Reggie Watts
09.9.08 at LeftBank/the Works
2008 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA
Photo by CaroleZoom
All Rights Reserved, PICA
Posted by Dusty Hoesly
Transition is another showcase for Reggie Watts’ talent as a comedian, actor, musician, and collaborator. Combining video, theatre, singing and looping, Watts and his crew remix pop culture mostly for entertainment and especially for laughs. An actor accepts an award, cycling in and out of his Scottish accent. A film recreates an Elizabethan melodrama, with fuzzy filming and close-ups of a swooning “Chatherine.” Watts speaks Shakespearean gibberish in an English accent with the words “An Soliloquy” projected behind him. Watts sings a song using his looping machine, noting he’s “not in the mood for violence but violence is something she’s always wanted.” We laugh at the juxtapositions, the manipulation of the audience, and the fact that we recognize the tropes and are “in” on the joke.
We see a couple walking onstage in front of a projection of a tree-lined sidewalk, the classic girl-has-a-crush-on-her-best-male-friend routine. Some in the audience will recognize the scene from Teen Wolf. Watts references Star Wars dialogue about unacceptable failure, commercials with music and images that have no bearing on the product advertised, the scary “it puts the lotion in the basket” dialogue from The Silence of the Lambs, Rick-rolling, and Kirk Cameron.
These upsets of expectations and send-ups of familiar cultural tropes play better for humor than provocation. We see a woman projected on a screen and talking in front of a white wall, as Watts talks with her about the role of social networking sites, like Facebook, and how they affect our ability to relate to each other. As she talks she finally walks onstage, a film-and-screen apparatus attached to her body, filming her as she talks. The ninja-techie removes the contraption and Watts continues to talk to the large projection screen instead of to her directly on stage. This bit is a satirical commentary on how we are losing our ability to directly communicate with the people who are near us, but it’s also a well-known point and Watts adds little to the dialogue with this scene.
More perceptive is the casual observation on how people in relationships often talk past each other, or have outsized expectations for each other (the woman tells him: “All I want is for you to know instinctively what I need, and it’s not there”). Or the woman who is afraid to swim, thinks there could be someone at the door, and pretends to be in love with people she happens to be walking by. Watts cheers her up by singing to her, only to turn the song into a sexual come-on (“I wanna fuck you just a little bit, not all the way in, not enough to qualify as sex”). Here, compassionate intimacy becomes a violation. People yearn for closeness beyond reason or offer vulgar notions of normalcy. At any rate, it’s hilarious.
Perhaps Watts is commenting on how we are selling ourselves, too attentive to our appearances and our Facebook pages. Perhaps he’s showing us that our self-fashioning reproduces tropes from mass culture. Maybe he’s just having fun, tweaking recognizable scenes to absurd lengths. As funny as they are, these disparate scenes need more to string them together, something beyond the amazing verbal and sonic skills Watts has already shown in his previous work.
Posted by Dusty Hoesly
Thanks for the write-up and your strong observations. Its good to get an outside eye.
I was curious what you think would string these Transition events together, besides the transitions themselves. What did you find yourself needing or wanting?
L,
Rw
Reggie,
Thank you for responding to the post; it’s not always clear who reads the blog and it’s certainly a treat to hear from you. From what I can tell, the transitions in the piece are largely connected to self-representation, how we choose to present ourselves to the world.
From the Scottish-accented speaker early on to the webcam bit (with the girl in the contraption) to you filming yourself towards the end, there is a string about how each of these characters chooses to present themselves in society. Even the playfully racist “ching chong racist song” bit brings up questions about when we think racist jokes are funny and who we tell such jokes to.
We are living in an age where young people especially are increasingly concerned to groom their profiles, online and in person, to share a lot of information with the public (again, selected to deliver a particular image of the individual), and to communicate in new ways (SMS, IM, webcam, texting, Facebook, cell phone, etc.). The pieces mentioned above speak to this cultural shift, this transition. Your use of technology enhances your critique of this phenomenon, the pitfalls and the pleasures. Technology marks so many of our latest transitions, from global to personal.
But how does the heavy metal commercial for Nabisco fit into this? Or the Teen Wolf reenactment? Or the sharp line about racism bringing people together (racism as a statue in a museum)? Should there be a more explicit or pointed connection to the theme in these pieces, if this is an intended theme?
Maybe the point of the performance is to show a state of flux, to highlight the transitions themselves and not the connections (in which case the show becomes a sort of latest hits compilation). But that still begs the question, why these elements and why this arrangement?
Of course, there needn’t be a theme running through Transition. A friend of mine said it’s funny and wonderful as it is. And she’s right.
Still, to find one way of thinking how it might be brought together more, I thought of one of my favorite lines from that night. Around the Devilation bit, someone says, “We just drifted apart, together.” This line symbolizes for me the incisive and funny work to be found throughout Transition. It connects the scene with the theme of transition and of representing ourselves away from each other, more concerned with our own navel-gazing than caring for the very people with whom we live our lives.
What kinds of lines like this are found in the other scenes, the ones that seem inserted perhaps more for comedic effect than thematic coherence? Or that touch upon another theme rather unrelated to whatever the central theme is? Perhaps more lines like this, subtle or explicit connections, could be a string linking together these transitions.
Dusty
I had a different take on the show, that “Transitions” didn’t relate as much to the transitions between material, (as that’s just Reggie’s thing,) but to the transition (or “Devilution”) of human relationships, as all of the sequences showcased characters unable to communicate with each other. My review is here
Abe,
Fair enough. I had read your review beforehand, but I’m still not clear how the heavy metal commercial, the Teen Wolf reenactment, or the racism-as-museum-piece scenes show us “characters unable to communicate with each other,” as you say. I think the main themes are self-representation and ill-communication (newer technologies are facilitating worse communication), but it’s still not clear to me how those showpieces evince either the theme you mention or the ones I mention.
Dusty
I love “Ill Communication,” and I agree that the theme of decomposing communication relates directly to new technology, so we’re on point there. Here’s how I can see those pieces you mentioned relating: I think the Teen Wolf thing fits in because it shows how life imitates (bad) art. I took the racism remark to be some kind of bad-PSA message, that, to be honest, I didn’t try to analyze that much, and I’d have to see again to really think about, and I see the Nabisco Commercial as a hyped up example of corporations using “new media” to target certain groups and failing miserably.
Those, of course, are just defenses. To be honest, I don’t think these were “cornerstone” pieces to drive home the message, I think the other parts that I mention in the review take the bulk of the load for that. I suspect that this piece came together from lots of different pieces, some of them more “on message” than others.
I am reading Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. The first chapter, called “This is Emo,” bares a lot of similarity to points in Transition. For example, Klosterman discusses how people model themselves on media stars and situations: “Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake.” He also shows how When Harry Met Sally provides the cultural archetype for people who are in love with their best friends and believe a non-platonic relationship could work, but in real life people don’t want to have sex with their friends yet do with their enemies: “Because that’s all it ever comes down to in real life, regardless of what happened to Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf.” Like Watts’ Shakespearean riffs or between-scene improvs, Klosterman’s “witty banter and cerebral discourse is always completely contrived.” We are who we see on TV. Perhaps, as I keep reading, more parallels will emerge.