VillarrealAR_Americana Kamikaze with Ciba edits
Temporary Distortion bent time and space from within two isolated boxes in Performance Space 122 in November 2009, and again from the box of my computer screen as I watched through On The Boards TV. She stands stage left, in an enclosure, washed in red, a sliver of light revealing just her lips; her monotone murmuring recounting the story that plays out on screen. She is projected there, overshadowing her material self. We watch as she, wearing a silken slip, slowly takes a razor to her face, cutting along her cheek, creating an upwards extension of her smile. Through this moment and others, Americana Kamikaze asks what happens when the edges of our desire and culture begin to cut.
Genres extend and blend throughout this production, as J-Horror melds with the texture of Neo Noir in stark combinations of cinema, narrative, and performance. Throughout Americana Kamikaze four characters weave a warped timeline, daring the audience to discover the truth--to walk down the darkened hallway to face the ghost. We see up to two characters at a time, each standing in a box hardly larger than a doorway, lit with contrasting washes of light that somehow still obscure the actor’s body, driving our attention with Hitchcockian precision to a tie, an eye, the curve of a collar bone, building suspense by refusing to reveal.
The two couples ponder love. Is it agreed-upon eternal mutual torture or an exercise in control? While debating, the characters exhibit alternatingly flat affects and exaggerated performances of gendered and stereotyped cultural expectations rife with US-American and Japanese imagery. Are culture and love constraining these characters, and indeed each of us, to the performance of deadly repetitious roles? Implementing a semi-circular timeline, projected ghosts and pasts and futures, and a fair amount of ambiguity, Americana Kamikaze invites the audience to find the answer to this question--the ghost from this horror story--for itself.
The lack of a didactic resolution reflects other works by Temporary Distortion, leaving barely discernible fingerprints on many of their works. Don Shewey wrote of Newyorkland that “for all the evidence of skill and craftsmanship and artistic choices being made, there didn’t seem to be any point to the piece, any personal burning insight.” While Shewey muses that this is a “liability of any kind of non-narrative art work,” I would argue that the use of non Aristotelian narrative forms is purposefully employed, inviting the audience to seek their own personal insights the way one seeks a route to the exit in a haunted house.
One such moment occurs when she recounts the story again; we’ve seen her cut her own face. We’ve been told that each time she tells the story, the details change. Now, her partner initiates the one eerie musical number of the production. After an extended moment of silence, in which the lights shift to a rusty orange glow that narrows our focus to his face, he is joined onstage by the projection of a cheerful white man in plaid, strumming a guitar on a tractor. The man in the glow sings, in a low, somber tone, that while some men like to wear their wives like a trophy--here the projection pans to her, in Daisy Duke cutoffs and pigtails, sitting atop the tractor, standing in corn, near a campfire--he loves her so severely that he can’t afford to share her with the world.