Indeedy, yep. Good stuff, Maynard. Breathe a sigh of relief and put down the shield.

For a change I’ll keep this brief.

Couple questions raised for me. Draw your own conclusions. (To be handed in at the box office.)

1)  Why World War I? The Great War. The Netherlands were able to remain neutral during this war, which to me raises all sorts of interesting issues about what it took to achieve that, and how that history lives in the present. Any connection to Hotel Modern‘s thinking on this (see Extra Credit below)?

1a)  Was this choice meant to be representative of other, more contemporary, conflicts? Or war in general? Neither of these seem satisfactory to me as motivations for picking this disaster with its deeply  ingrained images. Which itself raises more issues about representation, so I remain curious.

1b) The program says “Just like any other war.” But what is not only more interesting to me, but is more important when representing senseless large-scale global violence, I think, is: what makes this particular? What are the specifics, the differences between this war and others? Or between current ongoing wars and That One a century ago? What made either/any possible? No difference? Many differences? Do these play into the performance at all?

1c) Is it actually possible that this was not meant to call these contemporary massacres to mind? If this is true…wha? And why not? (Return to #1.)

1d) If it it was meant to somehow comment on our current condition, I would respectfully question the realization. A general association with these beautifully realized images is not much of a mental stimulant.

2) Why the text? I read All Quiet On The Western Front when my English teacher picked it out for me in 9th grade. Is this literary experience clouding my reception of all other language related to this war (specifically, this production’s)? If not, why did all the text — including the “authentic letters home written by trench soldiers” — seem so familiar?

2b) Why “authentic”? Does it matter?

2.1) “Staggeringly realistic“? More on this red flag below.

2c) Why no credits for text sources? Do they not matter? If not, why not move toward eliminating the text to begin with? They were the weakest part, and the moments without text were among the strongest. (See aphasia.)

2c.02) Over and over again in the publicity material, there is the overt linking of this work with film — and not puppetry (“live animation film” for example, from the program). I am supposing this privileging of the celluloid over the material object is a conscious and purposeful cue to how to position oneself as an audience member. And is related to the structuring of the images on the screen. It Looked like film. Which raises my suspicions. What end does this production serve? I’ve read my Guy Debord, even if I can’t remember it all.

2d.011) Does the fascinating revelation of the means of production temper this effect? Or does it just provide an escape valve? Or is there a more complicated response? (Discuss.)

2q) I was first charmed, then puzzled, then frustrated with the construction of images on screen. Although I agree with my colleague, Mr Kelley-Pegg, that the combination of illusion and revelation were tangibly fascinating to witness in performance (and which I believe my colleague Ms Kayim may also respect, given her previous post) I have questions about the created images themselves. For the most part they tended to reify those that live in our collective (visual/imaginary/conceptual) understanding of this event. They reinforce what we already think about World War One: the trenches, the mud, the movies, the senseless slaughter, the movies, the loss of the innocence of refinement, and the movies. And the highly cinematic use of the cameras and effects tended to support this image which leads me to think it was somehow intended. Which ensuing aestheticization of the experience seems to be contrary to any critical perspective on this — or any conflict. So: how wrong am I? (Response timed.)

2q.b) The heads in the opening section came, saw, and left. I woulda liked them to come back. A post-image internal moment of positioning the war images with (a semi-Brechtian?) critical distance. Or would it?

2r.314159265) Leaving aside the question of whether this work can be described as “realistic,” what does the desire to describe it as such reveal? Are we so antipathetic to the realm of the imagination? Never mind, don’t answer that. Since the reality of the image is in the mind of the audience, is it “staggeringly” (or “astonishingly,” cf website) because you wouldn’t think you could achieve this result via effect (film, puppetry, theatrical, textual, etc.)? Or is it so to reinforce a sense of accuracy and acceptance that otherwise might be relegated to questioning and critical perspective?

See? Only two questions. Brief.

Extra credit:

Hotel Modern’s website: “Hotel Modern are idealistic in the sense that they believe the watching and experiencing of theatre can encourage reconciliation.” Does this goal of encouraging reconciliation answer all your questions? Do you have any questions?

—

Charles Campbell

Skewed Visions

Mr Smith is unquestionably a highly talented writer/performer. He is one of those who have reached the apex of the form: fluent, deft and clear, with an accomplished and undulating musicality, following a wide-ranging, interpersonal, political, humanistic flow of images and stories. The sound- and imagescapes were works of great intricacy and grace, supportively layered and interwoven into the piece. The opening moment, a “palate-cleanser” in his own words, was easily the most exciting and beautiful section — full of potential and mystery, movement and power, the kind of stuff that lifts your butt off the seat. Then it landed, and the form began to unfold.

O Sole Mio, enough of this well-made play-type stuff! I’d love to complain about how the world will not withstand the onslaught of such perfection, but clearly such perfection is what keeps the world spinning. And the way this world is spinning is not something I’m comfortable with. I am at heart an aging dissident: restless in my Anti-dotage. Is it enough to mention Haiti?

Once again with Project we are in the territory of accepted performance conventions. Where Rimini Protokoll evaporated most attributes of conventional performance into an oddly static long-distance phone conversation, and Radiohole lightly stirred them into a messy satire, Mr Smith and Co. are settled comfortably into a different tradition (whose once unconventional attributes have been embraced as comfortably as Archie Bunker’s chair does his ample rear). This tradition has been firmly linked with both autobiographical exposure and a certain type of political/art activism. It is one of the culturally accepted positions for the Voice of the Outsider.

No matter how well-done and beautiful the performance, no matter how radical its sentiments (and Simon Rodia’s work and life can stand for both of these from a number of perspectives), when it appears behind the beautiful lights and curtains of this Tradition’s podium, the words spoken from this place are drained of blood and left a Fine Evening Out. And this sucks all excitement from the experience. This is doubly unfortunate in the light of the Watts Towers themselves that spoke from a scrap of dirt to a heavy neighborhood near a train track.

Lest you think that I am an irremediably cranky old man who can find no pleasure in his chosen profession, I will briefly say that there is a nameless collection of people who did a show in a cold basement under apparently semi-illicit conditions that I was lucky enough to take in after the Out There SpeakEasy. Because they are young, the gist of The Thing dealt with love and relationships, but the means by which this subject was approached allowed air in. It took place in the stank-and-funk basement(!) — a created environment in which movement, text, sound, bodies and light are given a rough ride and obliterate the proscenium and its minions of doom.

And once that arch was out of the way (and all that goes with it) you could take part in this experience, rather than sit and watch a Fine Evening Out. It was immediate, visceral, suggestive, and clever. Whatever it had to say was placed directly into your body, and revealed the passive artificiality of Dead Performance Conventionality. I was almost knocked to the wall a couple times and handed my half-eaten pancake so that one of them could stand on the table at my elbow. I was told what happened before that, and before that and before that, and that I was going to get a present. It reminded me of a manifesto I wrote back in the day. It was a manifesto. It was a highly engaging, effective piece of work that I hope will continue to shout out the doorway to the rest of the world “I like it rough!”

And I wish I could have seen Crotch, too.

—

Charles Campbell

Skewed Visions

Late to the table, I know, but I’m posting from another state (geographically, sweet ones), so I hope I’ll be cut some slack by the screaming pitchforked hordes clamoring for a complete Skewed rundown on Radiohole‘s latest messtravaganza. (Hordes? Anyone?)

Here’s my thinking, if it qualifies as such:

First, Radiohole is a great name. As I mentioned to a sympathetic ear on the crowded WAC stairway, which – except for no cigarette/beer/piss smell, entirely adequate lighting, and a graceful un-defaced finish – could have been the location for the line to a very hot new club (how young and hip will the audience get? Well, who knows. These days it takes less and less to be younger and hipper than me. In fact, by now I’m so hipless it’s a wonder my legs don’t fall off [pace, Douglas Adams]. And this post will add nothing to my pelvis.)

What?

Uh, as I was saying: as I mentioned at the time (but in language more awkward and trite) to a sympathetic ear, I feel that Skewed Visions maybe could have been drawing a younger and hipper crowd if we had a name that simultaneously referenced science and pop culture with allusions to contemporary vulgarities. But alas, we only get skewed.

As a matter of fact, this sympathetic ear made me feel so good about being there, so happy, that I slinked down the steep stairs to my memorialized seat with an open heart and a slight adrenal buzz. How long has it been since that has happened?

Squished in my seat, I read the program before anything happened. Radiohole has a moon there, on a swiveling arm, hanging over the audience, tilting and bending, showing off its bolted face, complete with shadowed clouds crossing its surface. I watched it do its little moondance, but already the McGuire space had taken over. High technical sophistication is an odd bedfellow for “outre transgressors,” maybe.

Because trash-aesthetic is not allowed in that space — no matter how many comestibles get flung. I’ve seen it before: the McGuire space eats any performance that doesn’t snuggle up to its clean lines. The curtains, the black perforated baroque, the entire 18th century structure is – besides an unusual topography for contemporary performance – a deathtrap for unconventional theatrics. The proscenium is not an object, it is a state of mind.* [Don't be shy, Charles, tell us what you really think…. Okay: the fly space would be a fantastic place for a show, with the audience lying on their backs on the stage looking up.]

Which was the first issue: The MacGyver space eats mess and spits a fine evening out. (1)

I recognized, perhaps strangely, Paradise Lost before I recognized All That Heaven Allows (or, as I think of it, Far From Heaven). And after that it wasn’t long before I recognized the mode we were in. Since I often like to layer and collage quotes in my crap as well, I was ready to jump on board. But to tell you the truth, I splashed into the drink as they pulled away from the dock. I know you’re supposed to be able to surf this stuff and see where it takes you, but my board musta been broken.

Which was the second issue: My problem with shows too language-heavy for me. (2)

If this had indeed been a Dadaist anti-spectacle it may have done better to take to heart the catchphrase of Seattle’s mess-theater Implied Violence “We don’t care to be understood, to understand is to lie.” I don’t know if Implied Violence achieves this not having seen more than a video of their stuff, but if they live up to their own hype they’d be worth a looksee despite some suspect ruminations I’ve read. Because I think I understood this piece. Messy, yes. But pretty straightforward satire, I thought.

If Whatever, Heaven Allows is a part of Radiohole‘s intent to question or disrupt our 21st century Spectacle as suggested in the program notes, I think it failed. Which is fine. (God knows, this kind of failure is one we urgently need to witness more often. After how many multitudes have settled for just rehashing Death of A Salesman or Molière, we are blessed that another lonely voice is attaching theater practices to a reasonable level of thinking about the world.)

But this is the third issue: Not to put too fine a point on it, but nobody wants to be halfway f*cked. That’s just fu*ked over. We ought to have been fuc*ed up. (3)

—

*What’s wrong with a little  proscenium in your mind? If you want to activate, it is an impermeable membrane. If you want to touch, it is a plasticene boundary. If you want to engage, it is a river to cross. It confines the mind and repels the soul. It’s a tool of power and  reassurance to the monied few. It is a means of ordering the visible. Fundamentally, it is a Wall of Death. Check out your Jean-François Lyotard.

1.

Wouldn’t it have been great to see this in a converted garage – a Collapsable Hole? Or better, a recidivist Heathen garage? Or better yet, amid the cigarette/beer/piss, stank and funk of a fading club’s basement storage with low ceilings and sticky floors (with maybe the bass thumps of a One Hit Pop Group filtering through the floor boards from the main room upstairs)?

In other words, there is too much Theater to overcome before the fight with the Spectacle could be enjoined. If you really mean it, take it as far as you can and don’t start out banging your head against the wall. Once more unto the proscenium arch, dear friends, once more! Or close the wall up with our American Beers and jello shots!

[Why Budweiser? Is PBR too hip? All the rednecks I know drink microbrews. But maybe that's just Minnesota.]

See, our old hobby whorse: site-specific is not a kind of theater – it’s not “environmental staging.” It is a way of thinking about the possibilities of art and performance in which space is a material to work with rather than a framework to hide or reveal. And because it must try to destabilize the proscenium, it also necessitates being aware that you are an alien in a hostile environment. We do not Belong. And every move is a fight to the death. Risk it all every time, win over the pit and screw the boxes, take it to the streets.

2.

There’s a fine line between poetry and nonsense. I’d argue that if you’re using language at all, then you’re on the side of the poets. Because aphasia is always a pleasant option – particularly for a world where which label to use – “enhanced interrogation” or “torture” – is a rational topic for public debate. Cripes. Peace is to war as _____ is to ___.

3.

The jello(?) missed Thursday night. By about 6 inches. Fell straight to the floor. So, why did no one pick some up and fling it? At the audience, for preference. It would have Dada-ed us no end. Well, maybe a little anyway.

But I don’t think that was what they were after either. And that, in the end, put the final kibosh on my adrenal rush. The story was clear even if the language was not. The moment when we were told what we weren’t going to see was a nail in my heart. Heartbroke in the lurch, drunk alone in the church. I didn’t want to See a story, but I certainly didn’t want to Hear a story either! Logos! That’s like taking away my box cutter and giving me a thermonuclear device.

Having picked up on the mess early on, I wanted a nasty-ass Guy Debord hazmat. What I got was conventional satire in a semi-conventional outfit.

And frankly, 1950s Americana is already a beaten dead horse as a symbol of bourgeois American/Western myopic self-satisfaction, conformity and hubris. Is there really no way of adapting apparently humanitarian frustration and rage to a contemporary mythos? (Of course there is. I’ve seen other attempts.)

And what happened to Milton?

But it was a funny show, I laughed a lot.

—

Charles Campbell

Skewed Visions

Experiencing Radiohole’s Whatever, Heaven Allows was a riot on the senses. In my opinion the show was a writhing, churning, unholy mess of  words, images, sound, jello, cheap beer, bad singing and bad acting.   This was literally  a sensory stampede whose  actions and images had some lose association with the 1955 Douglas Sirk melodrama All That Heaven Allows. It was also a kitsch, campy critique of 1950′s America and its obsession with conformity.

Now some contemporary critics will argue that Sirk’s movie is itself a subtle critique of American conformity and not an endorsement but an exposure of the conservative cultural values critiqued by Radiohole. So you could view the performance as a totally blatant, clumsy, irreverent, critical deconstruction of a film that critiques American conformity and the show is, itself really a contemporary critique of theatrical conformity or conformity of representation.

Or maybe not, maybe we should just leave well alone and say it’s pointless to go into this discussion. Maybe its just best to follow the advice of Philip Bither the Walker’s Senior Performance Curator who advises audience members in the program to: ‘relax, go with the flow, not try too hard to understand everything [and] look for layers..’

And boy oh boy are there layers in this show!! Lots of ‘em – gooey layers upon layers of stuff, to wade through. Like the Maori welcome dance (who saw that coming?) or the jello dump on Maggie Hoffman and the orbiting baseball-like slide entrances made by Eric Dyer.  Junk literally on stage and in the performance for no real reason other than, I guess, someone in the cast wanted it in the show. So much junk that this show is…is …hard to encompass in any kind of description. In fact trying to articulate or say anything intelligent about the ravings of the Radiohole lunatics is, I think, a futile task. Which brings me to my only point here. That I think the group’s intent is to defy all meaning and choose to assault the audience with their ‘trash aesthetic’ – I’ve also heard their work called ‘punk aesthetic’.

This attitude and this work reminds me of accounts of the performances made by Dada artists such as Tristan Tzara at the celebrated Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in the early 20th century . The over the top use of meaningless, stream-of-consciousness flowery language (so reminiscent of Tzara’s 1921 play, ‘The Gas Heart’),  the scatological sophomoric, humor; the-in-your-face sarcasm, violence and anger…shall I go on? In fact the peeing at the end of WHA?! could, I thought, be a direct reference to Oscar Kokoska’s famous peeing onstage in a Cabaret Voltaire show – which caused a riot. Also the Radiohole rejection of any kind of dramaturgy. The dramatic mayhem and defiant refusal to serve up any kind of dramatic structure that would provide comfort or support for an audience was supported by  Maggie Hoffman proclaiming at one point that Radiohole are determined to resist making any meaning on stage. It all seemed like Dada art to me, with a splash of the contemporary generations’ love of media and gadgets.   That’s my take on the whole sticky mess. Why subject us to this?

The Dada artists were revolting against social and artistic conformity in a world gone mad with the first world war. It was a response to time and place. The turn of the century saw an acceleration of technology along with a lot of death in the Great War, followed by the Spanish flu epidemic. Also, great empires were falling and dissolving: the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian. In fact Russia was embroiled in revolution prior to the WWI carnage.  All in all, it seemed like an appropriate response to social chaos and death on a massive scale. The Dada gesture was to meet chaos with chaos and declare art meaningless.

Are the Radiohole people saying something similar about the times we live in with their work ? Well this is a blog, and its getting late, tell me what you think?

Gulgun Kayim

Skewed Visions

The Radiohole show I saw last night was a royal, sticky mess.  That’s what I loved about it.

Let’s just get this part out of the way.  Radiohole’s Whatever, Heaven Allows uses the 1955 romance film All that Heaven Allows as a loose organizing framework.  The original film was a criticism of 1950′s domestic life trapped inside a melodrama, and it has been the inspiration for a number of other films.   It helps to know the basic plot elements, but since I haven’t seen the film, I’ll just parrot what I read online.  An affluent widow, moving in country club circles, falls in love with her free-spirited gardener.   She is intrigued by his romantic and fun-loving life, but their relationship is looked down upon by her friends and her nearly-grown children.  She must choose between love and convention.

The Radiohole bunch take that original idea and just go haywire with it.   They use an amplified, media-heavy approach with lots of beer and jello shots.  In fact, sit up close and maybe you can snag a beer too, like the fellow I saw in the front row.  It’s clever, funny, endlessly creative and without the self-important attitude that you so often get with this kind of show.

But a show like this can be a bewildering experience.   Afterwards, I sat listening a group of college guys who had no idea what to make of it.  So here’s my take on how to approach this kind of work.   Just roll with it.  Take five minutes and read about the film on Wikipedia, and you’ll be just fine.   Don’t expect to understand plot or feel moved by character.  Instead, just enjoy the chaos.   Here and there the bones of the story will poke through, but that’s only part of the fun.  If you know Jazz, think Charlie Parker.   He would start with a famous melody and just riff on it until the original tune was unrecognizable.   The point is to enjoy the riffing – how far into left field will they go, and then how will they get back?   Look for the formal qualities of the work.  How do they handle timing, pacing, and elements of surprise?   Watch for the way they create patterns and then break them.   See if you can catch how they present the obvious plot points in unexpected ways.

My favorite moments, in no particular order:

• A kissing scene, in which the rules for a proper stage kiss are described as the actors misbehave.
• An in-your-face cocktail party, toe-to-toe with the front row, that leaves everyone wet and filthy.
• The sticky sound of the actors’ boots on drying beer, and the giant squeegee used to wipe it up.
• A old-school sound effects record player on stage, operated by the actors themselves.
• Wrist-mounted wireless remote controls to change the stage environment.
• A wonderfully elegant hand-operated snow maker.

The show is short on things like “meaning” and can seem a bit random, but I found it full of surprises, playful, technically tight and never dull.  See it if there are any tickets left.

Sean Kelley-Pegg

Skewed Visions