Education and Community Programs

I had the opportunity to sit in on a pre-release screening of Lars von Trier’s latest offering, Manderlay. I was pretty hesitant, actually. If you’ve seen Dogville, you know what I’m talking about. If you’ve seen Dancer in the Dark, you know what I’m talking about. As the crowds filed in for a sold-out show I was chatting with Film/Video staffer, Joe Beres, and I confessed that I accept Lars von Trier as an undeniably great filmmaker, but at the same time I don’t know why I keep lining up for the emotional beatings he dishes out. I can’t seem to help myself.

Manderlay follows the continuing story of Grace (from Dogville), as she comes upon the plantation of Manderlay where slavery continues decades after the Civil War ended. In a move that Grace believes to be generous and humane, she tries to bring democracy to the former slaves. And then things just get stickier from there. I was just thankful that I made it to the end of the film without the sobbing I had succumb to during Dogville. Yeah, it really has its horrific moments.

And what do I walk away from this film with? A European view of American slavery? A feeling of guilt at the way America ‘brings democracy’ to the rest of the world? A new look at the modern incarnations of slavery in the world? Undoubtedly, Manderlay is going to generate a lot of talk and I won’t give away all it’s secrets here. I don’t feel qualified to lead a conversation about the themes in this film, so I think I will instead listen in on what the people are saying.

I got into this piece. Kommer is an inspired portrayal of fragility and grief – it’s funnier that you might expect.

The first component features six actors (Dutch art collective, Kassys) interacting at a wake for a recently deceased friend. The fidgeting, awkward moments, and ridiculous desperation in thinking of something to say or do that will be meaningful was spot on. I felt myself twitching in my seat just watching these people. They gather around a stereo, but every song seems to be vaguely inappropriate for mourning. They mingle, and spout out weird comments. They encourage each other to cry, but only succeed in producing an out-of-place wail. At one point they are all compulsively digging into the planters (full of dead plants) scattered around the stage, trying to clarify their thoughts on their dead compatriot, while literally uprooting these plants.

As the actors move together to the front of the stage at the end of the first part, a large projection screen silently descends and we see a projection of the same actors making the same motions. The live actors exit the stage, and the second component begins: a film that follows the actors to the dressing room and out in their everyday lives.

And their everyday lives are desperately lonely. Oddly, it felt like the people on the screen were more truly alive than the characters I’d been watching on the stage. As if following them out into the ‘real world’ is when I really begin to understand kommer (grief). I was super-curious to know if Esther really does have a day job as a flight attendant, and is Ton really a junk food addict? Why do their ‘private’ lives seem just as ravaged as their characters on the stage?

Altogether a very cool end to the 2006 Out There Series.

I’ve been putting off a review of my night at the Walker to see Everett Dance Theatre’s production of Home Movies as part of Out There 18. I was bored, and the whole thing felt uninspired. I was wondering why it was part of Out There – a series I tend to associate with something more cutting edge. There wasn’t anything new or interesting about the way they dealt with memory and nostaligia. So now I find myself on this blog giving an uninspired review of an uninspired work. Bleh.

It wasn’t terrible, it just wasn’t out there.

I was impressed with art collective Superamas’ presentation of BIG Episode #2 (Show/Business) as part of Out There 18 at the Walker. When I left the show I kept thinking of the phrase Walker Performing Arts curator, Philip Bither, used during the artist discussion: surface glamour.

Superamas, a French-Austrian collective, struck me as pretty shifty – they refuse to reveal their names or claim authorship – and the performance seemed pretty shifty, too. It’s most fundamental components are two skits: two friends and an airline attendant in a beauty products shop, and a Superamas rep trying to pitch the group to a Rolls Royce exec. Each skit, with pre-recorded vocals, is played over for the audience several times, but with each iteration there is a slight change to the narrative, along with added intersplicing of film clips and dialogues. (And a couple dance numbers to WHAM!’s immortal hit, “Wake me up before you go-go.”) These changes are where it starts to get shifty. Each new layer brings a new perception, but now that I think back on it, were they adding layers to the skits or actually removing them to get at some greater truth?

While I thought the work did really well with the surface glamour and these objects of American pop culture that are destined to be devoured by consumers (make-up, cars, etc.), what I thought was even more interesting was the idea of human beings as commodities themselves; something to be consumed. In particular I noticed it with the sole female participant. In the first skit, she offers to model underwear for the two male friends, even soliciting their opinion on what she should wear. (See-through, tight, sexy, and kinky was their reply over and over again.) In the second skit, she appears as a secondary character that catches the eye of the Rolls Royce exec, and in one iteration she seems to be effectively handed over to the exec for an onstage blowjob that will benefit Superamas in some way. That was a pretty freaky component for me – even more so than the 45 seconds of simulated gunfire that bisected the piece (during which I jumped several inches out of my seat).

In a brief artist discussion after the work, Superamas touched on issues of pop culture in Europe and America. One of the collective had a sincere fondness for dropping the f-bomb many, many times during the conversation, much to the chagrin of his fellow performers. Another member was very calm, quiet and reserved until an audience member asked about the sound and visual effects, at which point the guy nearly fell out of his seat in his excitement to talk tech. Geeks are so cute.

Thursday night was a last hurrah of public programs before House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective closes down on January 15. Super-programmer Sarah Peters pulled out all the stops for a night filled to overflowing with modern oracles and cutting-edge divination.

I started with Your Future in Our Hands, a performance installation created by tech artists Piotr Szyhalski and Rich Shelton. (Those names might sound familiar to you if you’ve had a chat with the popular Dolphin Oracle II recently at the Walker.)

So anxious was I to see what 2006 held for me that I was fifth in line – I jumped right in the middle of a crowd of visitors to make sure I was one of the first through! I just totally forgot my manners in the frenzy.

Each querent (a fancy word for someone with a question!) was greeted by our well-dressed hosts and set in front of a camera for a quick digital snapshot. Piotr used software to determine the distance between facial points like the pupils and temples, while Rich took the person aside and measured the length of their arm and examined the shape of their ear. All this measuring added up to indicating the oracle each visitor was destined to meet. The modern oracles included: a priest, a teacher, google.com, a financial advisor, a psychic, and a sex therapist.

Here were my results:

I was sent down the line to Oracle #5: the psychic! I confess, this was precisely the oracle I was hoping for. I sat down with Rose Ann Schwab and her sister, co-owners of Angelic Inspirations International. Rose told me a bit about the work she does as a psychic consultant – to presidents and the FBI, no less! – and then she set to work on two questions I brought to her.

Here is my psychic, Rose (the blond), at work between the sex therapist and the financial advisor. I admit that my first question was answered with a lot of broad generalizations that didn’t really ring true with the touted 95% accuracy rate claimed on Rose’s website. But talking with her, she didn’t sound like someone out to take you for an idiot, so I kept listening. My second question is where I was totally hanging on Rose’s every word, and I was sure that while she was still speaking in broad strokes, there were a couple of statements that were just a little too accurate to be coincidence. I was glowing afterward.

I ran over to a co-worker to tell them about my experience with the second question and they replied:

“You asked about a boy, didn’t you?”

“SO?!?!”

Whatever. I believe.

Part 2 of the evening was a lecture – Divination and Personal Destiny – with Tarot.com founder Paul O’Brien and StarIQ.com master astrologer Rick Levine. These two had a great rapport on stage, and it was a fascinating look at the ancient origins of various divination systems, as well as their modern incarnations online using software and complicated mathematical algorithms. While I do have my own tarot deck and have studied it a bit, I really knew very little about astrology walking into the talk. There was a lot more science to it than I had suspected, especially in the field of quantum physics. Rick pulled a great quote for the topic: “Quantum physics isn’t more complicated than you think. It’s more complicated than you can think.” So true!

I got to tag along for the post-lecture dinner, and it turns out that not only are Rick and Paul very proficient at their chosen divination trades, they are also both very adept at all things techie. With another tech-infatuated guest at the table, I sat back to enjoy my dinner and watch the geek-ese just fly across the table. When they later found out my BA is in computer science, I was briefly sucked into their world. But to be fair there was also a lot of talk about single-malt scotch, and Bali, so the non-geeks could join in.

Out There 18 kicked off at the Walker with Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty, Entertainment by Dan Graham and Tony Oursler Featuring Japanther and the Huber Marionettes. Promoted as a “multimedia puppet-theater rock-opera,” seeing those words all strung together made it irresistable. I had to go. That night also seemed to be the Walker Family presentation, because I saw a number of departments representin’: visual arts, HR, accounting, education, visitor services, building ops, and program services. I was there with my Walker ‘dates,’ Christina A. and Joe K.

I had mixed feelings going in to the performance. On the one hand, I was excited to see the Huber Marionettes (of Being John Malkovich fame) and post-punk duo Japanther, but on the other hand, the narrative is set in the 60’s and seeing the flower power era distilled down to phrases like, “Far out, dude,” and “Whoa…what a trip!” makes me want to grind my teeth.

As it turned out, my teeth-grinding impulse wasn’t too far off the mark. The marionettes were certainly cool, and I loved the miniature sets built for them contrasted against the legs of the puppeteers – giants in this world. But the narrative was spotty – cut up in segments – and spliced with projections on the wall of the puppet theater. There had already been enough drug references to fuel another flower power era altogether, and I was just starting to lose hope of ever getting interested in this piece, when I caught some movement in the darkened box beside the puppet set. I could see the shadowy figures of Japanther moving into place. Then the first frantic poundings came out of Matt Reilly’s drum kit.

One moment I am irritated with the lack of story, the next I am slack-jawed and drooling. Totally captivated by this duo, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to stand up and rock out, or fall to my knees and worship at the altar of Japanther.

I chose to worship. The narrative could barely hold my attention and I lived for the spliced moments of Japanther. I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find distortion that sounds this lovely. Both members used rigged payphone receivers to filter their vocals. The energy contained in that little box was constantly threatening to spill out into the crowd (and I wished that it would!). When it reached the point that containment might break, the floor of the box slid forward toward the crowd. Drummer Matt Reilly had to reconstruct his drum kit after each song – such was the violence in that sterile box.

Less than an hour later, the show is over and I’m heartbroken. No more? The narrative ended with another coup by the youth and a weak declaration to ‘Never trust anyone over 10!’ But then I spot Japanther emerging from behind the stage and my little heart leapt again. Joe K. caught me, starry-eyed in my fangirl moment, with bassist, Ian Vanek:

Overheard as I’m leaving the event: “I want to have the drummer’s baby.”

Amen, sister.