Squaring Up the Winners and Losers

The “On the Boards” production of Winners and Losers performed on April 25, 2014 in Seattle is, in essence, a conversation between two friends that reaches a jarringly honest and personal crescendo where the line between improvised and scripted performance blurs. Written and performed by James Long and Marcus Youssef, under the direction of Chris Abraham, the play is woven around the eponymous game Winners and Losers, during which the two characters take turns listing people, objects, places, and so on, to pronounce them as either winners or losers. What begins as a tête-à-tête of playful banter between two closely acquainted individuals quickly unravels itself as an interaction that asks how far and in what depth are we willing to probe politics of personal pridelections. Winners and Losers challenges its audience to explore how likes and dislikes are deeply entrenched in constructions of self, recollections of histories and explorations of privilege.

The production opens with the characters introducing themselves to the audience as Jamie and Marcus followed by Jamie’s announcement that this is “Winners and Losers.” With this itself, they recognize the audience as part of the game, almost a  third conversant. This renders the viewer of the filmed production a non-conversant observer that the characters/writers/performers are unaware of. Seated on either side of a table, on the utterly pared down stage, Jamie and Marcus reason as to why hipsters, Canada, Stephen Hawkings among other things, are losers or winners.  While Marcus determines that the first nations of Canada are losers given the impoverished state they are in now, Jamie, in partial agreement, declares them winners “on the moral high ground.” The banter during the initial determinations recedes as slippery slopes and ad hominems populate the game. Jamie ridicules Marcus for representing himself as “worldly-wise” for it absents an honest acceptance of his class privilege. In response, Marcus accuses Jamie of being threatened by the very prospect of vulnerability and weakness. The arguments bring up the thorniness of self-fashioning: what parts of ourselves would we rather veil and what parts of others would we want to  unveil for the sake of desirable self-definition?

Winners and Losers is indelible in how it allows its audience to be the bystanders of a seemingly private interaction between James Long and Marcus Youssef themselves. The meta-theatrical references to their acting careers and their performance resumes, along with the reference to Marcus’ rich immigrant father and James’ recollections of drunken “first-nation jokes,” create an utter confusion about the line between what is authentic and what is theatrical. As these lines blur, the cruel competition between Jamie and Marcus, uncomfortable, yet intrigued by the possibility of this being a “true” conversation. In the case of the twice removed audience of the recorded production, such viewing becomes almost voyeuristic and surveillant. For me, watching a seemingly real(time) argument between two friends through a screen during a post-pandemic space-time when various publics have had to merge through technologies, felt strangely familiar.

It is poignant that throughout, Jamie and Marcus stay within a chalk square they draw on the dark stage floor at the very beginning of the play. Reminiscent of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, the chalk square is a reminder of the momentariness and theatricality of the competition between the two individuals. Conversely, such purpose is rendered useless as Jamie and Marcus tear each other apart in realistic cruelty reflecting the politics of biases that go beyond the metaphorical chalk squares drawn in everyday life.

RothackerT_Shipment

The Shipment, written and directed by Young Jean Lee and produced by her theatre company in association with On the Boards asks audiences to ante up and admit to recognizing black stereotypes. After a particular sketch, three of the actors stand downstage in formal attire. They stare at the audience. We witness their breathing. This goes on. Is this a reprieve? What next? Viewing this production virtually and in the comfort of my own home allowed me to react in a way that’s different when seeing something live. I shouted out in appraisal of stereotypes being performed and broken almost concurrently. I stopped and went back to review passages I wanted to make sure I was understanding correctly. In this format, the play and performance lived with me longer.

Lee has been quoted as saying; “What's the last play in the world I would ever want to write?”  The fear of taking that leap into the unknown and exploring identities, cultural boundaries, and anything else in the margins led her to write a play about Black identity politics in collaboration with an ensemble of black actors.  Lee structures The Shipment as a minstrel shows.  Sketches, caricatures, dance and musical performance with a hint of Brecht collide on stage in a mashup of comedy and a fast and dirty look into the mirror.  Using this theatrical convention from the early 19th Century pays homage to black performers of that time and highlights the double entendre that this play is exploring; the struggle of Black identity and the theatricality of presenting injustice on stage.

The play begins with two actors dancing to a choreographed, yet with an improvised feeling, routine which is reminiscent of street dance.  It’s funny, light, jubilant and sets a specific tone.  A “Black Stand-Up” routine follows, with Douglas Scott Streater blasting the audience with a rant that is reflective of the world of Def Comedy Jam.  Making jokes and telling stories where the offense is equally divided between the black and white worlds allows audiences to laugh at the stereotypes and shake our heads in agreement.

Other sketches and shorter scenes include the young man being forced into a world of drug dealing to make money in order to support his dream of becoming a famous rapper, and a Grandma appearing from Heaven.  Cut to the moment of the actors alienating the audience and demanding them to take in all of the stereotypes and misnomers they have just witnessed.  The final scene of the play, after a carefully articulated and lengthy scene change, is a blend of realism and absurdism.  A group gathers for a birthday party in an upscale apartment, in formal-wear, and things rapidly unfold.  Something seems off though.  The behavior of each of the characters goes against the stereotypes that precede the scene. 

This stellar example of technically executing a live performance and it seamlessly bleeding into another medium (video recording) allowed me to feel like I was there in the theatre but having the cognizance to know that I wasn’t.  That is a very difficult line to balance. As the play ends abruptly, and with a major twist, the audience realizes the culmination of all they have witnessed and the different packages that stereotypes come wrapped up in.  Do you admit to seeing and knowing what was displayed on stage tonight?

schroeringa_songs with Ciba edits

In 2012, the Dutch collective Wunderbaum brought their “theatreconcert,”—“Songs at the End of the World”—to the Fusebox Festival in Austin, Texas. U.S. Customs and Border Control wouldn’t let them bring their giant Antarctica backdrop into the country, but they got to keep their enormous red overcoats. These overcoats are so bulky that they completely obscure the human figures of the performers as they shuffle onstage at the top of the show. Set off against the stark white cyclorama, facing the audience, unmoving in a straight, silent line upstage, it is hard to look at these creatures without asking, what are they, really? Which is another way of asking, what is “the human”? It is a question that has only gained in urgency in the intervening years, as our species’ destructive impact on the planet becomes continually more pronounced, and the polar caps (where this performance is set) continues to melt at a quickening pace. Captured on video for Sound Off!’s online archive, the performance retains the cadence and rhythms of the rough liveness integral to the ethos of the piece and welcomes the asynchronous viewer into the community of spectators, whose audible responses are captured on tape.

What unfolds over the 90 recorded minutes is a series of monologues, short scenes, and indie-rock musical performances that another reviewer has described as akin to (appropriately enough) the Arctic Monkeys. With only the sparse design accoutrements of their musical instruments, rolling carts that look like they belong backstage, and a couple of transparent umbrellas that serve as both ice mounds and—in one memorable scene—floating jellyfish, the collective carries us through the childhoods and early adulthoods of several seemingly unrelated characters. The performers shed their anonymous overcoats to reveal all-too-human characters, including a young boy in a speedo who learns to swim away from his hometown, a man with a sun allergy who feels at home among the penguins, a young woman who wants to fly, and a teenager reciting a poem about becoming a blue creature in a wincingly earnest audition for her performing arts high school. Throughout each vignette, the characters seek out ways to adapt to, escape from, or modify habitats that don’t quite fit.

The entire performance has the feel of theater newly-discovered and explored, as in a performing arts high school. The ensemble is alternately tongue-in-cheek about their lo-tech play (they ride across the stage on a rolling sound cart dressed in spandex to represent figure skating) and almost uncomfortably earnest (as in the rock-ballad “Silent John” that repeats the lyrics silent John, where have you gone? scores of times. In answer to the question, “what is the human?” Wunderbaum seems to suggest that we are a species striving to be something and somewhere else, and to share that journey with others. A powerful celebration of and argument for the necessity of live performance and play.

Phone Homer’s Classic(al) Power Relations for the Internet Age

πάθει μάθος

páthei máthos[1]

Michelle Ellsworth’s 2012 “On the Boards” Seattle production of her solo performance piece, Phone Homer, traces a contemporary Clytemnestra’s increasingly tragic response to the Trojan War’s horrors - as mediated through her online browsing, web shopping, and video chats - in order to ask questions about the relationship between canonical textual narrative (including the power relations it encodes) and contemporary consumer-driven online consciousness. The production, viewed here as a video recording of a live “On the Boards” production, is marked by larger than life computer screens and video calls with other characters such as: Agamemnon, Aegisthus, and Helen. The online web browsing and video calls mark time and space in this world of increasing despair where verbal language vacillates between contemporary conversation and more archaic translation-speak including the occasional humorous mispronunciation.

The video calls are temporarily interrupted by deliveries of increasingly larger online purchases, such as an absurdly enormous beach ball-sized eye called “male gaze simulator.” As the package arrives the object is ritually removed from its box and its shape is spherical. It appears to be a large white beach ball. When turned around, facing the audience, the pupil and eye shape become clear – it is a large disembodied eyeball. Clytemnestra places it on a tall pedestal upstage center where it sits, gazing, for the rest of the show. It watches Clytemnestra, her computer, and the audience. The performance’s language and rhythm vacillate between Clytemnestra’s intimate monologic sections, delivered as direct address, and the video calls’ more extroverted performative syntax. For example, Agamemnon’s calls often invoke a Homeric lexicon and cadence, including a hyperbolically long epic catalogue as he describes his battle prowess.

The performance’s most indelible moments take place when Clytemnestra desperately engages her whole body with the computer’s websites in an attempt to assuage her increasingly manic episodes. She gravitates toward consumer websites, especially those selling burgers of various types, as well as TED talks, Spotify, Facebook, cat videos, Martha Graham inspired dance videos (an allusive reference to Graham’s 1958 piece Clytemnestra, part of her Greek Cycle) and a constant barrage of online words and images which mediate/adapt/transmute her ancient tragedy for our modern world. The performance’s references to Martha Graham’s choreography read backward to Homer’s Iliad, and forward to the internet age, including a few twentieth century aesthetic allusions to: the incantatory feminism of Anne Waldman’s Omeros, Gertrude Stein’s estrangement of male identity as master signifier, and the free play of absurdist physicality. Likewise, this solo woman’s performance, including a commitment to technological integration, speaks to Laurie Anderson’s multiple digitized characters acted by the same performer. Phone Homer’s digitized drag performances recall Anderson’s early work, epitomized here by the auto-eroticism of Ellsworth’s courtship of Ellsworth in the form of video calls between Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. This new telling of the canonical tragedy helps contemporary audiences to ask difficult questions about identity - gendered, technologically mediated or otherwise -  rather than seek easy answers.

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[1] “learning through suffering” Aeschylus, Agamemnon

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.

Yangs_the institute of memory with Ciba edits

Created by Lars Jan, The Institute of Memory (TIMe), an earnest autobiographical performance about remembrance, is now online with On the Boards TV five years after its premiere at REDCAT, Los Angeles. The online production ironically adds an ironic layer of mediation to its original live version. A play about the violence of archives upon individuals, TIMe has become a digital archive itself, awaiting its audience to retrieve through a click.

As the overhanging fluorescent tubes map out the contour of an old apartment, a searching son leads the audience into his cold chamber of memory. He is patching together bits and pieces of his father’s untold life as a Polish Holocaust survivor and Soviet operative in post-war America. But more than a quest of family history, TIMe raises a broader question of how our memory is produced.

Creator of Holoscenes, Suicide Bombing, Abacus and other pojects, Lars Jan once elaborated on his idea in the interview with Artpulse, that “Art is research and performance is a lab”: “Art for me is inquiry, collision, curiosity about margins and a belief that the current frontiers are what we’ll eventually just call the backyard. Performance is the location in which my art practice happens.” From this idea Jan generates TIMe, where Jan uses his own memories as sources for a scientific observation. In this theatrical investigation of his father’s hidden history, Lars Jan sets himself as a narrating character that walks the audience through his memory of his father in a series of episodes, while intermittently jumps in to question and comment on the credibility of his own memories. With Jan’s integrated talents of design, directing, and writing, he lets memorial events collide, act, and react, creating a solemn space for investigation and contemplation.

A telephone and a typewriter----symbols of wiretaps and missives----are all we have on stage to trace the father’s story. The minimalist set of light tubes takes the viewer through different stages of the son’s journey through transformations. As it slowly rotates down from the ceiling, the once hovering, sealed, and vague space of memory is concretized as a crisscross barrier in the shape of a towering file shelf between father and son.

Embodied by Andrew Schneider and Sonny Valicent with Brechtian gestures, past figures shuffle back and forth in the jungle of light tubes, reenacting the son’s unreliable memory in an estranged fashion. The two performers’ bodies become anonymous containers which always proclaim their ephemeral roles in short statements as “I’m playing the man who became the father”, or “I’m playing the woman who became the wife”. The son’s remembrance of his father runs by in a rapid series of life episodes. Instead of bringing the audience closer to a strange misanthrope, this narrative device keeps them at a distance of skepticism. The so-called memory turns out to be no more than a patchwork of fragmental experiences and hearsays, flavored with some shoddy sauce of empathy. It drives the audience to interrogate whether our only solution to reconstruct memories exists in “authentic” records, as the son has no choice but to know about his father through documents and files. Moreover, the distancing effect of TIMe is reinforced by the experience viewing a filmed performance, because the audience before the screen has to perceive the story that is mediated through words and records yet through another layer of mediation.

Behind all these layers of stage crafts, Lars Jan’s restrained writing not only sketches the story in a succinct way, but also provokes the audience to reflect upon the tyranny of archives, and the entire literary apparatus that reifies real lives into erasable catalogue entries. In the forty-year-journey of TIMe, we get to know an inherently traumatized father, both victim and perpetrator who conceals every secret in his brain. We also empathize with the ever-questioning son, who finds himself lost in documents that destroyed his father, but meanwhile constructed his father’s life in the written history. TIMe reveals that memory is produced, preserved, and dominated by the institutionalized bureaucracy of literary apparatus. At the same time, it leaves the son’s bewilderment open for response: Is our own memory retrievable, if we are fundamentally alienated from its violent producing mechanism?

Predator Songstress Reveals the B Side Cuts that Accompany Social Justice Battles

A woman clad in a blue dress and white go-go boots bounds for the edge of the woods; blind to the soldiers that follow, blind to the shackled sisterhood that she has left within the stone ruins, listening only for the sound of her own lost voice. In 2014, Seattle-based collective Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE) asked the audience of On the Boards (Seattle, WA) to experience the price that comes with using one’s voice to amplify the voiceless. The artists unabashedly explore the change and consequences that accompany radical action in their production of Predator Songstress.

In this semi-apocalyptic fairytale, anti-heroine Ximena must break free from the oppressive regime that has stolen her voice and find a way to speak her truth again. This minimalist-meets-media event combines the stark impression of a near-blank stage with the flexibility of media in the form of screens, lighting, and ethereal folk music. The prominent commentary on communication is clearly and creatively conveyed across the empty expanses of stage.

In one repeated tableau, rebels from the movement take turns sending videos and transmissions from a chain link-backed “studio”. Meanwhile, 5 screens suspended above the stage display a grayscale image of tall, dark trees and smoky mountains radiating with pulsating radio waves. Aside from the band and the livestream set-up (a total of maybe 4 square feet), the remainder of the stage stays blank. It reminds the audience of the empty space through which communication has to travel; even now in a time when we are more connected than ever, the play subtly reminds us that those choice words have so far to travel to reach their destination.

The floating screens as well as the screens hidden in the scarce set pieces (the radio tower built at the start of Act II, for instance) serve as supplemental spaces for telling different parts of the story. Sometimes, an antlered woman lives on the floating screen, wickedly taunting Ximena with a series of doors to pick from, in a tricky twist on the classic Let’s Make a Deal. Based on the mocking cackle from the antlered woman, we’re led to assume that there was no choosing the right door.

The most striking use of media in the play comes directly from the words of the surprisingly open and vulnerable audience being sung over the airwaves. During the intermission, a live art installation invites the audience to participate in interviews, share messages or poems or songs, and even share personal stories. Then, like a Goddess of Words, Ximena stands atop a radio tower, draped in gold and her own set of antlers, conducting the stories of the people across the airwaves. It’s a graceful dance of her arms as she gently pushes the sounds around her, sharing with the rest of us. The “predator songstress” is a Giver of Song, drawing even more on the duality that comes with exposing people’s truths. All of this adds up to the production’s distinct statement on the ways society uses technology to share our sound – our voices, as the play aptly alludes to.

The play, originally produced in 2010, is brimming with themes that have had a particularly loud presence in the media as of late. The concept of “using ones’ voice” to invoke change and stop oppression is one that many of us have, especially in recent months, is something we’re currently revisiting and practicing. Ximena and her brother’s journey prove that the truth doesn’t always reveal what we want to know. This piece reminds us that just because our intentions are good this does not mean that the consequences of our choices will be positive ones.

One of the final moments of the show is a raucous, heart-wrenching punk rock number that completely disengages from the folk-feel of the show’s previous numbers. Ximena, in a battered white dress, wails into the microphone as she is forced to live with the consequences that accompanied her choices. In spirit, they were the right thing to do; she gave her people a place to use their voice to speak out against tyranny. The personal cost, however, and the cost to those she loved dearest make her actions hard to celebrate.

Predator Songstress is an eerily accurate reminder that just because our actions have good intention, it does not mean that the consequences will reflect the same. From the emptiness that words can be lost in, to the caged feeling that can accompany staying true to a single cause, DAE shines a light on the other side of the coin that is justice.

Finding Your Voice Through Predator Songstress

Imagine a time when you lost your voice. What did it look like? Feel like? Sound like? In Degenerate Art Ensemble’s Predator Songstress, performed and recorded in 2015 at On the Boards in Seattle, WA, it looks like Ximena, the protagonist, lying on a stage in a singular box of light—drowning but trying to stay afloat. It feels painful. It sounds like high and low toned voices desperately calling out for each other. After watching a filmed version of Predator Songstress through ontheboards.tv, I too was at a loss for words until voiceless Ximena summoned strength and stood. She begins to communicate using touch and gestures, telling us that this is not the end but the beginning. This moment reminds me that there is more to this story and that I must press on, too.

It begins with a projected video that resembles security footage of the theater lobby just moments before the show began. Caught on camera is Ximena singing, a small crowd gathered around her; like me, they are unknowingly acquainting themselves with Predator Songstress’ anti-heroine and indulging in a voice being heard for the last time. By the time the video ends, it is dark, quiet, calm until a sudden flash brings up both the stage lights and our guard. Ximena’s brother, Xavier, catapults himself onto the stage and through a series of carefully chosen phrases and rigid, calculated movements, he tells us the story of how his sister came to be captured and her voice stolen by their world’s government, The Harvesters. Xavier’s dance and metered narration is specific and deliberate, a cipher; it tells us that there are many ways to receive information, and that we must pay attention to them all. We then follow Ximena—nicknamed the Songstress—as she escapes imprisonment, balances on the edge of order and chaos, and conspires with rebel forces as a means of regaining her voice.

In order to do their part in aiding the rebels, audience members are encouraged to participate in interviews being conducted throughout intermission. This concludes when a singular light comes up on center stage, revealing Ximena adorning a new dress and headpiece that shines gold—a beacon in the dark. The room falls silent as a screen begins projecting the interviewees recorded just moments prior. The fourth wall crumbles and with each wave of her hand, the Songstress signals for a new story to be played. My eyes grew wide and my mouth agape, any questions I had faded, and I imagine everyone in the room experienced something similar in this collective moment of clarity. It is the audience’s voices that serve as the voice of Ximena and their stories that make up the very existence of Predator Songstress. Despite being more observer than participant, I can still feel the personal connection forged between spectator and spectacle. From this point on, when the stakes are heightened for Ximena, they are heightened for us. When Ximena and Xavier are put on trial, we feel their distress. And when our Songstress sings out one final time in a punk-rock ballad declaring, “nothing can take your breath away”, we listen and let it become our new mantra.

When asked how works like Predator Songstress are born, Degenerate Art Ensemble said "We peel one layer, look deeper, inquire persistently and prop open our ears and senses to let the space, the spirits and the environment speak"; as a viewer it does well to follow suit. A fairytale set in a dystopian society, Predator Songstress may be mistaken for other-worldly, but if we allow ourselves to listen as the work speaks to us, it is entirely too real. Through various forms of communication culminating as one language, it encourages us to make connections with our own society and individual lives. It explains that Ximena is not voiceless; we tell her story when we tell our own, not about when we lost our voice, but about what we did when we got it back.

cibad_TiME

Lars Jan, working with Early Morning Opera, wrote, directed, and designed The Institute of Memory (TiME), performed for Ontheboards.tv in 2017. The set, a ceiling of bright white neon tubes appears aesthetic, but in a moment of transition, becomes the back wall. Later it becomes the flow indicating the ground plan of Jan’s father’s apartment. Beyond its novelty, the set’s contribution to the piece accents Jan’s multiple uses of memory asking the question: how does memory affect narrative?

Lacking a linear plot and fully realized characters, the benefits of TiME are as a piece that defies traditional conventions. Each moment is unexpected—Jan weaves the ghost from Hamlet, transcripts from the Polish Secret Police, memories from his father and mother’s challenging relationship, medical transcripts, and a variety of imagined moments to explore the limitation of memory. The soundscape includes a variety of vocal distortions and symphony that Jan’s father gifted him, only added to the mystery and reflection that reverberates throughout the piece.

One of the most thrilling conceits of the play is the ability for the two actors to jump in and out of characters. Although it is very clear that they play a variety of characters from the onset, one lengthy series of extremely short scenes in the middle requires each actor to proclaim their character each time: “Playing the role of the man who will be the father” “Playing the son” “Playing the soon-to-be wife of the son.” Although Jan seems to draw from the healthy legacy of nonrealistic performances, the narrative reshapes and resurfaces to adjust to the various needs of the moment. To call these Brechtian would not only an understanding, it would be a disservice.

Instead, each moment vacillates between humor and pathos, making it all the more difficult to respond to the memories that Jan has collected in any coherent way. But this lack of coherency, which defies simple analysis, is one of the strengths of the piece. Early on, lengthy description of Jan’s memories of the apartment appear random, but through the length of the piece, the place where Jan’s father lived and died, create all the more value. By the end the paranoia that Jan admits he shares with his father resound as part of the contemporary post-COVID world.

Care and Symmetry: Beth Gill’s Electric Midwife

Challenging us to see how symmetry can manifest care, Beth Gill’s 2013 dance piece, Electric Midwife, performed at the Museum of Human Achievement in Austin, TX, features women, stillness and water, uniting what is symmetrical in all our lives—the need for care of body and communion with others. This review must acknowledge that the performance was filmed and as such, the experiential impact of being in close proximity with these moving and breathing bodies was lost. However, that same limitation created an opportunity to understand an exclusively female experience episodically. Distanced from the immediacy of primal, bodily need, it was easier to abstract and therefore contemplate fully what proximity does to bodies in motion who have needs and those who wish to care for them.

Set in a blank, proscenium, box space, there are two parallel black lines painted on the center of the floor, dividing the stage in half and creating what seems like an endless pathway. The audience, intentionally kept small (only fourteen people), faces this area. The six performers are grouped in pairs. Each pair has a movement trajectory, and each dancer has her own partner on the other side of the center lines matching her course. The performers take us silently through sequences that underscore what it is to witness and support a woman during labor. There are gentle, repeated movement cycles at first, the dancers remaining in close proximity center stage. Later, one pair becomes  the focal point. Are they, perhaps, representing the Woman herself?

They move with a strength that initiates the others’ sequences. There are frequent pauses in which the group stands in stillness, waiting, anticipative of the next sequence. And then the Woman pair moves down stage, leading the group to expand their movements as the pace quickens and the space they create grows. They breathe through these “contractions” as a supported yet independent unit. The mechanical, electrically produced score, performed live by Jon Moniaci, begins halfway through, accompanying the movement with stark, that comes in waves of single tones that feel as if it will go on indefinitely. When this sound  later returns, it is accompanied by a vamping electric piano chord. A cacophony of larger, quicker sequences culminates in one pair retreating, another finding water, and the Woman pair squatting center stage, alone. How much this can say about birth is without limit. It conjures many memories and underscores how regardless of the caring persons that may surround her, the birthing woman must do what she must do on her own. It can’t be done for her. The end brings all the performers to resting poses in the semi-darkness, some lying on the floor, some sitting but all still present, with us and with each other, as though bonded in a silent agreement to stay with the Woman’s experience, to the end.

gerbera_seagull

Anton Chekhov’s best known plays are not known for their movement—or if they are, it is for how little movement there is.  Even after dramatic events, characters stay at rest, repeating mundane conversations.  What, then, are we to make of The Seagull’s Nina, draped in what appears to be a very old, fragile dress, skateboarding past the other characters engaging in their usual dialogues?

This is not the typical revival of The Seagull but Tina Sutter and Half Straddle’s adaptation, Seagull (Thinking of You), performed at the New Ohio Theater in New York in 2013.  On its surface, this production is a long way off from Chekhov despite the occasional exchange and song in Russian.  We appear to be witnessing actors somewhere in the rehearsal process, but it can be hard to know where the characters end and the actors begin, especially Emily Davis’s haunted Nina.  All the cast are playing actors playing roles, but in Davis’s case, she is an actor playing an actor playing an actor (as is Suzie Sokol, Madame Arkadina).  These kinds of unfolding levels of reality are in the tradition of Pirandello’s Six Actors in Search of an Author and Charles Ludlam’s Stage Blood. As Helen Shaw wrote in “American Heroine”, her review of  Satter and Half Straddle’s staging, Is This a Room: REALITY WINNER VERBATIM TRANSCRIPTION, “Satter has a fastidious eye and a keen mind for choreography....” (https://www.artforum.com/performance/helen-shaw-on-tina-satter-half-straddle-s-is-this-a-room-78416).  Everything we see appears deliberate, even if we are not sure what it means.

Chekhov’s characters claim to be in love, but none seem to be in a happy, healthy romance:.  Medevenko desires Masha, who desires Treplev, who desires Nina, who desires Trigorin, who is in a relationship with Treplev’s mother, Arkadina.  This is reflected by the backstage action of The Seagull (Thinking of You).  At several points in the play, one of the fictional actors kisses another with more energy than tenderness.  “Arkadina” implies that the part of sex she likes least is having another person there.  Romance here is about power, not love.  Perhaps this is true of Chekhov’s characters as well. 

Similarly, the actors in The Seagull (Thinking of You) are struggling to connect to their play.  Again, narcissism is getting in the way.  They care more about being considered good actors than actually acting.  Acting with others, like loving, must have a selfless component that the characters may lack.  They have no trouble desiring each other, which is a selfish act.  Perhaps none of the characters in either Seagull truly love, although there are signs of hope toward the end of The Seagull (Thinking of You).

The Rude Mechs’ The Method Gun and the Power of Belief

A man with a bushy beard and mustard-yellow shirt interrupts the play before me to ask the audience to reach into the envelope in front of them for a pencil and paper. Staring at my computer screen—my window to the world since the start of the pandemic—I hesitate for a moment. Should I grab a pencil too? I have a post-it on my right, will that do? The man then tells the audience—his actual audience—to close their eyes and think of the name of someone who taught them something. Before I can question how present I should be, can be, for a pre-recorded performance, I have a name in mind. 

The Rude Mechs’ The Method Gun professes to explore “the life and techniques of Stella Burden,” the supposed developer of the theatrical training technique, “the Approach.” We learn early in the show that Burden abruptly quit teaching and moved to South America, leaving behind her company. The play is meant to honor Stella’s life and work, interspersing demonstrations of her techniques with reimaginings of the remaining company’s rehearsals and scenes from their 1976 production of A Streetcar Named Desire—a final performance nine years in the making, in which the actors play everyone and everything except the four main characters (Mitch, Stanley, Blanche, and Stella). If it isn't clear yet, Stella Burden is not a real historical figure, and this company and their 1976 production never existed. Rather than reimagining history, then, The Method Gun enacts a kind of mocu-docudrama: a dramatic, sometimes farcical story of theatrical practice and instruction. One would be forgiven, however, for not realizing this, and indeed, much of the enjoyment of the play for me came from forgetting—where I was, the state of the world around me, the fact that productions like the one I was watching have been cancelled all across the world.

The actors, speaking sometimes as themselves and sometimes as their characters, consistently toed the line between sarcastic mockery and earnest reflection as they revealed an inherent driving force of acting and theater—the desire to find the key to one’s identity outside of oneself. In the case of the Stella Burden company, this desire became located within the absent figure of their guru. As one of the actors articulates, “I’m not even a kind of person yet. I need you, Stella, to make me . . . I’m asking the question, how does one become oneself? That's what I’m hoping you can do for me.” The deep love and loss that surrounds the company’s conception of Burden, in turn highlights one of the powers of theater as a practice: belief. As articulated in the song “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” which became a kind of instrumental refrain for the show, “it wouldn’t be make-believe if you believed in me.” In this way, the play asks us, what is truth, self, theater, but a practice of belief?

Throughout the show I teetered on the edge of full immersion but being separated from so much—my friends, family, teachers—has taught me a lot about the limits and power of belief. There’s much lost in a pre-recorded performance but also much gained in terms of access, collaboration, and connection if you leave yourself open to the experience. The actors in The Method Gun lost their guru, and perhaps their wits, but the final performance of their Streetcar was a thing of unspeakable beauty. And when the scraps of paper collected from the audience went up in flames at the end, I didn’t feel as disconnected as before.

Winning and Losing on the Digital Stage

As the performance begins, two men dutifully chalk a large rectangle around a long folding table, a chair positioned at either end, and two hotel call bells placed haphazardly atop the table. The lights abruptly shift, reinforcing the chalk rectangle of the playing space. The reverberations of a bell echo across the mostly bare stage, and the game begins. The rules are unclear, our only hint is the title of the performance, Winners and Losers. This 2014 piece by Canadian theatre company Theatre Replacement (performed at On The Boards in Seattle) asks us to take a closer look at these categories, how we decide the differences and if we, ourselves are winners or losers. As I watched the recording of this piece via On The Boards TV it became clear that little was lost in the translation of this piece from a live experience to a digital re-broadcasting and the questions at the core of this piece are just as striking across the digital divide.

Winners and Losers lures in the audience with an illusory sense of simplicity and clarity. The two actors, Marcus Youssef and James Long, also wrote the piece, play versions of themselves. The central conceit appears to be straightforward, Marcus and James (Jamie) bring up various things or concepts and debate whether  it is a “winner” or a “loser”. Some examples of the topics they discuss include Hipsters, Pamela Anderson, Microwave ovens, and e-cigarettes. James and Marcus continually disagree in their assessments not only of which item is a loser or winner, but how those categories can or should be defined. The relentless pacing and wittiness of the dialogue transforms these mundane conversations into incisive cultural commentary on the nature of success and failure.

Just beneath the seemingly simple game is a much deeper and ultimately more fraught discussion. Understanding how each of these men conceptualize winning and losing means understanding how they came to these personal definitions. As we see their definitions unfold, the arguments and eventually attacks become more pointed, more personal, and startlingly revealing. The focus of the conversation shifts to more intimate subjects: street smarts, current events, even a brief foray into who is the better masturbator, and then continues to shift into economic status, race, inherited wealth, and personal mythologies. As their disagreements escalate James and Marcus physicalize their adversarial friendship through a game of ping-pong, a wrestling match, a quiz show, and continued verbal sparring. The seemingly simple distinction between winner and loser is blown wide open as the relentless exploration of these categories exposes the cultural and subjective understanding of what each idea means.

One might expect that the moments of physical violence or confrontation are the most shocking in the piece, but Youssef and Long craft the script and their performances in such a way that these more overt acts of aggression relieve the tension of their exchanges. Leading up to their wrestling match Jamie and Marcus have taken turns lording their specific strengths over each other that the possibility of violence between the two men begins to seem inevitable. At one point, Jamie makes an excuse to leave the stage in order to use the bathroom, a decision Marcus refers to as “the pee move… a significant move in the game” (0:49:14-30). When Jamie returns the two men clear the stage without speaking and assume the position of Olympic wrestlers at the beginning of a match. Jamie quickly overpowers Marcus and begins to humiliate him by tickling and repeatedly slapping him. The audience is left with the belabored breathing of the two men as they writhe on stage. As Marcus taps out, and Jamie leaves the stage, Marcus launches into a personal fantasy of physically overpowering a home invader to protect his family. As he recounts this fantasy through gulps of air, it is impossible not to see the delusion in Marcus’ words and the title of the piece demands that we make an evaluation. Despite his education, affluence, and charm, the piece asks if it is possible to see Marcus as a winner in this moment.

Ultimately, the piece refuses to give any answers, imploring the audience to reflect more critically on these categories and the ways they silently guide our perception. This exploration of winning and losing perhaps gains more poignance in the more solitary confines of the digital screening. There is no larger audience to find safety within, and the questions and challenges feel deeply personal and uncomfortable in such close quarters.

It’s Not Too Late

2020 is shaping up to be a year for the ages, and perhaps, the sort of revolutionary year Markeith Wiley longed for when he created and performed It’s Not Too Late at Seattle’s On the Boards in 2016. Framed as a late night talk show cum protest, the multidisciplinary show featured the recurring image of Wiley reaching desperately through a hole of floating light in black space, in turns holding his breath and silently screaming, only to be pulled back into the blackness by a faceless dark figure. The work seemed to ask: whose voice is allowed to be heard, and what happens when new voices reveal uncomfortable truths?

The work opens with a LoraBeth Barr (a white woman) as Jodie, cheerfully warming up the audience for the show. She tells bad jokes, instructs them on reaction cues, and teaches them an awkwardly whitewashed version of the “Whip and Nene.” All the while, our host, Markeith Wiley appears to be asleep (or dead?) at his desk behind her.

Upon Jodie’s departure, Wiley dances a duet through the blackness of the space with a figure clad head to toe in black - his shadow, or some other sort of tethered self. Wiley is visible only in slim strips of light and small spotlights that he tries to break through. Eventually, he succeeds, and this is when the talk show begins.

Wiley’s character introduces himself as Seattle’s #1 black friend, Dushawn Brown. His pleasant and casual report with the nearly all-white audience makes it clear why he’s earned this title. Although the performance - of which I viewed a recording through OntheBoards.tv - is only four years old, much has happened since Trump took office - a central focus for much of the monologue - and many of the jokes feel dated. He addresses Beyonce, Jay-Z, and Blue Ivy; Kanye West’s feelings on Donald Trump, the “controversy” of Black Lives Matter, and America’s obsession with two mediocre Kevins - James and Hart. These ideas feel quaint today, but serve as a necessary time capsule of 2016, a time that once seemed bleak as could be.

The monologue portion of the show also involves Wiley inviting the mostly white audience members to ask him questions about black people - a scene that could have been more cringeworthy had the most provocative question not been “how often do you wash your hair?” - as well as asking them questions about being white.

One of the most intriguing sections of the show was the interview with the evening’s guest - Natasha Merritt. A black, queer mother with a bright red faux-hawk and schoolgirl plaid skirt, Merritt exudes confidence and ease, and this was the moment I was able to relax into the experience. She answered questions about blackness in Seattle with a cleverness and spontaneity that was both delightful and provocative. As she answered, the DJ (Keith White) sounded a horn with each response, making it difficult to hear some of her answers. Here, the silencing of black voices became more apparent.

Later, as he delivers another monologue - this one more uncomfortable for the audience, as it was rife with the n-word and included several black cultural references that seemed to evade them - his voice becomes distorted. After a moving performance by rapper Sketch Lightly, he returns, and the two men hug, joined by that shadow figure once again. It is here that things take a sharp turn, and Wiley as Brown begins to shout into a bullhorn, illuminating the oppression of being black in America. He begins to rage, and that is when Jodie (a real “Karen”) returns to the stage. I will not reveal the result of this struggle, but it’s a perfect and powerful move, one that deserves to be seen and examined.

While the show was certainly that of a rising artist finding his footing, it is a deft exploration of how white supremacy reigns, how black voices are controlled and often silenced, and what the consequences have historically been - from slavery, through minstrelsy, up to the current day - of speaking truth to power. 2020 feels like a culmination of all those ideas. It is curious to consider how Wiley would rework It’s Not Too Late for this year in which the world has been witness to so many tragedies against black people - the deaths of George Flloyd, Ahmad Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony Mcdade, and so many more. Might the past four years have changed the title? Perhaps, now, it is too late.

The Shipment Delivers Shock Therapy and Cultural Reset

In Young Jean Lee’s boundary-smashing 2008 work The Shipment, performed at On the Boards in Seattle on October 3, 2009, five performers confront the deeply embedded racial stereotypes that continue to infect stories about BIPOC. About thirty minutes into the taught 80-minute performance, the hackneyed story of a young black man being drawn into a life of crime is played out in an intentionally stilted performance style, and hopefully for the very last time. In this land of stereotype, we are presented with two drug dealers (one the “mentor” of our young main character) shooting it out over turf. The actors use forced gestures and stilted voices; it is clear that they are quoting their parts, presenting rather than embodying them. The stage picture in this section reinforces the quoting in that there is no attempt at realistic costuming (everyone is in and remains in eveningwear, tuxes and elegant gowns), there are no props (no requisite bags of drugs or guns), and the stage is an unadorned black box. The two drug dealers face off, in profile to the audience; they use their “guns” and threaten each other in turn, this life-and-death moment should be full of tension, but it is emphatically not. The characters take turns making generic threats and posturing. They raise their finger guns and “shoot” in slow motion. Both fall down in beautiful, choreographed slow motion. They lie on the stage in posed, remorseful martyrdom. But the worn-out pity that one might feel at the “waste of humanity” displayed in a scene like this rings false; it loudly rings fake. It fairly shouts that such scenes are little more than lazy writing and deep lack of knowledge.

Young Jean Lee’s production batters extremely forcefully at racial stereotypes. She seems to seek out the most sensitive pressure points to pound. A little later on, three performers sing forcefully: “If you can’t see the thin air, what the hell is in the way?” Really, white America, what is preventing you from seeing your black community members? How are you missing them in all their individuality and nuance? They are right in front of you.

“Dark Matters:” Uncanny and Uncontrolled

In a Kidd Pivot performance recorded for On the Boards TV in Seattle, WA on February 18, 2011, Crystal Pite’s theatrical choreography for “Dark Matters” presents a stage world populated by puppets, shadowy figures in black, and dancers who push and pull each other across the stage. As you watch, you are invited to question whether any of the identifiably human figures onstage are really in control, as the theme of the “maker” who no longer commands their creation flows throughout the performance.  Watching a recording removes some of the sense of threat when the performance feels unpredictable or ominous, yet the camera work undoubtedly re-enforces the production’s delightful visual tricks.

In the beginning of part one, a pendant light hovering over the table upstage center clicks off and on to suggest a time-lapsed construction process. Underscored by the sound of a thunderstorm, the creator seated at the table frantically hacks away at sheets of cardboard with metal sheers, snipping out a human silhouette. (lights out, lights up) He holds up a head, with a human profile, attached to a simplified torso, showing us a figure that is progressing from two-dimensions into three. (light out, lights up) He kneels on the floor, laying the jointed legs of the puppet over his own knees, as if testing their action in relation to his own. (lights out, lights up) Finally, the creator lifts the full puppet up off the work table, allowing its limbs to dangle in mid-air. (lights out, lights up) In an unexpected twist, shadowy puppeteers dressed all in black have taken up the rods of the finished puppet in the darkness, endowing it with rebellious life. To follow the Frankenstein reference given in the production description from On the Boards, “it’s ALIVE!” The puppet stands looking up at its creator who is no longer in control. Whereas metaphors usually invoke the powerlessness of the puppet, the dynamic is reversed when the creator fails to become the manipulator. 

In this opening sequence, the artist is driven to create, but also faced with their inability to control the work after its completion. By extension, Pite seems to be reflecting on some classical artist’s dilemmas - How do you make time to create without feeling like a project has taken over your life?  Once the work is completed, and put in front of an audience, how do you cope with the fact that you cannot fully predict how it will be received or where it might travel after it leaves your studio?  In this case, it seems that the maker is, in many ways, at the mercy of their art.

According to the Kidd Pivot website, the show was inspired by Pite’s “fascination with the unseen forces at work on mind and body.”  The shadow players are reminiscent of Japanese Bunraku, and normally the convention would be that they are invisible onstage.  Instead, in this production, they become the embodiment of Pite’s mysterious forces. At the end of part one, they literally tear down the walls, transforming the stage into a half-lit, color-saturated world where they haunt the remains of the collapsed set. During this interlude, the audience watches one inky figure pick their way through the detritus, stepping through a tangled mass of metal frames and disheveled canvas, while cradling a second shadow body that they scooped up out of the wreck. Reaching center, the moving shadow turns sharply down stage and throws the body roughly onto the pile. It is a trick, of course. I am ashamed to say I gasped (and watching from home there was no one next to me to gauge the reaction against). Yet, in a production that plays with the uncanny by showing us puppets and shadows that live and people pulled by invisible strings, it felt appropriate to lose track of which figure was living and which figure was faux.

The power struggle continues in the brightly-lit dance space of part two. In this sequence, performed on an open floor, plain-clothes dance partners throw each other in and out of balance with the controlled violence of stage-combatants.  In the final duet, one dancer seems to “stitch” breath into another - pulling them along by unseen heart-strings as swelling music takes over for the machine-sounds and sharp silences that defined the previous sections.  It becomes the final, surprisingly tender, variation on the theme.  From beginning to end, this performance presents the act of creation as a burden, a battle, and a love affair by turns.  The final segment seems poised to remind us that while control can be sinister, surrender – or even better, trust – is tender and sweet.

Songs at the End of the World

A pop-singer clad in a giant, red snowsuit, steps out from behind a microphone, strips down to nothing but his Speedo, and transforms before our eyes from an intrepid, Antarctic explorer into a shivering and nervous child awaiting his swimming instructor. This moment, which occurs early in Songs at the End of the World, a “theatre-concert” performed by the Dutch-Flemish ensemble known as Wunderbaum in 2012 at the Long Center for the Performing Arts in Austin, TX, poignantly calls forth the childhood anxieties that haunt our adult lives.

The filmed performance of Songs at the End of the World that I recently viewed on ontheboards.tv begins with an electronic message board broadcasting the announcement, “we will appear very soon”. Supertitles then ask us to imagine “somewhere far away, an endless plain, where everything can be filled up anew” while playfully reminding us “this is all just a metaphor”. In a 2018 interview for Fusebox Arts Festival, Wunderbaum ensemble member Walter Bart explains, “We start a show a lot of time by saying to the audience ‘welcome to our show’. We want to make sure that the audience and we are in the same space. So that we don’t build a fiction and there isn’t a fourth wall where we are on the floor and the audience is sitting there”. Experienced on ontheboards.tv, this serves as an invitation to join Wunderbaum in a virtual space where their live performance is mediated by cameras, microphones, headphones, and laptop. Here, technology brings you so close it creates a remarkable illusion of intimacy and liveness.

Over the course of 90 minutes, the eight-member ensemble of Wunderbaum performs an imaginative song cycle comprised of eclectic pop music, monologue, and dance built on a series of vignettes in which each performer inhabits a character who is at once a child dreaming of being an adult and an adult longing for their childhood. Songs at the End of the World captures all the nostalgia of sifting through a shoebox full of childhood photographs. But a departure from this wistfulness occurs late in the performance when the space explodes into a theatrical, DIY, underwater wonderland. Suddenly, the naked cyclorama is washed in deep purple with streaks of white light. Neon-green ovals form a mobile at one side of the stage that flickers on and off to the beat of the music, while cast members puppeteer giant, clear plastic jellyfish, each suspended by a single string run through a pulley. Clear skirts fluttering, they undulate towards the water’s surface, then descend and start again. The man in the speedo appears, this time in a lifejacket, goggles, and flippers. Lying belly-down on a plank held aloft by a pipe attached to a skate that is pushed along by another performer, he “swims” through the water until he reaches the edge of the stage and then floats back to begin again. The music is euro-pop of the highest order; tantric techno-beats, synthesized harmonies and ethereal vocals repeat over and over again “I don’t want to grow up, thank you.” This is an extended sequence of pure, childlike joy that I confess to re-watching several times.

Although Songs at the End of the World may be a metaphor for “somewhere far away, an endless plain, where everything can be filled up anew”, it conjures a space we can create out of our own imagining; a space where we can dream. Maybe we can’t forget where we came from, but we can always imagine new places to be going . . . at least for about an hour and a half.

IsquithRNowI_mFine

When comedian, singer, storyteller Ahamefule Oluo walked across the stage to collect two images of his mouth, a soft bowed cello notified the audience that they were about to redefine being “fine”. On December 4, 2014, Oluo shared these two images with Seattle’s Moore Theatre. One, an image of healthy lips used for storytelling, name making and trumpet playing. The other, “generally mouth shaped, but without the part that opens”. Every morning for a month, Oluo would painfully cut across this layer of excess protein, residue from recovery from a rare autoimmune disease. Watching Oluo cut across the paper image of black, scabbed-over lips with cuticle scissors we ask, “how are you okay?”

Over the course of this pop-opera, we watch a rotation of darkly intimate comedy and instrumentation . At the start, Oluo recounts lighter-fare trials like being singled out on a bus for being the unnoticeable high schooler, and extracting chewing gum from his “ass hair”.  Each time we encounter a challenge with Oluo, the orchestral strings lower us through discomfort and pity. The vocalists and larger brass band prop us up as Oluo works to “let his name not be forgotten”. Oluo shares vignettes of young fatherhood, short marriage, rapid divorce, and the death of his estranged and disappointed Nigerian father. Even when an autoimmune disorder physically pulls him apart, causing rapid deterioration of the skin, Oluo finds a way to be fine. “Inspired” is not how I thought I’d feel when hearing the story of a man playing a broken organ in a closet. But there I was, inspired.

Ahamefule Oluo asks audience members to understand that Now I’m Fine is, “about finding a way to feel okay, when you know that things are very much not okay”. This show celebrates finding what keeps you sane even as everything you know falls apart. When blistered and raw, Oluo’s ability to find music and humor is a testament to human resolve and resiliency. One hour and fifty-one minutes with Oluo inspires you to consider what keeps you going, and the ways in which you are still okay.