audience in a line and opened up their faces to an extreme. And their faces remained that way for the rest of the performance, suspended in a state of total shock or an unending yawn or expression of utter vapid idiocy, depending on what you wanted to see. After a while I began to see their wide-open saliva-secreting mouths as body parts as intimate as flowering anuses -- in fact the whole performance seemed to be some twisted inversion of the order imposed on us writhing breathing wild humans by the system we call society.

Though unlike much dance I see this work was very dramatic (in terms of describing a sequence of events and interactions amongst people), it somehow lacked a rhythmic drive to pull the audience from one excruciating portrayal of the human condition to the next. Clocking in at just under an hour, it presented a rich if a bit tired (and very very sweaty) view of human nature.