September 16, 2007 Archives

I’m tired of sad. The ten years I’ve spent collecting degrees related to the making and study of literature have convinced me that it’s much more difficult to create a beautiful, meaningful, and solid piece of art that celebrates humanity than one that mourns for it.

Kassys looks straight into the face of that mournfulness, both in the form of a grieving group of characters and in acknowledgment of the tragic little human condition. It attempts to reveal the happy absurdities of life, and throughout much of the performance, most of the audience was in stitches. A scene in which six grieving characters absentmindedly revel in and destroy planters full of shriveled plants was deeply memorable, absurd and profound at once. The first half of the performance is a stage play, and then, as that play ends, the actors essentially step off the stage and onto the screen, where they become characters whose post-performance solitude in separate vignettes becomes the focus for the next half. It is an ingenuous mode of enlivening the old play within a play, and the implications of the film as “real” life are thought-provoking (maybe only if you’re a scholarly type). The show, as you watch it, makes you laugh. You are engaged by the absurdity first and foremost.

Yet when I left, I, for one, felt like I do when I leave a Bergman film. What I left the theater with was the deep sadness, the isolation, that lay beneath the humor. Perhaps I have no right to feel peevish that a performance entitled “Sorrow” made me feel sad, but for me the performance lost something in that the humor didn’t stick, in that I was left with that Bergman devastation I know so well.

Of course comparing the performance to Bergman is a compliment as well, and a deserved one. Technically speaking, the performance was brilliant, and the performers knew what Bergman knew about the quiet and the unquiet gesture, about the world in the space that lies between people, and the broad spectrum of the human condition that can be expressed in a perfectly blank face. Yet joy, too, and quiet happiness, have their deep part in the human condition, and its honest expression seems to me to be a struggle that is worth having, and one which lies beneath many of the performances at this year’s T:BA.

Posted by: Taya Noland

Convergences are what make TBA. Perhaps it is just the result of seeing this concentration of stellar avant-garde performances in such a short window of time, but I always have this sense of déjà vécu that unifies the entire week of experiences. The eleven days blend into this sublimely exhausting web of conversations and concepts and visual stimuli that beg to be examined. It could just be that a lack of sleep puts me in the mindset to read too much into the similarities, but I love feeling like I've discovered these hidden intentions behind PICA's festival curation. Quickly thinking back over what I have seen, a handful of such confluences easily come to mind. Going from Sell Out to Disinformation, I looked at Watts' commercial breaks and sponsor acknowledgments a little differently than I otherwise would have. In reading about Eckert's past work, I learned he had helped create a piece based on the lost yachtsman David Crowhurst. Days later, I saw that name appear again in Ryan Wilson Paulsen's installation on exploration and searching. And hearing the mechanical/factory score of Donna Uchizono's State of Heads put me in the right mood to appreciate Amy O'Neal's beat-box narrated dance with Reggie Watts.

But out of all the myriad themes I found running through the performances, there is one that I just keep returning to - the transparency of the stage. It is easy to get lost in the dream-state of the festival, but I feel like this year, the PICA staff selected shows that would never let the audience forget that it is all an illusion. I think back to Kassys or the Nature Theatre, both of which bombarded the viewers with self-referential asides, only to trick the audience into believing the entire charade. From what I have heard of Wampler, she has accomplished much the same thing in her latest work. So with this, I was thrilled to find that Young Jean Lee, a remarkably sharp and hard-to-characterize writer, continued apace with Songs of the Dragon Flying to Heaven.

The piece opens by plunging the audience into unexpected darkness. As your eyes adjust, there are no visuals, only a recording in which you hear Lee and two men making a video. They discuss the action that they are about to film - it seems to involve a slap across Lee's face - debating the intensity with which they should perform the hit. Then you hear it. It makes you cringe, but you haven't seen a thing. The voices dissect it and they try again. The audience flinches just as strongly. The slapping continues, interrupted only occasionally by stage directions to Lee ("Chin up. Debutante."), for an uncomfortably long time. I kept reminding myself that it is a play and that Lee is the one in charge and that I still haven't even seen the violence. For all I knew, they could be mimicking the sound like a foley artist, laughing that the audience imagined each crack as a real slap. But just when I felt assured that this was the joke, the video comes on and Lee stares directly at the audience, tears running down her face, sniffling. She is slapped again and every frame that would have shown the hand is cut out. There are tears and a struggle for composure, the sound of the slap, and then Lee's face rebounding from the impact. Every time that you feel like you've caught on to the gimmick of the performance, Lee changes the rules. She reminds you that this is just a play and then she slips in a question mark. This video sets the tenor for the entire performance.

Featuring a young woman named Korean American who delivers all of her caustic lines with a wide-eyed wonderment, Songs of the Dragon is wildly offensive in the vein of a race-baiting stand-up comic. But Lee is not that facile of a writer to merely write the kind of play you would expect with characters named Koreans 1, 2, and 3. Just like Lee kept restating the terms of her introductory video piece, every line of dialogue is contradicted or revised until you can't keep up with what her intention is. Every laugh comes at a price. From the opening monologue in which Korean American delivers a knowing lampoon of Asian stereotypes to her later interactions with the Koreans, each sequence of jokes ends with a reminder that the audience isn't in on the joke. At first you think the joke is the one-liner. Gradually, you realize that Lee is highlighting your ignorance every time you laugh and that this is the joke. But wait, she reminds you, "You have no idea what the fuck we're up to." Through the whole show, Lee deliberately frustrates understanding by juxtaposing squeaky clean pop songs with sadistic pantomime or by leaving large passages of dialogue in Korean.

To complete this exclusion of the audience, Lee intersperses the action between Korean American and the three Koreans with a straight-faced relationship drama between White Person 1 and White Person 2. They are the stand-ins for the audience and they are every bit removed from the action as you are. While Korean American battles with white culture and her Asian heritage, all that the White People can muster is a shallow and incredibly self-indulgent examination of their sex-life, their appearances, and their roller-ball pens. At most points, they only enter the scene once the Korean characters have left. When their time on stage does overlap, everything is lost in translation - the Koreans sing and dance in their own vernacular, while the White People try to follow along in the spirit of cultural sensitivity, but ignorant of the meaning of what they are doing. They are as lost in this culture as the audience was when waiting in line, surrounded by caricatured "Asian" art, paper lanterns and a stone pathway upon which we hesitantly walked, only after being instructed to do so.

You think you get it, the whole point of the play. The audience reveals their racism by whole-heartedly laughing along with the absurdly bigoted jokes. White Person 1 and White Person 2 are clearly racist because of their self-absorbed obliviousness. Even Korean American is just as racist towards the Koreans as she believes that the audience is towards her. Yet Lee isn't writing a morality play about the universality of bigotry. In the midst of another trivial scene between White Persons 1 and 2, Lee deploys her four Asian women to speak on her behalf. Delivering their lines in unison, Lee directly rips apart everything she has done the entire show and how clever and edgy she believed herself to be. Sounding like a "Pledge of Allegiance to My White Cultural Patrons," the four women explain that Lee is no racial provocateur. Rather, she is just reinforcing stereotypes and mollifying your guilt. And if these last few minutes have been too political, they reassure, Lee will just cut them because your comfort is all that matters. So with that, let's just return to the relationship problems of a white couple, shall we?

Lee wrote a comedy, changed it to an admonishing sermon, rewrote parts to make it a confessional piece, went back to the comedy, deconstructed it down to a political statement, then decided to scrap the whole thing and write a straight romance. Each time you think you've pinned it down and know what you're watching, Lee changes genres. I'm still not sure if I got Lee's joke or if I was just the butt of it.

posted by patrick l.

The following is a near-total summary of Saturday morning’s conversation between John Collins, artistic director for Elevator Repair Service, the theatre company staging Gatz, and Mark Russell, artistic director for this year’s T:BA festival.

Elevator Repair Service began with John Collins and his friend James Hannaham in 1991, when the two were rehashing an old joke after moving to New York City after college. When Collins was nine, he took a career placement test which listed repairing elevators as one of his top job opportunities based on his personality and interests. Their joke was that he would use this name for any theatre company he founded in NYC, and it became the name associated with the group after their first performances.

Influenced by the Wooster Group, the famous experimental theatre company, ERS builds plays from scratch and utilizes multimedia in ensemble pieces. Initially, Collins worked with friends to do little shows, using an aesthetic based on what was at hand: here are the people and material we have in the space we can get. Earlier works were based on research, beginning with dramaturgy and ending in a play. Starting with material in which they were interested, they asked how can it become appealing on stage? Their 1993 piece about Andy Kaufman, “Language Instruction: Love Family vs. Andy Kaufman”, began this way.

Usually it takes the company 18 months to prepare a show, not 8 years, as it did Gatz. They stage performances through the process of creating plays, using them as drafts for further revision based on audience feedback. Otherwise, they can run into the problem of internalizing the show too much and including too many in-jokes that are funny for actors but not audiences, Collins said. ERS is an informal, porous theatre company. Gatz includes about 4-5 people who’ve worked with ERS for over a decade, several people who’ve been in ERS shows before, and some people who are new.

In 1999, ERS began discussing how to stage F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a book Collins never read in high school. We are not playwrights, Collins said, so we did not want to distill dialogue or insert stage directions. They were intrigued by the question, how do you put a novel on stage, the novel as a whole into a theatrical experience? Initially, they were going to say their production was “inspired by” The Great Gatsby, but as they read it over again, they wanted to preserve the novel itself as a form. Collins was taken with the contemporary language, the streamlined, efficient yet poetic writing, and he couldn’t find a single word that felt unnecessary. An editing venture felt like asserting an authority we didn’t have, he said. Besides, the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, is a convenient solution to the problem of how to read the novel. Interested in upsetting expectations of what theatre and adaptation are, they set to work.

Plans to begin production in earnest were soon derailed, however, by the 2000 TV movie version, starring Mira Sorvino. The Fitzgerald estate would not re-license the text for four years. In 2003, ERS began work anew, and began practicing regardless of the estate’s permission. Collins, actor Scott Shepherd (who plays the narrator), and actor James Urbaniak (who is not in the production) began rehearsals in the intern office at the Wooster Group’s theatre. This helped the creators decide to set the play in an office, with a man who begins reading the book, which is about a man overcoming class and re-imagining himself, moving from rural poverty to urban wealth. This mundane, white-collar office is a good background for the novel, Collins said. Other productions, such as the 1974 Robert Redford movie, are all about the glitz and period costumes, which make them less interesting. Once that falls away, you see the core of the novel. Similarly, ERS presents an ambiguous office space so that the novel’s center, a young man running away from his situation in life and reinventing himself, is emphasized.

The play is titled Gatz because that is Jay Gatsby’s real last name: James Gatz. It is, therefore, the core of the character. Also, ERS did not want to call it The Great Gatsby because it is not by Fitzgerald; rather, it is a theatrical production that includes the novel but that is really a work by Elevator Repair Service. It is also partly inspired by their play about Andy Kaufman, who read The Great Gatsby in a smoking jacket with an upper class accent in comedy clubs. Often he would be booed off stage or the club would empty out. Kaufman asked himself, what’s the most ridiculous thing you could do in that setting? ERS wanted to do something similarly crazy but make it work as theatre, to create gratification for audiences.

The Portland run is the 13th venue in which ERS has performed Gatz. [They have not been able to produce it legally in New York, their home city, due to licensing restrictions by the Fitzgerald estate, which hopes a more traditional adaptation, already written and performed elsewhere, will open on Broadway]. They’ve been performing about three shows in a row, but Collins says they could do four [the play lasts 6.5 hours, including two 15 minute breaks, plus a 1.5 hour intermission (enough time for a sit-down dinner)—8 hours total]. It’s hard on Shepherd, who is on stage performing the entire time (while other actors can rest for hours during the production). However, Collins notes that the actors are wired after the show, and that audiences experience time in a new way, having entered the novel’s internal clock.

Unlike “duration theatre,” where viewers are expected to come and go as the play rolls on for many hours (such as in theatre group Forced Entertainment’s productions), ERS wanted a coherent narrative, where the piece works because it is as long as it takes to read the novel. Gatz is not designed to punish audiences, Collins said. Besides, audiences feel a sense of accomplishment when the play concludes. We asked ourselves, Collins said, what’s too long or indulgent when creating this show? By being committed to the novel, ERS could bypass this question and use a different set of tools to keep audiences entertained.

The final chapter of the book, chapter nine, was the most difficult to stage. It’s why it’s a novel, not a play, Collins said. By then, the pace is already established and the audience is there to get the entire novel. Chapter nine is the most beautiful language in the book, he said, so they staged it mostly with one actor facing the audience intimately, no longer reading the book but reciting from memory. [Shepherd has memorized the novel and also knows all of Hamlet by heart. At ERS, they lovingly call him “the freak.”] Shepherd begins like us, reading the book rather dryly, though by the end of the play, the audience is most identified with him. What began as a reading becomes an orchestrated duet between the office world and the world of the novel. The production shows that ERS is aware of the audience and their energy level, and so audiences usually stay until the end.

Currently, ERS is working on staging Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. What’s more audacious after Gatz than doing another novel, Collins asked. A novel guarantees new ideas and a breathtaking scope, although there are already several staging difficulties (such a narrator, Benjy, who never talks) alongside the compelling text. We want to go where it’s most fearful, Collins said, adding that this is what keeps you honest. They already have the rights to the book, and the length will be more traditional; rather than read the whole work, they want to give an impression of the novel through performance. ERS also wants to work on Faulkner because they are intrigued by the challenge of translation, and because many ERS members are Southerners.

Posted by Dusty Hoesly

Prologue
Maybe it's not a good idea to preface this by saying I have been flat on my couch with swollen glands and a sore throat since Tuesday. If you sat next to me last night, please do not be angry. It's just that the Nature Theater of Oklahoma so enchanted me last year that not even the hot knives that fillet my tonsils every time I swallow could keep me away. (Also, the amount of audience coughing I heard during Donna Uchizono and Kassys suggests that T:BA has been attended by a number of worldly viruses as well as people.) (Also, I am beyond the contagion point.)

My point being: No Dice is a do-not-miss event. Even if you don't think you feel totally up for it. Even at four hours long. Even though they kindly let in a few more of us than could actually fit, and some of us sat on the floor in front of the seats, cushioned from the concrete by thick folded PICA hoodies (thanks, Erin.) You should really go. Get there early, because the line is formidable.

Sandwiches
I didn't realize it until they stepped out to introduce the show, but the people making us sandwiches included Pavol Liska (below) and Kelly Copper, the directors.

A sandwich on soft white bread is a perfect theater snack. Delicious and aurally unobtrusive.

DIALOGUE
The Nature Theater of Oklahoma does exactly what you are never supposed to do with dialogue: use it verbatim. As anyone who has ever written journalism, fiction, plays, police reports, et cetera knows, people are barely coherent. We stop, restart, trail off, hesitate, repeat ourselves, ramble, sigh, search for words, use the wrong ones. So the dialogue we are used to seeing performed is super-distilled and crafted (and for that we can be thankful.) But Nature Theater goes the other way--they go for the whole raw material of conversation, and instead of sifting out the nuggets, they take the unwieldy verbatim mass and tease meaning out of every awkward particle of it.

This could be a horrible disaster. It could be the most boring theater you've ever seen in your life. But instead, it's perplexing, and then amusing, and then illuminating. As "dialogue," it's often banal, flecked with wit (just like so many of our conversations.) But the delivery transforms it. The actors sometimes speak with bizarre and obviously fake accents (French, Irish, Jamaican); they use exaggerated facial expressions; they incorporate "found gestures" (many recognizable from last year's Ballet Brut). Anne Gridley in particular, tiny and fishnet-stockinged, with a wild auburn wig, has a way of delivering and then reacting to her own lines as if she can't believe they've just left her mouth, or are in fact at this moment leaving her mouth.

What you come to realize, watching this, is how anxious and afraid humans are, and how this fear constantly guides or dismantles our attempts to communicate.

Words
"What do we require to enjoy ourselves in a social sense?" asks Kristin Worrall--who wears a rumpled Marie Antoinette wig and black Ray-bans, and for whom you could not draw a better face for her silent, lurking organist role--when she finally speaks. "We don't want to just enjoy ourselves alone. We want to enjoy ourselves with other people."

She goes on to say, "One might describe a civilization in"--and then my notes stop because I realize I am getting approached by Anne Gridley for some intense one-on-one audience/actor interaction, but I think the rest was something like in terms of the conversations it has. Or, One might describe a civilization in terms of the quality of its conversations.

And if these conversations among the actors and their families and friends are a barometer of our/their slice of civilization right now, the recurring concerns are food, the peculiarity of work, anxiety about money, and negative desires: desire to not have to think at all, to expend no energy with body or brain, and to not need. But also dinner theater and tubs of Kozy Shack pudding.

ALSO
"People expect to have a story to go with storytelling. And in this day and age, it's up for debate if that's really necessary."

"Having second thoughts about your life's mission?"
"I wish I'd had first thoughts about it."

"There's a lot that can be conveyed in just an uh-huh." (And what follows fantastically deconstructs it.)

MOVES
At a few points in the show, the Nature Theater players burst into dance. It's comic relief, but also necessary--an outburst of nonverbal, purely physical energy. The one wearing the cape and pointy ears who looks like a scared Totoro and never speaks suddenly starts beatboxing into a loop pedal; the bearded Hasidic pirate moves with surprising fluidity that belies his Dickies and torn sneakers; the mustachioed blonde shirtless guy's whole body zigzags in every way and direction. It's suprising, and funny, and so wildly, instantly, effortlessly entertaining, it's no wonder they can pull off such a formidable and strange project as No Dice.

P.S.
I thought the M&M dance was a good idea. I hope they make a lot of money off it.

--Chelsey Johnson

With silky voice and well arranged folk-orchestral back-up Holcombe Waller lulls his audience into the kind of quiet complacency necessary for the absorption of such sweet singing. While his lyrics successfully stir self-reflective images of morning light on lovers’ shoulders, the actual images from his video projections fall short of purpose. They are simply too literal and force an ill-conceived redundancy that almost breaks the spell of his songs.

Equally, it is hard to say whether the set, a dining table, several “Light Moves” moving boxes and a couple of liquor bottles each mouthing a single feather, is under or over-used. To be sure it invites the audience into the artist’s country kitchen. However, as a mover, his single outstretched gesture, atop the table, to a bright light in a song about running into Jesus was quite disappointing after being led to believe (by the TBA catalogue) that, ”Hope Chest is a vocal performance that imagines movement, video, costume and character to be instruments as inextricable from the process of musical arrangement as piano…”

I understand that projects often shift significantly between proposal and production and certainly Waller’s music is well worth hearing so I am not at all complaining about having seen him, but admittedly I wonder at his inclusion in this festival. The only weak aspects of his show were precisely those gestures to performance art that might have made it seem more fitting to the festival program: movement, video, costume and character. While I don't believe artists should only stick to what they’re good at, I would say that Holcombe faces a particular challenge if he wishes to imbue the non-vocal elements of his show with as much heart and honesty as he puts into his singing.

posted by Marty Schnapf

Dressed in red, white, and blue prison stripes, a cowboy hat, and cowboy boots, Larry Krone looked like circus cowboy escapee. And he sang such sweet, heartbreaking ditties, but for the laughs of his stage banter and woefully hyper-depressing lyrics. Krone is the big-eyed puppy in the window, with tattoos.

Breaking out of his prison outfit, Krone changed costume several times, singing in a hand-sewn multihued coat (for a song about a coat of many colors sewn of multiple fabrics due to poverty), a little girl’s dress with blonde wig (for a song about a little girl who just wants to dance with her absent/dead father again), his underwear (“I just feel like dying… I’m gonna have fun tonight even if it kills me”), and finally in a gold suit. Twice ably accompanied by Kenny Mellman on the organ, Krone played ukulele with tenderness and simplicity in front of glittering, colorful mylar streamers in the shape of a heart.

Krone’s folk-country music includes the saddest songs you can imagine (“Don’t stop crying, please don’t get better… Take me back, take me back”), and they are so sweetly affecting that they take you by surprise. I get the feeling that sitting around the campfire with Krone could be the gloomiest camping trip ever, but also an unforgettable one.

Holcome Waller’s “Into the Dark Unknown: The Hope Chest” was a subtle shift from Krone’s melancholy music. Waller’s concert featured the “introspective, depressing songs I specialize in,” as he noted. He referred to his music as “kitchen songs,” due to the kitchen’s centrality for hospitality and family/housemate poignant moments (the people you live with and the people you love, he says). Indeed, the set looked like a kitchen/dining room, with Waller sitting on a kitchen table for much of the performance, and some set pieces or equipment looking like old ice chests. He sat in a white button down shirt and slacks cut off at the knees, showing his bare legs and bare feet, a modern Huck Finn with a guitar instead of a fishing pole.

Waller sings with a soulful, soft, sweet voice, his folky music a catharsis. Accompanied by four musicians playing French horn, cello, viola, keyboard, banjo, and guitar (most notable among them the talented Ben Landsverk), the compositions took on a grander life, a gorgeous, lush vivacity. At times projections displayed videos of actors or Waller himself looking like photographs, or blurred images of leaves swaying in the wind, for example. These ethereal images reflected the delicacy of the music and the performance.

One highlight, and a shift from the tone of the other songs, was a song spoken/sung in French, a little like a lecture with a drumstick as a baton or pointer. English subtitles were projected above images that sometimes coincided with the theme of the song. The energy heightened, and people laughed at the absurdist imagery of the lyrics.

Another highlight, this time softly and carefully sung, featured the last line, “One way or another, we are going to need each other”—a bittersweet refrain for a bittersweet, bravura performance.

Posted by Dusty Hoesly

with Aki Onda, Fuyuki Yamakawa and Pablo de Ocampo.

This noontime chat offered insight into the artistic processes of two experimental practitioners from Japan. Both perform tonight at the works, and after hearing them talk about their work, I eagerly await seeing it in action. The discussion gave both artists a chance to talk about how they made their work and answer questions. Aki Onda spoke of making field recordings - he doesn't seek them out so much as just kind of always has his walkman cassette recorder with him, and records frequently. Fuyuki Yamakawa explained how his performance stems from his body - the various noises and visuals are an emanation from the inside of his body: "I think I am a physical artist" he proclaimed. He picks up his heartbeat with astethoscope and proceeds play it. As his heartbeat changes around, his body becomes his instrument so to speak, and he can control this. Having not seen this or heard it I can only imagine, but I'm not so sure seeing it tonight will exactly complete my understanding, it seems so abstract, and having heard the chat beforehand, my interest is a bit academic at this point.

There was more talk about how the work was made, about the relationship between an image and sound. It was pointed out that the role of everyday life was dominant in both artist's work. ToAki , the field recordings and pictures he uses are all taken from everyday life, they are documents of his everyday life, attached with his memories which are invoked in his performances. Fuyuki is certainly using the fabric of the everyday in his work, a form of documentation as well. Putting the inside of the body on display in a aural manner (he also doesTuvan throat singing in his performances). He said it was difficult to explain what he does, but it should be a pretty big extravaganza.

At any rate, it should be a good close to the festival, performers that are certainly good representations of tba artists as a whole, pushing the boundaries of artistic practice, in a way that's bound to be enjoyable in that tba way. So all should attend!

Posted by: Benjamin Adrian

You may have played with the idea (as in a dream) that the entire world is a production of your imagination. It might seem spooky or lonely or egocentric, but never real. Wampler's piece takes that mental exercise and turns it into an experience. I would be curious to know of the many people who didn't get it, how many remember their dreams or believe that their dreams hold significance beyond the random cleaning of a tired subconscious mind. Wampler’s piece was like walking into David Lynch’s Red Room. On the surface its language seems babbled and insignificant but when reversed a slightly more cipherable world emerges and you are left in suspense- with suspicion of everyone around you.

posted by: Marty Schnapf

Posted by Chloe

Despite everyone's best efforts, the show was canceled about an hour after it was to begin. I wasn't terribly bothered; it got me out of bed and dressed at a respectable hour, I finally saw the inside of Living Room Theaters, I got to chat with friends, and it occurred to me that a Sunday morning cartoon pajama brunch could really catch on in this town. You can learn more about the Xprez and the folks that put it together, here.

The last Claude Wampler run is tonight, and I'm thinking about going for a second time. It's a tricky one not to spoil, so I'll try not to by saying that this was the most personal show I've seen yet. I'm not entirely sure, but of the 8 people I talked to while waiting or seated, I think only two were not involved in the show. I felt at times like I was the only audience member, and that's something that no piece has done for me before. I got kissed on the forehead during last year's Nature Theater piece, but that was the closest I've come to the eerie feeling that I am a part of the show.

Or maybe I am the show. Remember that Jim Carey movie The Truman Show? Where he's the only real person in a world of actors? I couldn't shake that feeling at Claude Wampler's show, and I didn't want to. It's an amazing way to see the world.

I'd been tipped with roughly that much information beforehand, and I think that's all you need to be in the right mindset. For the 15 minutes I waited in line I kept thinking, "has it started yet? Is this person in on it? Has it started now?" Then the same thing for another 15 minutes after the show--"has it ended yet? Is it really over? Are they all still here watching me?" Has it? Is it? Are they?

--Carissa Wodehouse
Blogger, member, enthusiast

I’m a slow reader, so I’m actually surprised that Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz – which everybody knows by now includes a complete reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – is only about 7 hours long, not counting a dinner break. I now wish that ERS would illuminate every great piece of American literature for me.

Yes, I was tired by the end. I can only imagine how tired Scott Shephard (Nick) was, or Ben Williams, who was also onstage almost the entire duration of the show. Unlike Shepard though, Williams had to sit in one spot most of the time (like us), run the excellently designed sound and, I believe, lighting cues, and play a variety of roles one doesn’t recall from the book but contribute enormously to the production’s sense of humor. What’s more, Williams seems to have been assigned the job of carrying characters offstage one by one towards the end of the play. Oh but it didn’t seem laborious at all!

On the contrary, I got the distinct impression that everyone in this production was having the time of their lives – and just living their lives, in a very extraordinary and inspiring way. Setting the action in a Dilbert-esque office was brilliant. Not only did the set contrast the main character’s simple existence with that of Gatsby, but also underlined how drab our own day-to-day lives can be…without art, without Fitzgerald, without ERS, without TBA.

Yeah, I’m already mourning the end of the festival and the return to a far less extraordinary life. But I’m inspired. As several fellow TBA-goers commiserated with me, it’s good to be left wanting more. I couldn’t take any more at 11:10pm last night when Gatz was finished, and I missed Ten Tiny Dances. What did I miss? Tell me what you thought.

My head is still spinning from Gatz. I want to read the book again, but I don’t want to see the movie again. I couldn’t help but have flashes of Robert Redford in the movie we watched in my high school English class. I remembered a quiz question – we were tested on reading the book before we got to see the film, don’t worry. It was “which famous movie actress took her first name from the pages of The Great Gatsby?” Should I tell you? Or should we form a book club of our own? I don’t think even the greatest high school English teacher, the sexiest movie star or the hippest book club could do what ERS has done to shed a brilliant light on an American “classic”.

I will never read a book in the same way again.

Hand2Mouth forever changed the way I hear American music. ERS made me REALLY hear Fitzgerald’s words. And I want more!! I want to listen to more music, read more books, see more art – brings to mind the resolutions the young Gatsby inscribed inside the back cover of his own paperback book.

I will rally today for The Affair at the Jupiter, make my way to Reed College and Corberry Press in the coming days, and keep checking back here to read your thoughts and ideas about time-based art. I’m grateful to PICA for letting us come down easy, so that I don’t have to go cold turkey. But I am a little upset too. If I had just stayed home, I might not have been reminded of how bland life can be without time-based art. Thanks a lot.

Posted by Nancy Elli

T:BA:07 Day Ten – Saturday, 15 September 2007

9:30a Young Jean Lee Workshop, PNCA
12:30p Reading Between the Lines, PNCA
3:00p Gary Wiseman, Rimsky-Korsakoffe House
4:00p Simple Actions, PAM: Whitsell
6:30p Young Jean Lee's Theater Co., PCPA: Winningstad
10:30p Ten Tiny Dances, Wonder

I reached a happy saturation point yesterday. Yes, I was looking forward to Young Jean Lee’s workshop, the “Reading Between the Lines” Noon:30 with Elevator Repair Service’s John Collins, especially Gary Wiseman’s tea party [and I even had red | black | white clothing with me, but I was not sure where/what to do about the bees], and the Simple Actions film at the Portland Art Museum; but I was chatting with a friend about an artistic collaboration, and it just felt more right then running around from venue to venue for a short bit of time. I look forward to reading about the events from other bLoggers and experiencing them in a more limited capacity in PICA’s resource room once Jörg Jakoby is able to wade through the hundreds of hours worth of video and do his magic.

Young Jean Lee’s Theatre piece was excellent, which much like Andrew Dickson, greatly surprised me. I heard great things about the work, but it was going to be theater, which usually has such a hard time of drawing me in. But, Young Jean Lee was able to make it feel personal, even if they way to create something sincere is to present something completely and utterly contrived as Claude Wampler stated the other day at the Noon:30. She just might be right. Young Jean Lee did what Nature Theater of Oklahoma has been trying to do for years, but was never effective with me, Lee’s piece drew me in, it formed a bridge, just like Taylor Mac and Marc Bamuthi Joseph were able to do. Lee spoke about mocking one’s own self to then allow others to feel superior and in such more relaxed and accepting of you, as wrong as this may be, I understand the perspective. It is not so much that she was being critical of her own nationality, but she was showing ‘others’ how very wrong they are if they possess bigotry, preconceived stereotypes, etc. When I was studying in Japan, my Sensei had this amazing way of talking with me about my design work in the context of all that was beautiful and right in the world, which left me with no choice but to become self-critical and apologize for how badly my design process was going, and how I would correct my ways and make stronger artistic works. I feel that Lee did the same thing.

As some further study on the subject, I would recommend taking a seminar with the Untraining folks down in the Bay Area www.untraining.org, or atleast reading this article by Peggy McIntosh entitled “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”.

It was so nice to not have to rush off to another performance.
I was able to just sit about with a friend and talk with them about the show we just saw, and how it related to the litany of other works I and they had experienced in T:BA this year.
We were both quite impressed with the thread that is working it’s way through the festival this year. Mark Russell, and the rest of the PICA staff, did an excellent curatorial job this year! There is a sense of flow and beauty running through like the line that Randee Paufve spoke about with her choreography the other morning, a flow between vignettes that smoothes over junctures, but still allowing each movement to express its full beauty.

Speaking of Randee…
Ten Tiny Dances 14 took over the Wonder Ballroom, and I mean took it over!
The place was PACKED!
Ten Tiny has become a phenomena, and the word is out.
I have to just air a bit of my disgust about Mike Barber’s ego-maniacal choice to have nine pieces that were all about him. I know this is his baby, and I greatly respect the idea that he conceived, but just as some people have commented upon my bLog being wordy masturbation, at least I have the kindness to give people the option of it being in a medium that they can easily click away and not have to read it if they do not want, plus, the underwear… really Mike… have you not heard about Tim Wagner’s Under U4 Men shop on Broadway. Oh, wait I think that I did see those on the rack the other day, but by goodness, I did not purchase them. [Yeah, yeah, irony, schmirony,… I just did not want to have to watch you up there even when you were fully clothed.]

BTW, Cydney Wilkes, I greatly appreciated your comic and gestural work. Do not be offended by my remarks about your collaborator. I was especially touched by the simple piece when you placed the goggles upon your eyes.

There were some really thought provoking pieces, but there was also a lot of blatant self-promotion that was going on. Ten Tiny Dances is now seen as an audition space for potential future T:BA head liners, and a way for current T:BA head-liners to let their hair [or wig] down for a bit and by entertaining. Did I mention that I’m not a big fan of ‘entertaining’? Even Moon Patrol was just entertaining. The Kobe b-boys from Ashes to Ashes would so stomp you’re a$$!

But, I would like to thank Zoe Scofield, Christiana Axelsen, and Kate Monthy for a beautiful piece. The use of lighting that Juniper Shuey conceived for the piece, how it focused in and flowed through the pouring sands of time, how their movement enlivened the little stage, and how the subtle unfurling of one of the dancers as she receded into the crowd provided a path for their future actions. Some people are critical of Zoe, as I was just of Mike, but she has a technical prowess that is worthy of the stage.

Randee Paufve was another dancer whom fully enraptured the stage with beauty, thought and passion. I was not clear about the staccato nature of the piece, as the connective thread she spoke about in her choreography the other day was much more aware in the workshop then what I witnessed in her Ten Tiny piece; but I’ll forgive her that, as her range of movement and expressive narrative was sumptuous, beautiful and engaging.

I have one closing curatorial idea of next year.
The technical crew had to work overtime to make each of the pieces work, with clean-up, installing multiple custom stages [which was just glutinous], etc. Next year, spend the money to have two of three people from Stomp to do tech, and get rid of Mike Barber. Mike, you created something beautiful, now just sit back and enjoy watching your baby grow. It has its own life now, and it is not always about you.

Ten Tiny Dance’s Archive: http://www.tentinydances.org/archive/archive.html

Ciao,
Fredrick H. Zal
Architect | Sculptor | Advocate

Atelier Z
an.architecture and industrial design studio
advocating dialogue in the fine + applied arts
http://www.fhzal.com

Prior ‘Day in the Life’ Posts:
Navigating T:BA;
Day 01 – Opening Night;
Day 02;
Day 03;
Day 04;
Day 05;
Day 06;
Day 07;
Day 09.

Fredrick’s Best to Worst:

BEST:
TEEth
Marc Bamuthi Joseph
Donna Uchizono
Marc Bamuthi Joseph Workshop
Reggie Watts
Randee Paufve Workshop

Excellent:
Taylor Mac
Mirah & Spetratone International
Lifesavas
Regina Silveira

Good:
The Suicide Kings
Zoe Scofield & Juniper Shuey
Ten Tiny Dances
Young Jean Lee’s Theatre Co.
Mammalian Diving Reflex Haircut
Guido va der Werve
Cloud Eye Control / Anna Oxygen
Andrew Dickson
Sara Greenberger Rafferty Workshop
Hip Hop 101 Workshop

OK:
Liz Haley
Rinde Eckert
Donna Uchizono Workshop
Vanden Eynde & Vendendriessche
Portland Cello Project
Holcombe Waller
William Kentridge

Could have missed it and not cried too much:
Awesome
Urban Honking Workshop
Arnold Kemp
Sara Greenberger Rafferty
Kassys
Hand2Mouth Theatre
Fred Frith / Zeena Parkins / Ikue Mori
Cartune Xprez

Really sucked [for me, remember you might think something completely otherwise…]:
Jeffrey Mitchell
Larry Krone
Las Chicas del 3.5 Floppies