The Role of Tourist As Seen In a Performance Piece @ PAC/edge

Was this piece billed as a performance lecture? It should have been. I went out of an interest in ideas about tourism and to see the only show that links PAC/edge to the current tourist art thing that is in Chicago right now.

The lecture was given as a partly read (or loosely memorized) dialogue between two performers (Sheelah Murthy and Anuj Vaidya). They engage in a theory heavy presentation, which tracks the evolution (bad word?) of their thoughts to this point. They show PowerPoint documentation of past performance actions and try to engage the audience in a stilted participatory event by handing out envelopes of text for audience member to read aloud on cue.

I admit this barrage of words didn’t connect with me and in response to this assault when I was handed my envelope I applied some Tactics of my own reading a sentence of my own creation than what was before me. Their moment of shock was the first real connection I felt with them.

They did have a rather interesting post-show discussion though and it seems important to their piece. It was revealed that this was originally created as a lecture for a conference (last years PSi in Singapore it sounds like), and I can see how it would go over better there than the situation I experienced.

I can imagine a group of performance studies scholars a bit burnt on a day of regular lectures seeing this slightly more-than-a-lecture-lecture and feel expansion and relief. In the case of this PAC/edge performance I was coming in from the street, have already witnessed several other performances in a variety of modes, and so was more engaged in my body and emotions as well as my mind and so this lecture felt constricting.

The piece also read differently to me than they expected I realized as we talked post show. To me it was more like a classical theater piece of the angst of being trapped in a socially restrictive age. Instead of social confines, you have a elaborate web of language that has to be held up and ends up driving these two up a wall. Their staging even seems parlor like but the parlor is now part study and part media/tech center.

Therefore, the ideas in the piece ended up seeming conflicted. The artists conflate Buddhist, tourist, and a PoMo, culturally constructed argument for identity and then express stilted angst over the resulting position it leaves them. How do they respond to the large powers of the world and find a way to move through an emerging society with a coherent identity. They told us in the discussion that the piece was “about the barrage of language” and their concurrent annoyance and love of the poetry of the words. It seems to me by positioning themselves aesthetically in this very bland, everyday/academic setting, and only presenting a word body to us leaves little room for poetry except in the points where their system collapses. They are confused if they think handing out short script to the audience and prompting them to read empowers the audience to engage a sense of agency in the piece. They are creating a dogma.

I trust they will make more stuff though.

And it was nice in retrospect to see something way more brainy and in a different format at the festival though.

The post-show talk took place in the café area, which is usually dead. It would be great if every show in the fest would move down there for some post-show talk, actually activating the space and creating a more engaged community and more lingering.

Dog, Action Item: DOG does not perform @ PAC/edge

Dog is perhaps my favorite performance project in Chicago right now. They have performed in the PAC/edge Fest for three years now and they are the only group I have seen so far that has seemed to consider their presence in the festival.

This year Dog presents a breezy and amusing video in the place of their normal live ensemble creations. Edited together by one member and structurally tided together with some thoughts about Aristotle, sub-title humor and the lovely ambient music that is becoming a signature for their works, the video presents a series of excuses by each of the members of Dog for their absence in this year’s festival.

It becomes a bit of a behind the scenes event revealing the collection of artists that all seem willing to engage a variety of abstract agendas to sidestep, contain and perhaps accentuate their idiosyncratic quirkiness. This kind of thing seems to be on the mind of this subset in Chicago Performance because 500 Clown (who is connected to Dog in a variety of ways) also chose to turn in a video this year rather than re-perform their fabulous and popular version of Frankenstein yet again.

It seems some of Dog have better excuses than others….

Some have art or career opportunities that are consuming, some have had rather traumatic health issues, some seem to offer hyperactivity, negligence and a self-satisfied sense of oddness.

It is a hoot and perhaps marks the end of Dog or the beginning of a metamorphosis for the group.

Like I wonder if PAC is going to turn off their artist and volunteers with their ticket policies, I wonder if PAC is going to exhaust their core group of performers before the festival gets fully established. I don’t fully understand the relationships with the groups that PAC supports but I get the sense that PAC assumes it will at some point achieve the position in the city where the are in such demand that artists will want to participate in the festival no matter what.

Though aren’t the city’s artists the core audience for the festival in the first place?

There is a special website for this show at www.DogdoesnotPerform.com.

e

Weather Talking "Discarded Landscape" @ PAC/edge

I have a good friend in Weather Talking so I attended opening night and am very supportive of the project. I encourage people to go see the show. Here is a bit of a review...

Last year's commission winner, Brian Torrey Scott, has returned to the PAC/edge festival this year as director of a collaborative theater project called Weather Talking. Brian also returns with several of his regular collaborators with Jeff Harms, Tiffany Liveris and Donovan Shermas as performers, Sam Wagster providing live guitar accompaniment and Nicholas Monsour in a design roll. Of course, it is misleading to box these folks too tightly into roles in this kind of product of collaborative process, but it is one of Brian's obvious knacks that he is able to attract talented people to his projects.

Weather Talking's first work is a piece of Devised Theater that tracks emotional denials of a father, son and daughter who have lost their wife/mother as they make a retreat for the woods.

Brian offers a couple clues early on that help carry the first part of the performance. He indicated in program that the play is in a five-part structure that is located for the most part in a hermitage. He also introduced the play and himself as director to open the show.

Brian's introduction to the play informs us that he will be playing the role of the mother and proceeds to sit in a chair just off stage. Occasionally, he would get up and exert his will on a scene by breaking up a fight or by turning to the audience and reading some section of text. I am sympathetic to this desire to actively direct a piece like this one (especially when to content is somewhat improvised), and I also can intellectually understand how the Mother's presence/memory might occasionally exert itself on the family, but Brian's nervousness, jittery stance and the choice to read in this pseudo-haughty-acting-like-you're-acting- voice seemed to spoil the opportunities created by having someone in his position in the performance.

Like Brian's last PAC presentation, Discarded Landscape opens with an extended section of the actors scurrying about in a Goat Island Summer School manner with overlapping dialogue and a good deal of fussing with chairs. Successfully disconcerting but murky. The actors would find moments of business around the stage but didn't hold up any kind of deeper motivation or through-line so the activity seemed to indulge a fetishism of process more than anything for me.

Fortunately, Brian seems to be aware of his tendency to be obscure and the performance got sharper and sharper as it went.

I dug the performances of the principle actors generally. Jeff Harms is charming and funny in his storytelling bits. Tiffany improved throughout the play and succeeded in carrying an emotional transformation at the end of the play into her mother. Donovan is a bit of a shooting star whose biggest flaw in this show was that sometimes his personality would overwhelm the stage.

There are great lighting choices throughout the performance. Upstage curtains are illuminated and combined with overhead lighting that leaves the cast often masked in Noir-ish shadows furthering the retreat of the family.

My memory of the show now several days past is that the play spends a great deal of time disorienting us and providing us with characters who are often untrustworthy because of their denials or tendency to exaggerate the truth for the sake of a fun story. The play asks us what will stop this runaway denial and proposes the point in an abrupt, dramatic ending.

Kata Mejia - "I Draw You You Draw Me In" @ PAC/edge

Kata Mejia was in my grad program. She is fascinated with presenting tragic images of women. She uses movement, ritual, drawing, domestic objects and food in her performances and did so in this her PAC/edge solo performance "I Draw You You Draw Me In". She won a commission from PAC last year to produce a work.

The space was segmented by tape that looked like thick, drawn white lines on the black stage floor, dividing the stage into irregular sections...some of which climb up the walls. The program stated that the piece was in four parts/rooms. Each room is a melodrama of a woman waiting, of the power to draw the other close being enacted, and then of the woman "crying for him".

The performance of these rooms was through ritualized movements and actions. There is no talking, only the occational punctuation of music and the sounds of her body moving in the space.

In the first room she pours rice in a pile in the center of the stage. She repeatedly stands and falls...grating herself against the rice on the floor. She plays with putting her dress on and off. She then moves onto the pile of rice and lays in it like a bed and at one point performs a lovely action of pulling the rice in and under her. The pulling creates a lovely sound of the rice against the floor, soothing the earlier grating somewhat.

In the next room to the audience's left, she performs a pouring sequence from a domestic water pitcher into bowls and cups. It creates another area of messy white on the floor and a surprise as rice pours from the pitcher rather than a liquid.

She then takes the bowls and cups one by one and walks along a path to opposite wall and to another taped section. She suprises us again by quickly placing the bowl on the wall where it sticks and the rice in it pours to the ground. She lays down with her feet to the wall, with the white splatter of rice beneath her, she slaps the ground, does a backwards roll slowly to her feet and follows her path back for another bowl. She repeats the sequence for each bowl/cup about seven times total.

The final section she fetches onions from a pile in the back corner of the stage. She acts out a stuggle to collect them all and bring them downstage to pile them before us. She bites one and eventually enters into a movement sequence of hugging herself and rolling around. It is lovers entangled, kissing and crying. She stops and stands and looks. She collects the onions and places them in two rows. Then she gets the bowls and cups and creates another parallel row of them. She goes to the back corner and fetches a bowl of flour and a sifter. She sifts flour over the onions and bowls. She then picks up the onions places them in the bowls along the front of the stage leaving the dots/shadows of the objects in flour behind. She then lays next to this flour marking and sifts more flour over herself. When she is fully covered she rolls to the side leaving a striking impression of a partly curled body in the flour. She lays there and the lights go down.

The aesthetic quality of dryness built throughout the performance as these dry, raw goods were displayed and became surfaces to rub against. This and the repetitive actions actually lead to a rather nice catharsis first in the peaking emotionality of the huggin movement sequence where Kata seems quite focused and committed and then fully resolved in how striking, quiet roll of her body away from the flour to reveal a beautiful silhouette. And while mostly being a self-involved and internal piece of performance, the general tragic feel lead me to connect the flour secetions those images of mass graves where bodies are covered in lye and for a moment this tragic self-involved woman who has lost her love is so sad that she seems to channel a greater universal sense of loss.

I was never moved to cry or anything, the melodrama was too over the top to trust and enter into for me but the little gasp at the end left me with a strong enough experience to make me feel the piece was successful.

Still because it just briefly reaches that archetypical moment that Kata has been working towards, this seems like a more minor piece from her. She is a young artist who is starting to actually talk in coherent sentences in her work and the shock of those first "mommy"'s and "daddy"'s is wearing off and I am now tuned to expect her to take us more into sustained moments of archetypical communion.

A friend of mine made an interesting note that Kata seemed to lose her commitment as she would progress through a series of repetitions. Starting precise and then getting more sloppy and rushed as the repetitions continued. Perhaps a risk of self-directed material. Sticking to her agenda might help sustain her hold over the audience and her connection to the material.

She has in the past dealt with equally visceral body acts and social material that ranged from the domestic to the problems with kidnapping in her homeland of Columbia. I imagine she will be evoking rather powerful forces when she finds more ways to connect her willingness to experience and proclaim suffering and grounds it in the historical and cultural contexts she is interested in.

Her piece also struck me as a rather good example of where performance at PAC/edge is at. Small works by young artists who are willing to experiment creates at times uneven pieces but in general there is a sense of risk and maybe you might share something special with a small crowd some night.

I watched Kata's piece on opening night with a small crowd of her supporters and found myself wondering where the opening night crowd was for this years commision winner.

I also was shocked early on when the door people repeatedly made a huge noise as they allowed late-comers to enter and walk right in front of the stage to find seats well after this quiet and delicate show had begun. Sloppy.

erik