Performing Arts

The following review is courtesy of Gulgun Kayim, Co-Artistic Director of Skewed Visions:

I chose to see Kommer because, as a practitioner, I'm always curious to see how other artists use media in their work. I am particularly interested in how they manage to negotiate the difficult territory of manipulating two, very different, mediums -film and theatre- into a unified work. Personally, I have found it very difficult to present filmed images in conjunction with live performance for the simple fact that the larger, two- dimensional image always manages to overwhelm live performers. I also find that even if the image isn't large, the filmed medium has the power to draw the audience's focus away, distracting from the live action in unintended ways. (There has to be an explanation as to why we find filmed image so mesmerizing, that we will ignore people standing in front of us, maybe it engages a different part of the brain?). Consequently I have restricted myself to using film as background, image embellishment, as detail, or as part of the larger, performed stage picture. The fact that the Kassys bill their work as 50% theatre and 50% film was very intriguing to me. So I proceeded to the performance with high hopes that Kommer would succeed where I had failed, or at least show me some interesting ways to create a single work utilizing these two mediums. I am sorry to report that last night’s performance was Kommer was a let down.

Kommer is an observation of human inadequacies. Kommer (translated, means 'grief') is based on the premise that contemporary life has stripped society of the ritual systems that support us in times of stress. When faced with pain in the form of grief or suffering, we see the inherent flaws around us in our insecurities, embarrassment and awkwardness -not knowing what to say, how to behave or how to contextualize our relationships and ourselves. Translated onto the stage we see the meaninglessness of muttered platitudes and clichés behind stock phrases. The first part of the Kommer, performed live by six actors, portrayed a group of people responding to the unexpected news of the death of a loved one. The responses of the group ranged from absurd and meaningless to funny and playful. Their movement vocabulary composed of gestures and ticks merged subtle, poetic understated poses and movement with playful contortions and violent outbursts. I found the overall subtle humor in the work interesting, it drove the action forward, and in turns masked, then overwhelmed the 'grief' behind the work providing a contrast which offset brief flashes of violence with awkward silences.

The filmed part of the work I found less successful. Midway through the performance a large screen descended from the Walker grid to reveal the same six actors on a filmed stage. At this point, the live performers exited leaving their filmed counterparts to bow to the audience's applause. The camera then followed the performers as they retreated back stage and into their supposed 'real lives' which we discover to be filled with other kinds, or varieties of 'grief'. One character looses himself in lonely contemplation in his little cramped apartment, another desperately seeks company, only to end the night getting drunk and his bag snatched, one is suicidal and vomits with despair, another exorcizes her rage in an airline bathroom, and another binges on junk food. Their private lives as revealed through film were mini soap operas in contrast to the subtle observations displayed on stage. As a result, the filmed events seemed forced and predictable flattening the poignancy of the preceding live performances.

In retrospect, Kommer felt flat and forced as a whole because the two mediums used to make it -film and live performance- were executed utilizing two entirely different approaches. The performed awkwardness of the live action succeeded because of the company’s attention to detail. They were subtly abstract and surreal building in tempo from quiet to loud, small to big, reasonable to ridiculous. The filmed images, in contrast, covered a lot of ground, the makers expecting the audience to fill in the details of who, why, what, where. In an effort to document and present the breadth and 'reality' of the lives lived off stage the Kassys missed the depth and detail that made the stage action so engaging and moving.

The following review is courtesy of Nor Hall, Minneapolis-based psychotherapist and writer for non-text based theater:

It was a pretty seamless experience going from dinner at 20.21 to the performance, seeing the stage (where there appeared to be a cocktail party going on) to watching the film, and out again to the Walker parking lot and on to the road. I looked in the mirror at the intersection of Hennepin and Groveland and saw Sally in the car behind me–not seeing me– and it felt exactly as if we were still part of the performance. I thought: Oh dear God, please don't get into an accident.

I think that means that Kommer ("grief") worked. Their amplified awkwardness at a pseudo cocktail party wake in the beginning was charming and funny and so familiar that we all (at least everyone in my section of McGuire theater) seemed roped in to the clichés with great sympathy and hilarity. Whatever can you say when some beloved person dies? I remember finding a cache of letters in my mother's files– letters written to the family when her mother had died. One letter struck me as perfect. That person knew exactly what to say. I meant to copy it down and didn't and still think about it every time someone dies and I feel the ridiculous inadequacy of condolences. I thought of it again tonight listening to the resigned speeches: '"Life goes on" "How are you feeling" "Would you like to get some fresh air" while the six actor/persons absent-mindedly dig in the dirt of hip high planters and tear apart the dying foliage. It made me think of the ancient spring propitiation ceremony of the Gardens of Adonis –especially as the long blonde Ton dug into the peat with his phallic stick– where small potted gardens were tossed into the river to come up somewhere downstream dead or alive. They– all six actors– were tossed out onto such a stream of life especially after the first half (staged) performance when they went "backstage" on film–( a screen descended majestically– deus ex etc.–right in the middle of the set) and we saw them get into the gear of their nightly personas. Most of them came up dead. Ton, for example, back in his barren student's room adorned with a vase of dead roses, sitting on his single bed and opening a drawer full of disgusting snack foods that he ate with a compulsive lack of pleasure. (The same guy with the stick. His last scene was a sort of whipped cream climax with a can that was grossly funny and very sad.)

The choreography got my attention. In the first scene when the people start to fall away one by one from their own attempts to be 'normal', they decompose gesturally and proceed to meld slowly into the far back black wall with one hand raised. Sort of an hieratic gesture– but of helplessness. Then they go off stage right and stand quietly with heads bowed. I'm not sure I caught all of them in the act but it seemed ritualistic– almost as if they could be lighting candles. There were no candles. There was bread and water (and the dead plants) and plastic chairs and a boom box blaring Oh Danny Boy. ( The music was over the top sentimental, ironic and evocative: John Lennon singing Imagine All the People in the middle and then Let the Sunshine In at the end. No one could agree on what they wanted to hear.) Kassys adopted their piece beautifully to the new stage– using exit doors and back hallways to great effect, splicing their moves to the film.

A word about "technical difficulties." It's gotten hard, post-Daylight (Sarah Michelson), to know whether technical difficulties are part of the act. My seat mates and I were divided on this one. Was it real when the staff announced technical difficulties at the beginning of the film section– or was it an intentional glitch that set the audience into "search" mode along with the equipment? When an entire audience asks that question aloud directors need take note because the element of surprise is certainly gone. (It probably was not intentional.)

Roger, my immediate seat mate, commented appreciatively that "it was so Dutch" which I've been thinking about. It's the kind of comment we would elaborate with each other but not in public because it's potentially 'incorrect.' But the quirky, dry humor and the reserve and the height and the bicycles are all there… Also one night about twenty years ago we were north of Amsterdam wandering around in a small town and walked into a gathering in a theater for someone named Eric who was turning 40. He was the director and had transformed the theater into a party space which we didn't know. We sat on the risers with a lot of dressed up people and discovered we were part of a party going on right now. I liked the inclusiveness of that night/this night's event. It induces a kind of meta-awareness: making you aware of yourself as another one of All the Lonely People, yet grateful for the fact that you're not alone.

The following review is courtesy of Peter Rachleff, Professor of History at Macalester College in St. Paul:

Kommer poses two major questions: what is reality? what is grief? I think it is most interesting to consider these as two axes, and then to explore what happens at their intersection. Since the “reality” issue is posed by the piece’s form and the “grief” issue is posed by its content, exploring the intersection of these axes is a way to explore the relationships between the piece’s form and its content and, then, a way to ask whether the relationship between form and content reveals anything profound, interesting, or challenging itself.
The “reality” question seems inescapable and intentional. The first half of the piece is performed on stage by live “actors.” But the “characters” have little if any particular character, little if any particular history, and tend to follow each other’s movements and gestures. Moreover, the “characters” bear the names of the actual “actors.” It seems impossible to watch this and not wonder: are these actors performing roles and adhering to a script, or are these “real” people sharing/creating an experience of grief at the passing of a common friend?
In part two’s film, we see/hear the characters/actors/real people comment on what they have done this evening as a “performance,” there is mention of an audience, etc., so we then know that what we had witnessed in part one was a performance. But, then, in part two’s film, when we see the actors/real people in their “behind the scenes” lives, we cannot help but wonder, is this another performance or is this reality? Their own program notes suggest that in part two “the audience observes the actors in their individual ‘private’ lives,” but the form of the piece made me, at least, skeptical about this. Maybe the actor (Esther) who “played” the grieving friend in part one is “playing” a flight attendant in part two, or maybe she “really” is a flight attendant (don’t many actors have to have “day jobs” to pay the bills?), or…, or…
So, yes, the form of the piece as a whole is successful at destabilizing our (well, at least my) ability to differentiate between “reality” and “performance.” And it calls our attention to what it is doing while it does it. That all seems smart and potentially worthwhile to me.
Now, let’s turn to the other question, the other axis, grief (which is the title of the piece). In part one, the characters weave a collective experience and performance of grief over the sudden and unexpected loss of a common friend. Their gestures and movements, slow, deliberate, repeated, paint an interesting expression of grief as a mosaic of emotions, even as none of the characters stands out as an individual with particularly well-defined or notable reactions. This is a remarkably collective expression. I do think it works best when it is most physical and least well when it is driven by the dialogue. Given that we know next to nothing about these “characters” and even less about the deceased, it is interesting how part one’s performance tends to elicit a variety of emotions in the audience, from rapt attention to nervous titters to our own fidgeting.
In part two, which is film (although with some brief appearances by flesh and blood performers walking through doors or across the stage), there is no collective interaction at all. Each actor/character/person is depicted individually, on his/her way home, directly or indirectly, and appears quite alone, isolated, even lonely. I found myself responding to the sadness of their situations, even though they were on film rather than personally present in front of me. Were the characters/actors/persons on film “more real” to me than the actors/performers/characters who had been on stage just half an hour before?
These strike me as interesting questions and, in our climate of “reality TV,” “Survivor,” “American Idol,” and the like, and in our celebrity culture in which we act as if we “know” various people whom we see only on the screen, they seem worth asking to me. I suspect I will continue to mull this over as I reflect on Kommer over the next days.
But I also have a nagging feeling of dissatisfaction, of having been “had,” of having been encouraged to think something is substantial (”heavy,” my generation used to say) when it is actually pretty lite. There were a lot of moments, extended moments, in the dialogue in part one on stage and in many of the particular scenes in part two’s film, that seemed to me not to have been carefully thought through and enacted. They seemed designed to elicit laughs, to lighten the atmosphere of the grief-laden themes, or just to serve as filler. In these extended moments I felt unchallenged, off the hook, kind of “in the know” with the writers/actors/characters/persons. This, for me, was a problem. And I felt this problem acutely at the end, when the swelling music of Hair seemed to be directing my emotions, wink, wink, with a heavy dose of irony shared between writers/performers and audience.
This made me wonder how seriously the Kassys group took the very issues they were exploring, how seriously they took themselves, and how seriously they took the miserable state of the world in the year 2006. This is no time to let us, any of us, off the hook. When you have grabbed my imagination, when you might even have me by the throat, don’t let me sigh, laugh, wink and walk away.
Peter Rachleff

With a fine arts degree from Leeds University in England, Jon Langford’s pedigree would seem better fit for painting than punk, but that latter path is the one he took. He was a founder of the Mekons, a band described by Lester Bangs as “the most revolutionary group in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. They are also the finest artists ever to have graced this admittedly somewhat degenerate form with the grace of their aesthetic sensibilities, rarefied as a glimpse through a butterfly’s wing.” With such legendary status, Langford’s next move might have been surprising: he started playing old-time country.

Born in Wales, Langford first started realizing the connection between country and punk when an American told him that what the Mekons played was actually country music–with all it’s drinkin’ and cheatin’. He moved to Chicago in 1991 and later was a founding member of the alt-country band the Waco Brothers and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts. But as the successes of these bands grew so did his fascination with American roots music by Johnny Cash, the Carter family, Bob Wills and others. And he also kept painting, making portraits of these heroes in paint and etched copper plates. He told the Chicago Sun-Times, “The idea to do those tribute paintings of neglected country singers was a direct response to coming to America and finding out that Bob Wills wasn’t a household name like I thought he should be.” But, further, the portrait form came to him while downing a beer at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge in Nashville. Amid framed photos of long-gone musicians he realized, “There was a music industry graveyard up on that wall. Country music had moved on to this shiny white suburban pop and the stuff I liked was pitched. The only place I could find it was on those walls.”

Graveyards–both literal and of the music industry’s dead-end variety–factor heavily in his performance work The Executioner’s Last Songs, which he performs with members of the Mekons and Pere Ubu at the Walker on February 10 and 11. The work combines his visual art with storytelling and music, all to lead an autobiographical traipse through his experiences in the music biz as well as his political thought on the death penalty. Coinciding with the show is a free gallery talk by Langford at the Walker on Februay 9, and an exhibition of paintings at Minneapolis’ Rogue Buddha Gallery, February 8 through March 18. (The gallery has extended its hours February 9 through 11 to accomodate Walker visitors.)

See more of Langford’s paintings here and here.

The following review is courtesy of Lightsey Darst, dance writer/critic:

Everett Dance Theatre: "Home Movies"

What's the use of stories? Everett Dance Theatre's "Home Movies" is full of them; we seem to be fascinated with telling and hearing them, and yet I'm not quite sure why. Perhaps stories remind us that we're all human and all have things in common: as the performers identify their homes projected onto hanging screens, we remember our own. But stories just as often set us apart: Cambodian-American Sokeo Ros's tales of his parents' escape from the Khmer Rouge won't be familiar to most in the audience. Perhaps it's the shape of stories that we like--the set-up, the slow build-up, the payoff--yet some of the stories in "Home Movies" just trail off. Stories take up time, so maybe we enjoy that momentary immersion, or maybe we enjoy that momentary immersion because we know it's going to end soon. Why ever we like them, we tell and listen to stories often, in conversation, print, film, cartoons, and other media.

I'm wondering about stories because "Home Movies" doesn't have much else. Yes, there are some projections on stage, but they only illustrate the stories; there's some dancing, but the dance feels subservient to the story, as if both visual elements were simply presentation aids. Although "Home Movies" is up to date in various ways (the media, the music mix, the onstage mix of bodies and ethnicities, the "anything goes" style of postmodern dance), it's essentially an old-fashioned performance. So, again, why stories? Dance doesn't tell stories on its own, other than very simple ones. Instead, dance, like many other art forms (static visual art, poetry, non-verbal music), presents visions, feelings, atmospheres. Or am I just fooling myself here, and are these all pieces of stories--stories without the context? I switched from writing short stories to poetry because I found myself more interested in the inside of a story--how a person feels when watching snow at a particular point in her life--than the outside. The story remains.

Here's my theory. A story is a scene we look into, a privileged glimpse, a secret; we value the communication, the you-standing-there-talking-to-me. As we look into this scene, though, because it has nothing immediate to do with us, we are able to sympathize, to empathize, and to create a relationship between ourselves and the scene. Perhaps it reminds us of something already in our past (late-teens struggles to define ourselves); perhaps we believe it's in our future (the death of those near to us). Perhaps it's beyond our experience, but we can begin to understand through the story (escaping from the Khmer Rouge or the Nazis). Stories broaden our experience, and by some magic we all become vulnerable before them.

Which is to say that "Home Movies" is a strikingly sincere, heartfelt piece which asks you to remember and consider many critical junctures in life. The performers work their way up from childhood to the present, telling their different stories in roughly chronological order, acting out each other's stories, but without connecting their stories together (even though a brother and sister are on stage together). A series of stories about the deaths of parents are moving, even tear-jerking in an old-fashioned way. This kind of emotion--still and always valid--hasn't made many appearances since the high tide of irony left us all beached.

Oddly, for a show about stories, "Home Movies" is a little shapeless. It feels long. I usually don't like dance which serves something else, but here I enjoyed the mix of dance, movement, and speech. The performers are charismatic and flexible.

I am left with one question which it may not be Everett Dance Theatre's job to answer: what is the difference between lives? If one person escapes from the Khmer Rouge and another's deepest trouble is confusion about what to do with one's life, are these lives equivalent? Can health, freedom, and peace understand disease, oppression, and misery? "We're all human" and "we all want the same things" feel too easy. What is it that we share? What can we make or say (from our place of privilege) that will help anyone not privileged?

The following reveiw is courtesy of Penelope Freeh, choreographer and company member of James Sewell Ballet:

The five performers of Everett Dance Theatre were earnest and sincere in their presentation of Home Movies, a compilation and accumulation of non-linear personal stories accompanied by visual images and dances/gestures around the themes of family and memory. Despite the non-linear nature of the piece, it was very straightforward and even dated in feeling; it was a little odd to see them in the setting of the Walker Out There series, known for it's experimental edge.

Nevertheless the piece managed to disarm the audience. As the title implies, each performer brings with them actual photographs and/or film footage of their lives, their childhoods in particular, which we view on giant screens that scroll up and down as needed. They weave their visual stories with narration and movement, at times to touching effect. The piece opens with a dance sequence, intermingled and effortless in it's ensemble partnering. As their stories unfold, performers group and re-group to serve the story, fading into and out of focus. Transitions were flawless as we were led from film to dance and back.

Sokeo Ros, an endearing performer, offered fine movement juxtaposition as he occasionally broke into breakdance sequences amid the fluidity of much of the other movement. His deadpan style was needed against the sometimes campy and too performative expressions of the others.

There were moments when the piece reminded me of what kids do: put on shows for the grown-ups after dinner. There was a playfulness that was at times cloying but ultimately was effective at representing the themes set forth.

Perhaps the most poetic moment was Aaron Jungels' (co-founder) spliced together film of sequences of foreign films that his film professor father would show his kids. Aaron's comments read like subtitles below the images, like a kid's journal entries: "Bergman was creepy..." To have uttered the words would have ruined the image, it was after all about film.

Every person's story is a foreign film to the rest of us. We do our best to keep up with the subtitles and have occasional moments of overlapping experiences. This piece seemed to ultimately be about getting one's story out there and letting it bump up against and intersect with the others. In the end we are left with our memories. Often tragic moments thankfully turn funny (like peeing in school). Sometimes tragedy remains so and etches itself upon our faces. The final images of the piece, ones we've seen before, remind us that history repeats itself.

Penelope Freeh

The following review is courtesy of Jim Bovino, Director of Flaneur Productions:

In the late capitalist west we have experienced our desires go from unattainable to virtually attainable; we can now look but we still can't touch. The persistent imminence and unlimited availability of consumer items, titillating visual stimulus, and the ubiquitous beats supplied by upscale/populist marketers make us feel like we just might belong after all. It's like walking into a club where everything looks just like its supposed to. No one is depressed, everyone is beautiful, and has limitless credit. Flatter me and I'm yours for the rest of the night. Or at least until the next commercial.

Superamas' Big Episode #2 (Show/Business) starts as any smart ad does: with good-looking people having fun, smiling at you, playing in an air band that, like all good media constructs, makes it seem natural that everything before you is totally artificial. No matter; this is something we've all seen before. It's comfortable. Known. We know just how to act and we're a part of it.

We then proceed to the airport (we are after all going on a trip aren't we?). Airports are perhaps the most mediated and artificial environments on the planet, surrogate Disneylands with real live rides. But there's always something sad and even terrifying in airports. Death always feels nearby. Perhaps they suggest the transience of existence; we are always already on our way out and so, gone. An encounter with a beautiful flight attendant is part of the landscape of desire that calms our fears and chases away the existential dread we feel at such times. She shows us around the skin care counter, helps us cover our blemishes and stave off our wrinkles. She even models underwear for us. Desire virtually fulfilled, reality averted.

But in the hyper-consumer culture we inhabit that's not enough is it? Our desires demand more complete fulfillment, and Superamas isn't the kind of group to disappoint. They have a product to sell and they know just how to do it. The last major scene of the evening has one of them trying to pitch the group itself to a higher-up from Rolls Royce. Masterfully, they choose to stage the scene, in all of its evolutions, with the executive's back to the audience. You see, we are him. He is our flattered, catered-to self. We are the ones being asked to buy in. We are the ones with the power. We are the ones getting the blow job. Until we're not.

What is generally considered reality does intervene when an offstage explosion and the momentary chaos this creates sends a visceral jolt through the audience; but this is only an interruption to the project of providing us with steady and sustained entertainment.

Last November, in a reading promoting his latest book The Conspiracy of Art, philosopher Jean Baudrillard said, "We have no more to do with art as such, as an exceptional form. Now the banal reality has become aestheticized." Superamas does just this. Rather than a blugeoning critique of the mediated consumer reality, they present it, and somehow manage to conjure the thing itself. When you feel the audience start to move to the beat, or surge slightly with the anthem of 4 Non Blondes’ “What's Up?,” it becomes obvious how easy it is to evoke market-conditioned behavior.

The seductively simply scenes they enact are repeated and deconstructed. The actions are meticulously performed lip-synched voice-overs from movies and transcripts. The repetition and recontextualization of the sampled text suggests the interchangeability of celebrity; this interchangeability is provided so you can more easily insert yourself into the scene, the clothes, the lifestyle magazine, the pornographic act. This repetition makes it easier for us to learn the necessary behavior to participate in that culture. A mediated population must learn the script, the words of the song, the attitude of the star, the routine. Mediated repetition helps us learn to repeat what we see.

Superamas manages to present the process by which the media creates us. By the time the show begins to close with feigned love for the audience and assurances of philosophical ambiguity, there is a profound sense of mistrust generated. We don't even know their names. Who are they? What do they really mean? No actual curtain call. Just a false ending and an anxious exchange about the efficacy of their critique. And of course, the credits.

An excerpt from an interview I did recently with spoken word artist/musician Sekou Sundiata for an upcoming feature on art and patriotism appearing in the March issue of Walker (mentioned here):

PS: I interviewed curator Hou Hanru awhile ago, and he told me his favorite “political” artwork was a piece/performance by David Hammons, where the artist was selling snowballs of different sizes for different prices in Brooklyn in the winter. The absurdity of it, Hanru says, says more about race and commodity culture than a thematically overt work might’ve.

SS: I think that's a debatable assumption that comes out of some useless, leftover hierarchical thinking from the 20th century. Overt versus covert, etcetera... is a waste of time unless we are talking about specific works. By the way, I was a part of the founding meeting of the Black Rock Coalition (15-20 years ago). The meeting took place in an art space called Just Above Midtown, founded by Linda Bryant. There was a refrigerator in the place that was connected to the most available electric outlet, which we needed for AC power. So, someone disconnected the refrigerator. We found out later that one of David's famous snowballs was being preserved in the freezer. Talk about time-based Art! It was a brief moment in time when rock n roll was restored to its rebel roots.

Sundiata performs The 51st (dream) state, a work including poems, song cycles, and moving images that “ponders America’s definition of itself in an era of unprecedented global power and asks what it means to be both a citizen and an individual in our complex society,” March 31-April 1

On World AIDS Day, December 1, 2005, I interviewed dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones for an article on art and patriotism I’m writing for the March 2006 issue of Walker, our members’ publication. That night, he was scheduled to perform at a UN commemoration at the Church of St. John the Divine in New York, and he admitted he was “feeling a lot of emotions right now and everything is so urgent and very tender right now in those places where art comes from.” A brief excerpt on his performance planned for that night:

I'll do a work that'll start off telling a story about my mother, when we were migrant workers back when I was a small child. There was a notion that older people had then that, when a mother had a young child and she was traveling with it--we were traveling, caravan-style, from state to state--when they passed over a body of water, you should always call the child's name because its soul would get left on the other side of the water. Well, I remember being three, four, five years old and hearing in the middle of the night, in these crowded cars, some young woman calling her child's name. "Come on, Billy. Come on, Gus, come on." And my mother encouraging them to do so.Now that story, told tonight, about calling the names of those whose souls we want to bring with us, has another kind of resonance. Is it political? Is it poetic? For me, it is all of the above, but ultimately it's about a spiritual struggle.

Jones visits the Walker March 10 to perform Blind Date, a work that’s a bit more politically direct. For more, see my earlier post on Jones’ notion of patriotism and the “toxic certainty” that’s one of the defining characteristics in America today.