Big Art Group's S.O.S. at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Big Art Group encouraged the audience to use their cellphones to take pics of the performance. These were snapped by Ernie Lafky who was sitting behind me. The top photo captures the balloon-gasm which concluded the performance.

BIG ART GROUP
S.O.S.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco
April 23-25, 2009, 8pm

Q: “We’re parodies, what more can we do?”

A: “You’re a fool, dear.”

Big Art Group’s S.O.S. is (theater of the) Ridiculous B movie camp that may or may not be something else entirely. The hyper talented cast plays a trashy queer family of post drag revolutionaries sucking into the big nothing that might or might not be Realness, I mean, Realness ®. The gifted text crams the jargon of all the new academic Studies (Cultural, Gender, Performance, Queer, American) into chaotic fusion with the equally disturbing textual simulacra (infinite copies of ideological cliché) of the non-profit industrial complex. Are you with me? Neither am I. Now add lots of costumes, wigs, lights, loud music, body mics, live and prerecorded video projections, and children’s theater puppet crafts. (I mean by children not for children.)

S.O.S. is created by Caden Manson (director as well as video, set & costume designer), Jemma Nelson (writer, dramaturg, sound design) and Big Art Group. The script is near genius. I was jealous that I didn't write it first. The performers detailed professionalism does not detract from their freakish dissonance with professional theater. These people shriek and moan. I heart these fierce queens. The performance devolves more like a crisis, a situation. Picture a spectacular collision of lowbrow and high-tech with the budget and attitude of Vienna’s Superamas or Meg Stuart at Berlin’s Volksbuhne or an early opera by Peter Sellers. Big. Messy. Witty.

Eight large screens. Too many cameras to count. (They call it Real-Time Film.) More cheap f/x than you can shake an ur-text at. The fake fights of Reality TV. Facebook gossip. Twitters in a Cockettes film of Patricia Nixon’s wedding. And the Blaire Witch Project except that instead of dumbass actors who talk like mall rats lost in a suburban forest, it’s animals (or theme park mascots who think they’re animals) lost in a forest of technology. Anyway they’ve escaped the cage, their libido is wack, and they have no vocabulary to articulate their crisis.

Low-tech flashlights meet high-tech body harness video cams that televise the performer’s facial minutia in a banal mimicry of TV ads and drugged youtube videos. I say Hegemony, you say Fabulous. Hegemony! Fabulous!

These virtuosic speed talkers spit postdramatic text mashups of infomercial, black drag queens, academic critiques of accumulation and identity politics, spasms of relentless self-obsession and pop nostalgia for Patty Hearst era revolutionaries. Yes, its’ the Realness Liberation Front. Cut to Realness ® logo. Cut back to actor, queen, slave. Cut to stage hand (queen, slave) jiggling photo for earthquake-like background. Cut back to actor, fauxqueen, slave, spewing verbiage that we know too well.

Most of you won’t know what I mean when I say it reminded me of a particularly wild night at Trannyshack with a super fat budget but of course SF anarcho-queens would never agree to this many rehearsals and would never be granted the $50,000 in video equipment. Or was it more?

Frustrated screams morph into orgasmic moans and then neurotic giggles. “That is so totally fucked up.” I agree. “You are preparing us for consumption, for transition.” Wait I get the consumption bit but what do you mean by transition? Too late, they’ve spun faster than minds can acquire, “Slipstreaming past each other’s essentiality.” I’ll say. “The philosophy of the hopeless will be done with. We will begin the eon of a new Nothing!” These people look like they’re on acid but they talk like they’re on crystal.

Insane costumes of hundreds of those long twisted clown balloons consume the actor within. S.O.S.’s increasingly mad antics climax with an orgy of balloon attack and mic feedback. My buddy Jeff Mooney points out that this is the only time they directly touched each other. Meanwhile the escalation of spectacular nothingness continues to explode outwards while simultaneously sucking everything into its black holes of non-center. Lights out. The end. The revolution will be ridiculous.

What happened? Big Art Group re-presents trashy 70's drag freaks with massive techno budgets and very ambitious updates of Ludlum and Cockette. The text was pretty brilliant and the performers are delish but is it good or bad or just something? After they sucked us all into the big Nothing, most of us left empty, as in, I feel empty. Is Big Art Group the Dada provocateurs of our time: meaningless art to confront meaningless spasms and twitters of unending war and capital accumulation? Why don't I love it the way I love the Dada of 1916? Half my friends thought that S.O.S. constructed a brilliant and empty spectacle about the brilliance and emptiness of the capitalist spectacle. How brilliant! How empty! The rest acted like they’d snorted poppers and ran naked into a summer rain, smiling widely.

Then I realized that as much as it had one foot in the 70s and another in the 00s (pronounced, the naughts), Big Art Group’s S.O.S had another ancestor in The Living Theatre’s 1963 production of The Brig. The play, written by Kenneth H. Brown, is a hyperrealist representation of a US Marine prison in 1950s Korea. In this hellish dystopia the men can’t speak to each other. The stage is a complex grid of territories and every line crossed requires a ritual of submission and humiliation. The audience knows it’s bad, it’s hell, and they might be there forever. In S.O.S. we don’t even know. We think it’s fun or smartly ironic. The animals think they’ve escaped the enclosure but of course they can’t survive in the wild. They can’t even tell that there is no wild, that there’s only enclosure, surveillance, projection, a reality game. Their solidarity breaks down and they consume each other. In The Brig someone tries to escape. He cries out, “I am not a number. I have a name!” He is beaten and carried away in a strait jacket. In S.O.S, no one tries to escape. There’s nowhere to go. It’s all a borderland swamp where escape and captivity merge. Submission and humiliation are natural traits, embodied. We think we chose these products, these rules, these enclosures. Hyper connectivity and abbreviated codes for accelerated chat echo in the prison of a technosphere maintained by a panopticon of personalized webcams. We’re all on TV all the time. Ok children, everybody surveil themselves, turn yourselves in, beat yourself up. In both projects – The Brig and S.O.S. - the performers sacrifice themselves to an equally rigorous labor of seemingly meaningless gestures – stand here, cross this line, don’t move, move like this – all the better to control their every desire. The demand on the actors, by the director and the writer, reproduces a totalitarian regime rooted in some kind of consensual SM that any ballet dancer or football player would recognize. A ritual of sacrifice enacted on the young bodies of the players.

According to Big Art Group’s website, this sacrificial ritual called S.O.S. has a much older ancestor than The Living Theater. In 1913, Le Sacre du Printemps caused some kind of riot or disruption with Stravinsky’s dissonant and polyrhythmic score and Nijinsky’s choreography for a pagan girl, sacrificed by her own people. She dances herself to death. Attempting a “celebration of renewal through chaos” S.O.S. revisits the scene of the (art) crime to ask the question, "Can sacrifice create a new beginning?"

Lizz Roman & Dancers AT PLAY

Photo of Sonya Smith on the Dance Mission fire escape by Rapt Productions.

At Play
Lizz Roman & Dancers
Friday, May 15, 2009
Dance Mission Theater, San Francisco

I hate missing anything. I’m very good at negotiating site-specific performance and pride myself in being a good ‘participant’. In At Play, Lizz Roman’s newest choreography of architectural archeology, a vibrant quintet of dancers enlivens the walls, windows, doorframes, studios, hallways, bathrooms, and fire escapes of Dance Mission Theater. And it’s impossible to see everything. Shit. Then I realized that partial viewing is the point. It’s about the unseen, the surprise, the revelation and the sudden disappearance. It’s about the periphery in relation to the center and it’s about, “Where did she go?” and “Where did he come from?” Not only can the whole choreography not be seen, Roman challenges the idea that there is a whole.

Just as someone disappears from view you discover that someone else has been dancing for five minutes without you having noticed. Roman plays with our attention, abruptly tricks us, and then gently leads us. With the audience crowded into spaces never intended for public gathering, it’s clear that we’re not all watching the same thing. We can’t. Forced to choose, we follow different impulses and while half the audience has their necks craned to the right, the others are leaning to the left to see who just emerged from the stairwell.

A basic element of Roman’s site-specific dances, like most site or environmental performance, is to reveal the unnoticed and to bring our visual attention to places we might usually ignore. That’s why I refer to it as architectural archeology. However, Roman and her dancers seem as concerned with imaginal and archetypal spaces as with the visual or actual site. Watching a dancer fall out of our line of sight we might ask, “Who caught that woman as she fell into another room? What’s around that corner?”

I catch myself wondering if people dance in and out of bathrooms in other cities as much as they do in San Francisco*. Then I wonder how many people will find a new way to perform the fire escapes and external brick wall of Dance Mission. The Dance Brigade, Project Bandaloop, Jo Kreiter/Flyaway and I have all done it. This is neither the natural outdoor performance of Isadora nor Ted Shawn’s naked men at Jacob’s Pillow. This is closer to Trisha Brown’s 1970s experiments with rigged dancers walking down the sides of buildings, but subtract the minimalism, or Anna Halprin’s dancers on scaffolds in the 60s, but add a released and lyrical dance vocabulary that was not yet imaginable 30 or 40 years ago.

Co-composers Alex Kelly on cello and electronics and Clyde Sheets on percussion and electronics, parallel the experiments of the dancers. When some sounds, textures, or rhythms are prominent, an undercurrent of other sounds is happening in the sonic periphery. A child’s voice (Dahlia, Kelly’s daughter) recites her A, B, C’s as if she’s in the next room or just happened to sit next to daddy while the composers recorded a driving beat. Although we often can’t see the musicians except when traveling from one site to the next, we know they’re playing live. For the outdoor section, they play like neo-gypsy street musicians, using battery powered amps, a snare, Kelly’s electro cello, and a CD of prerecorded samples that was too mute to recall. Again, an evocative partiality occurs. Someone closer to that amp will remember it differently. Others might not have heard them singing live, unmic’d, briefly.

At every performance choreographed by Lizz Roman, I’m impressed with the ensemble, the team, the family of dancers. They shine as individuals, seem truly affectionate in duets, and are solid as an ensemble. They seem somehow unlikely as a team. When I heard that ODC veteran Brian Fisher (most recently seen dancing with Sean Dorsey) was in Lizz’s current company, I was surprised. But Fisher, again and again, shows us what a generous, willing, and versatile dancer he can be. Afterwards I told him that I’d never seen him do so many hand balances. He responded that he’d actually been a gymnast before a dancer. Roman treats the group democratically, sharing solos, alternating duets. Sure the men lift the women higher and more often, but women also support the men, and the same-sex lifting is where the affection is visceral. (But I’m biased towards actions that read as queer and feminist.) The way these dancers move between solo, duet, and company, alternating central focus and periphery, reveals a group bond that is more than a willful accumulation of disciplined labor. Maybe this invisible yet tangible bond is part of the unseen - the vibrant imaginary - that the work evokes.

It’s hard to imagine a better use or further exploration of the building, especially the transitional spaces - doors, windows, hallways, and the spaces between spaces. Sonya Smith and Tara Fagan performed a sweet duet for an improbable triangular space that links two dance studios. The molding above a door became as likely a place to find support as from her partner’s shoulder. All of these dancers, especially the three women, have lovely, muscular arms. They spend a lot of time, gently swinging onto their hands, pausing with their feet on the walls, and they seem to lift each other, or suspend themselves from doors and railings with ease. Kelly Kemp floated in a window frame overlooking the stairwell and James Soria jumped to grab overhead storage shelves like a parkour runner or playground athlete. Our experience of the dance and the space was enhanced by the spare and subtle touch of Jenny B. of Shady Lady Lighting. I especially liked the audience sofas bathed in blue and when the dancers in the lobby performed under a string of red bulbs, like a summer porch or vintage fairground at night.

Years ago Roman choreographed a piece at ODC Theater on 17th Street (now undergoing a radical rebuild). In that work (8-1/2 x 11) the audience watched the same dance from two different viewpoints. Imagine seeing a dance through a narrow doorway, knowing that you are only catching glimpses of a larger choreography viewed by the other half of the audience. In At Play, the audience is again offered a standard doorframe through which to watch a dance. Crowded, half of us sitting on the floor, we watch the five dancers in a line, leaping into and out of sight. We see landings with no take-off and rebounds with no landings. One dancer is carried into view, another is pushed halfway out the 2nd floor window overlooking 24th St BART, before he rebounds back into the studio, and then flies out of view. One dancer lies on the floor, and a dancer we can’t see, drags her from view, her legs trailing… as another dancer bounces into the visible.

For our final move we gather on and around two large sofas. An audience of strangers is now a happy family. Negotiating politeness is no longer necessary. We’re all in it together and accept the choreography that Roman has intended for us as we huddle together, sharing the same democratic spirit that the dancers have modeled. The music is pumping and the dancers are moving faster. Weight exchanges and supports are precise yet still seem gentle and easy. They are dancing now in the lobby where we sat to watch a hallway dance over 30 minutes ago. And we’re watching from what is usually the stage. As the music calms, the dancers disappear, Lizz points to our right, where they reappear at the top of the risers. Fearless Sonya Smith claims the steel beams that hold this building together. She recalls Joanna Haigood, a pioneering dancer of dangerous heights and exploratory spaces, concealing the work involved as she appears both relaxed and weightless. The final gesture of the evening is Smith’s back arching over the steal, her arms open to the side, heart open, available. Lights fade. Applause.

This review was, so far, easy to write. But I didn’t love everything about the performance and I wish I could as easily find the critical language to discuss what I considered the weak points of the work. To complicate things, I am a performer/choreographer in the same community as these people. I’m friendly with some of the dancers, the musicians, the choreographer, the lighting designer (Jenny B), the board operator, the videographer and the people who run the theater. Mutual respect among underfunded dance artists is important to me. I write about Bay Area dance and performance because of a painful lack of public discussion, visibility, critique and consideration. I don’t follow rules of journalism nor of academia, although I flirt in both fields. I’m stylistically prejudiced against most traces of Modern dance and Ballet vocabulary and compositional structures. So if I don’t always like or appreciate Roman’s movement choices, I tend to refocus on other aspects of the performance. Once I reveal my prejudices, of what value is it to critique an artist’s movement or compositional choices?

I want to ask the dancers about their faces. Where are they looking and are they trying to express something particular? Are the faces choreographed, like the arms, or the leaps? I’ve noted that the work investigates a physical, architectural space as much as it suggests psychic, imaginal, and allegorical spaces. Recognizing this dual or complex relationship to ‘site’ might explain the performer’s shifting choice of gaze and presence. Sometimes the dancers looked at us, acknowledged our presence, and acknowledged that we were looking at them. Other times they looked as if gazing over a distant horizon, or blanked their faces as if to reflect an internal meditation. I generally found this latter look confusing or off-putting. My alienation got worse when the cello sounded airy or moody to match these dreamy faces, and the gestures seemed less grounded in physical curiosity or in necessity. With a gestural vocabulary shifting between abstract and practical, I was caught between worlds, even time periods. But my attempt at critique only highlights the partial and inbetween where this dance played throughout the evening; playing between rooms, between inside and out, between visible and invisible, between the body and the imagination. Now it’s 5am and I’m still caught between, writing myself into further sites of transition and translation, between what happened and what I experienced. Thanks Lizz Roman & Dancers.

* Local spaces where performers have entered or exited from bathrooms: Smith/Wymore at CounterPULSE, Sunny Drake at The Garage, Lizz Roman at ODC, Neon Weiss and others at 848, Twincest at femina potens, Lizz Roman at Dance Mission…

Note: Audience size is limited to 30 people, and it is highly recommended that you buy tickets in advance. No late arrivals.

Lizz Roman & Dancers

AT PLAY

May 15-17, May 22-24, 2009

Two shows a night 8:00 9:30

Tix $20

brownpapertickets.com

Dance Mission Theater, 3316-24th St. @ Mission, SF

Pichet Klunchun & Myself (Jerome Bêl)

Pichet Klunchun & Myself
By Jerome Bêl in collaboration with Pichet Klunchun
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 3/3/09
Co-presented by Dancers’ Group

“He’s full of contradictions,” comments Guillermo Gomez Peña as we leave the bar and say goodbye to French dance artist Jerome Bêl. More of a conceptualist than a choreographer, Bêl has achieved considerable international success with a series of anti-spectacles that interrogate dance performance and the Western theater.

In his first Bay Area performance, Bêl performed with Pichet Klunchun, a Thai dancer in the Kun tradition. Pichet Klunchun & Myself, which was warmly received in San Francisco, is smart, generous and delightful. Its provocations are its charms.

The performance is like a scripted talk show. Each artist questions the other about his work and gives brief yet evocative demonstrations. In common they share the struggle of finding or developing an audience that can understand their work. How they represent death in performance (or not) is one of many contrasts between their approaches to dance making. Despite Bêl’s almost coy distancing, they are both moved by the other’s work. That is to say, they were moved during their first meeting, of which this performance is a recreation. The performance is a documentary theater piece based on an actual meeting in which they introduced their work to each other. The mood is informal and anti-dramatic, and yet the fourth wall is firmly in place, as are the conventions of theatrical artifice and repetition.

In the lobby after the show, theater artist Kevin Clarke says, “It’s theater, not performance art. It’s a representation of their first encounter, a showing.” When I mention this to Bêl after the performance, he says, “Yes we are representing something. It’s a real fourth wall piece. I’m not proud of it. It’s what happened. We didn’t have time.”

The work has been performed around 100 times since it premiered at the Bangkok Fringe Festival in 2004 and is probably one of the most often presented and written about works of contemporary dance in the past five years. And yet the two men speak as if they’ve never met, and have no idea how the other will respond to their questions or demonstrations. In an interview with choreographer Jess Curtis, Bêl informs that there is no written text and that each performer is free to change the discourse at will. “Depends on our mood, our situation. For example, Pichet says different things if we perform in Thailand, Asia or in the West. I can say specific things if I know that somebody is in the theater and I want to make him/her understand a particular thing.”

After the show Bêl told me that the piece with Klunchun is his first popular success. He added, “The first time we performed it, I thought it was a failure, not to be repeated. We were convinced to remake it in Brussels.” Clearly, it snowballed from there. Previous works have been successful, he pointed out, but only with curators, presenters and a limited contemporary dance audience. The audience in San Francisco, for their Tuesday-night only performance at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, included more local choreographers and dance-performance people than at any other performance in the past few years. Explaining his work to Klunchun, Bêl describes the audience for his work as an audience interested in contemporary art. He says he doesn’t return money to dissatisfied patrons because contemporary art does not promise anything, so there is no contract with the audience to break.

The second half of the performance, in which Klunchun interviews Bêl, is a primer in contemporary art aesthetics, tactics, and tensions. Bêl articulates the primary role of research and experimentation, the importance of state funding, a critique of spectacle and representation, a resistance to virtuosity rooted in populism and democracy, and a deconstruction or appropriation of pop culture. Since the late 50s, there has been a genre of dance that investigates dance more than presents dancing. Central to this project is a critical inquiry of Western theatrical practice.

Bêl said that he could no longer find meaning in dance so he took two years off to read philosophy, art criticism, history and more. He cited Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (“All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.”) as particularly influential. Explaining to Klunchun, Bêl said, “So there was a struggle, how to keep doing performances, which I love, but how to do spectacle without being the société du spectacle?” Since that time, Bêl’s work has been spacious and slow paced. If there is dancing to a pop song, movements generally respond to a single idea and play out for the length of the song. Minimal and conceptual describe his approach to choreography and performance. He said that the slow pace of his work gives the audience room to have a response. UC Davis professor Lynette Hunter notes that most anti-spectacle is not intended to provoke emotional affective response, and yet this one did. Not a communal catharsis, she notes, but instead the performance prompted a particular and open-ended emotional response.

Bêl is moved by Klunchun’s dance of a woman crying upon finding out that her husband has been killed in battle. With gestural precision he shows her hiding tears, and then hardening to anger.
When Klunchun adds the gesture for ‘raining’ to the slow funeral walk, Bêl says, “This is a funeral. It starts to rain. It is sad.” We feel not only the dance, but also Bêl’s feeling of the dance. He is learning to read Kun. Later, Bêl performs a dance in which he dies slowly, or softly, to the sounds of Roberta Flack singing, Killing Me Softly (with his song). Some in the audience laugh at this overly literal joke, but Klunchun is reminded of his mother dying. While the performance reveals the limitations to translation and mutual understanding, their simple gestures of grief seem to transcend cultural difference. The work suggests that cross-cultural respect and understanding require both patience and dancing.

Although their movement demonstrations are brief, each artist reveals an embodied virtuosity rooted in both reverence and concern for dance. It’s as if by limiting the actual dancing to short excerpts that punctuate a spoken conversation, the audience might appreciate dance even more. The work suggests that if you understand the meaning, with space to insert yourself and your concerns, then you’ll consider it “good.”


Klunchun states that western concert dance throws the energy away. He demonstrates a jeté, a leap from one foot to the other. The legs extend forward and back through space, the arms reaching up, as if thrown, releasing something from the hands. Bêl starts to analyze and maybe even to defend but then he agrees. What is not mentioned is that much dance of the past 30 years, even by people extending European classical or modern dance, practices recycling and circulating energy in the body, between bodies, between the body and its environment. This is evident in the influence of Aikido on Contact Improvisation, the dance practices describe as release technique or releasing, Simone Forti’s passages about flow, Alexander Technique in the work of Anne Bluethentahal or Augusta Moore, and William Forsythe’s approach to improvisation. David Zambrano teaches a technique that focuses on recycling energy, except that the ground, the earth, is the center or king, and the body is both indicator and energy itself, moving into and out of the floor. Klunchun’s description of the body as a literal metaphor for a Thai temple, with Buddha at the center and hands and feet continually redirecting energy back to Buddha, offered specific language for re-considering contemporary dance techniques.

We have seen anti-spectacular performance that is intentionally not enjoyable, not pleasing, but as Curtis points out, Bêl’s work is often witty and enjoyable. Bêl addresses this possible contradiction with, “I love that audiences enjoy the work, but not too much. If they just enjoy it, I am disappointed. I am more ambitious than that.”

The thought-provoking work is arguably most contradictory in its relationship to transnational and post-colonial debate. Despite Bêl’s intentions to avoid exploitation, the work simultaneously resists and complies with larger structures of neo-colonialist practice that would privilege a reading of Bêl’s contemporary European dance over Klunchun’s traditional Thai/Kun dance. Within the limited field of contemporary dance and performance, Bêl is famous and funded. Klunchun is neither. Even in their respective countries, their status is neither symmetrical nor comparable. Their performance is theorized, marketed, and presented in contemporary dance contexts, where contemporary is simply the most current, and globalized, version of European and American cultural developments. Klunchun’s work, both by being foreign and by going first, becomes the ground for re-viewing and re-valuing not only Bêl’s work, but our own; we, the white people in the audience, and we, the postmodern dance and performance people who are the most represented ‘community’ in the audience. Simultaneously the conversation reveals the complicated role of the western tourist. In Thailand, as consumers of “traditional” dance, tourists are the primary audience for Kun performance, albeit a performance adapted to tourist attention spans and hotel poolside schedules. Sitting in the audience, resonating with Bêl’s situated knowledge as a European dance artist, I wondered if I/Bêl was just another tourist using the Other as a mirror to see myself more clearly. It is a tribute to the work that it’s surface simplicity and generous spaciousness, provoke personal considerations of cultural shadow. A mirror, indeed.

Pichet Klunchun & Myself is an excellent failure. It paradoxically embodies all that it attempts to critique, in terms of spectacle, a democratic exchange, virtuosity, and the role of the European in global culture. Its contradictions are inspirational, evocative, encouraging, and generative.


Note:
If you're interested in Bêl's work, there is a website/archive/catalogue worth checking out.
http://www.catalogueraisonne-jeromebel.com/


PS.
My review of this work is more of a failure than the performance itself. When I sent this to my prof Lynette Hunter she told me that dance thinker Susan Foster suggested that gender was key to analyzing the piece. I feel dumb that I missed this. Duh, representations and memories of the female body are the primary reference in the work as well as its gateway to feeling, grief, and to bonding. Klunchun dances a woman crying. Bêl dies to the voice of a woman which reminds Klunchun of his own mother dying. Absent and present, woman is, throughout. I look forward to Foster's writing on this.

PPS.
July 2009, Oaxaca, The Prisma Forum
I just saw this piece for a second time. When Klunchun demonstrates Kun dance, he casts Bêl in the role of the King, counterpoint to Klunchun's role as Demon. Klunchun dances a sequence that illustrates the ineffectiveness of the King's magic arrow, concluding with a tiny yet forceful gesture of flicking his pinky at Bêl. The following conversation between them clarifies that the Demon is telling the King that he is a insignificant piece of shit. It's hard not to see the smirk in this colonial clowning.

Penny Arcade BITCH! DYKE! FAGHAG! WHORE!

Penny Arcade's
BITCH! DYKE! FAGHAG! WHORE!

Through March 8, 2009
Brava Theater Center, San Francisco
http://www.brava.org/
myspace page
http://www.pennyarcade.tv/press/

Queer underground survivor and superstar Penny Arcade has made a deliciously vibratory experience for all whores, feminists, fags, dykes, faghags, and the people who love (or pay) them. Appropriately the performance is titled, BITCH! DYKE! FAGHAG! WHORE! An ever-evolving vaudevillian ritual spectacle, the work was born during the sex and censorship wars of the 80’s, but is updated and adapted to today’s San Francisco.

Penny is backed by a chorus of ten saucy strippers and go go dancers who surround the audience on a series of platforms. Men and women, boys and girls, these young people are already masters of sleazy representation, coy flirtation, and camp erotica. Depending on your mood or preference you might find the burlesque seductive or provocative, titillating or even inappropriate. But whether it’s lust in your pants or morals on your mind, consider these scantily clad crotch hounds as temple dancers making the stage holy for Penny’s mythic storytelling, political ranting, and erotic preaching.

B!D!F!W! is about history and love and intimacy and the struggle to survive. It is about the importance of sexual energy liberated from hypocrisy and marketplace. The show is long and probably too much. But it's gay honey, and gay liberation is intended to be too much. In fact, it’s super gay, over the top, excessive, and even includes the very gay songs, "I will survive" and "We are family", with and without an ironic wink wink.

Calling for a new language that is neither politically nor academically correct, B!D!F!W! embodies the histories of the last 30 to 40 years of LGBT activism and queer theater/performance. Walking us through the 70s we visit the queens and queers of the avant-garde who adopted Penny as a wayward teen faghag. Then we visit a very late 70s militant separatist lesbian land where men can’t even touch a toe and gossip rides the winds of patchouli. We know the 80s are coming and still it’s a painful shock when Penny’s friends start to die. Three hundred of them. Her grief and rage are tempered with the wisdom of survival, even as her intense feelings extend from her body to awaken in our own. The stripper chorus, too young to have been there, become the queer kids at drag momma’s feet, still, attentive, grateful, and sad.

Penny can speak to loneliness and devastation, isolation and rejection, without drowning us (or herself). She's hilarious and occasionally dangerous. Prepping for a righteous finale state of the union address, Penny proudly strips and teases her hot aging body to a film of Wooster legend Ron Vawter being Lenny Bruce. The juxtaposition is punk, fierce. Queering the stage in many ways, she switches genres from 80's performance to Laugh-In standup to burlesque Happening. My favorite moment was when she held my hand in the dark, while bragging that her unique gift to performance history is simply turning all the lights out and hanging out with the audience. A long monologue by seven-year old Penny, chatting lesbian histories while her legs swing from a bench too high for her feet to touch the ground, was probably the only scene that I wished were shorter. B!D!F!W! is wildly imperfect, contradictory and eccentric which is exactly what allows all the love, intimacy, political liberation, and sexual healing to be available to any audience willing to receive.

My buddy Neil and I left the show sensing that our own intimacy had shifted, that we felt more comfortable and friendly with others in the audience on the way out. Maybe that doesn't turn you on. Maybe that won't happen. I felt more alive and more sexual; more inspired to take bold action and fondle more ass.

DRACUL: PRINCE OF FIRE, A BALLET! (short review)

Dracul: Prince of Fire

The Crucible’s 10th anniversary fire ballet was a re-telling of the Dracula story with circus, burlesque, ballet, heavy metal-ish blasts of actual fire, molten metal, and interventions by Rocky Horror’s Brad & Janet, Buffy the vampire slayer, and Michael Jackson’s zombies.
It was somewhat campy but not enough. They drained the radical potential from the Camp. They remade Rocky Horror but forgot the importance of Queer. The ballet took itself way too seriously. The music was bombastic orchestral drama and I didn’t like it. The moment where the undead performed the Thriller choreography was delightful genius. The acrobats were superb. The work was a fantastic, community-based spectacle featuring a large and joyous ensemble of aerialists, dancers and fire artists. The stage was literally on fire!
The performances benefited The Crucible, which is an inspired, populist school for fire and metal arts, based in West Oakland.

(If you want the long long review, read the next post)

DRACUL: PRINCE OF FIRE, A BALLET!

Dracul: Prince of Fire
January 9, 2009. The Crucible, West Oakland.

10th Anniversary Fire Ballet, directed and designed by The Crucible Executive Director, Michael Sturtz.

The performance began with a welcoming from Dracul’s director and primary designer, Michael Sturtz, who is also the founder and executive director of The Crucible. He wanted to answer the question, why a fire ballet? He answered with a series of questions. Who is here to see ballet? A smattering of applause. Who is here for the aerialists? More applause. Who is here for zombies and vampires? Even more applause. And then guiding our crescendo, he called out, who is here for fire? And the crowd roared. Point taken.

Dracul, the prince of fire, played magnificently by Brett Womack (Circo Zero, New Pickles, Vau de Vire) arrives on the balcony, carrying a torch and standing behind a circular scrim, which becomes a projection screen for the rest of the event. When he approaches a staircase, the banister is set aflame. When he descends to the stage he touches a tall pillar with his torch and ignites a fountain of fire, with flaming fluids tumbling down. Enter the massive robot dragon, stage left, spewing fire. Its articulated head, with flaming nostrils, lurches left and right, snapping its jaws. Dracul draws his sword and fights the dragon, slapping his weapon against the welded beast and pushing it offstage. The mimetic gestures and orchestral score are super dramatic. OMG! He’s injured. Dracul falls to the ground and starts to pull his armor off. A newfound strength starts coursing through his body. A cable descends from the ceiling. Dracul fixes his wrist to a strap at the bottom of the cable and he flies. A line of fire erupts along the downstage edge of the stage. He flies again, and then performs impressive circus moves while suspended from one arm.

The townsfolk arrive, walking in every direction. One at a time he grabs them in an embrace, they swoon, he bares his teeth, sinks them into their neck, feeds. They slump to the ground. It’s a world of grey and black. Everyone has ghoulish makeup, white faces, dark shadows for cheeks. The music is serious, but Dracul plays with us, referencing every vampire we’ve ever seen on TV. The stage is littered with corpses. When all are dead, he stands center and raises his arms, wide and open, and they rise. The zombies come to life and then it’s Thriller. For real. 20 plus dancers led by Drac give us the dance we know too well. Applause and cheers. If anyone needs a model of simulacra, a disappearance of the real in an endless series of copies and repetitions, this is it. It’s kinda genius. Unfortunately this distorted techno version of one of the most listened to songs of all time, is the only break we get from an overwhelming symphony of bombastic melodrama.

A pole dancer descends from the ceiling. Her first gesture, wearing shorty shorts, is a wide straddle crotch shot to the audience. Two more women emerge from white aerial pods. The mummies unravel and the trio of sexy vamp-fatales (Breonna Noack, Kerri Kresinski, Noel Dellofano) announce a zombie world safe for burlesque. Four women begin a dance below. A modern ballet chorus. Other performers arrive to spray sparks from the balcony. One zombie (Tom Sepe) spits and eats fire. Others weld, bend metal. The two fatales continue in the air, performing synchronized, aerial acrobatics on the white fabric. They’re having so much fun, it almost seems normal to be suspended, inverted, arching back to grab one’s foot and bringing it towards one’s head. They call it contortion for a reason. Dracula oversees his seedy empire. The scene is a complicated, multi-centered portrait of life in the blood and fire factory.

Brad and Janet arrive through the audience. They’re people, not zombies, i.e., no ghoulish goth makeup. Brad’s glasses announce geek. Janet’s wardrobe announces prude. They’re both prudish geeks. Janet texts her friend Lucy and the txt msg is projected onto the round screen. An acrobat (Simon Chabon) spinning a long staff burning at both ends dance-tumbles across the stage and pulls the couple into the scene. Chabon gives them a thrill/scare. He’s very good. A graceful tumbler with excellent timing, sustained flight, and controlled gestures. Now add fire and a charming presence. Brad and Janet are entranced, and thus delivered into the hands of the evil Dracul. Bwa ha ha.

This is fairy tale so Drac immediately falls in love with Janet. While one fatale distracts Brad, the other two strip Janet to her chaste, white undies. Then they strip him too. He gets to keep his black garters and socks as well as his tighty whities. Meanwhile Drac steals Janet away, which allows for a comic sexy dance with the three fatales and Brad. OK this is all pretend, mime, representation, citation, reference, cliché, archetype, i.e., Bad Acting. I remind myself that this is melodrama, a po-mo B movie horror. It’s not as self-conscious as Scream, and that’s too bad. Suddenly the sex play is over. Now the girls have fire. Brad is bound to a rack and tortured. Of course this is also an excuse for a sexy ballet. The music must be read as Camp overkill, otherwise it hurts like a cheap manipulative sound score. No worse, it hurts like hell, as in Dante, or Heart of Darkness hell. O the horror, the horror.

Buffy the vampire slayer arrives. Brad has collapsed and the fatale trio are dancing and sniffing his shirt. Jealousy is woven into their solidarity. The fatales confront Buffy, who is not afraid. She pulls out two wooden stakes. Dracul enters with sword. Thanks to a stage combat coach, they fight. It’s too bad they don’t disrupt their own representations. The relentless music continues. The projection of whirling gears continues. Buffy starts to win. They flip. They “struggle”. She throws garlic but he bathes himself in it, taunting her, then throws it aside. She flicks holy water in his face. Drac is undaunted. Things are looking bad for grrrl power hero. When she holds up a cross, he sets it on fire. Before I can think KKK twice, she drops it. Buffy wins this round with a forceful blast from a fire extinguisher which makes even more fire and smoke. The fatales escape, exiting vertically, up. The projection is black birds racing across the sky.

Brad and Janet dance a lovely ballet pas de deux in white underwear. The projections show blue sky, wafting white clouds. They reach, they extend, he lifts, she floats. Three to four minutes of ballet with flutes and violins. He tries to kiss, she pulls away. More pas de deux, slower perhaps, more serious, but not dark. It’s way too much. When they spin off, she is in his arms. Applause.

Here’s where the production’s lack of irony is most obvious. Ballet in a melodrama? Why not? Joan Holden (SF Mime Troupe) wrote an excellent defense of melodrama as a people’s art linking it to commedia dell’arte’s archetypal figures and struggles (e.g., good vs. evil). Holden’s melodrama is popular art, intentionally lowbrow, not elite. Ballet, outside of the seasonal fundraiser in the guise of a costume spectacle called The Nutcracker, is hardly lowbrow. The only Nutcrackers worth seeing are the Revolutionary Nutcracker Sweetie by Dance Brigade’s Grrrl Brigade and Mark Morris’ queer camp sensation The Hard Nut. The 40 year old Rocky Horror Picture Show is, among other things, subversively queer. This Dracul misses its opportunities for popular uprising via the liberatory potential of lowbrow spectacle. Think Brad and Dr. Frankenfurter, Lucille Ball, Buffy, hyphy or crumping, John Waters, Chris Rock, Jon Stewart or Culture Clash. They realize that low brow is permission to satirize highbrow. In this way, it’s always time for melodrama or B movies or camp, because it’s always relevant to confront the absurdity of everyday life. Dracul avoids the social commentaries of the works it quotes (Buffy, Rocky Horror, MJ’s Thriller). How much better, funnier, more thrilling to have Drac make out with male zombies, Janet getting near seduced (or gang banged) by the sexy girls, or just townsfolk humping inappropriately during the super-normal lovers duet. It’s a let down to combine all of this and then deliver a fated story of true love in which boy gets girl.

And while I’m on the much maligned topic of political correctness and the role of art to subvert dominant cultures, do I have to remind everyone that we’re in West Oakland and have been treated to a 45 minute pre-show of documentary video clips showcasing the many Black youth who enjoy classes at The Crucible? Why is any production of this scale so White? Especially when hosted by a community building, all people’s access, educational non-profit located in a historic African American neighborhood, in a White minority city. Without trying to white wash any of the cast, it appeared to me that all lead roles, all or most directors and designers, all tech people, and most of the secondary roles were played by people with ethnic roots in Northern Europe, from Great Britain to Russia. Two of the dance chorus quartet were visibly non-White. Apologies to anyone I missed due to mixed-ethnic backgrounds and ghoulish make-up. This kind of counting suggests a more simplistic perspective than I am trying to provoke, and yet statistics are one of the best ways we can measure cultural progress or paralysis.

Back to the show. Brad & Janet have just danced off in their pristine yet coy underwear. Lucy, Janet’s buddy, the lithe powerhouse Alyssa Marx, appears, repeatedly trying to reach Janet on her cell. Silence at the end of the phone. Somber strings and a follow spot accompany her descent down the stairs as she searches for her lost friends. I take a moment to check out the set, a near classical balcony and staircase built around a central doorway. It has a goth-industrial style (and quality) that resembles digital gaming with pillars and bas-relief dragons that spew actually flames. It’s part southern or Transylvanian mansion and part abandoned factory. It screams Theatah.

Dracul creeps out from his tomb room, opening the central portal which is angled as if he is emerging from a ship or from within the earth itself. Lucy is still on the phone. Drac carries two lengths of black fabric which he rigs to a descending cable. As they ascend the fabrics become veil and cape, building the tension before the inevitable strike on the innocent woman. Moving like a breeze, he removes her jacket before she senses his presence. All the better to perform an aerial duet in the guise of a fight. The vertical pas de deux starts off pretty and symmetrical but each set of movements increases in risk and virtuosity. There is an awesome moment, when Lucy, fabrics crossed at her back, is held in the tension caused by Dracul pulling from the ground. She spins deliriously. It gets even better. Lucy proves to be a match for Drac, and in the only gender role reversal of the whole performance, she lifts him off the ground. He climbs up her body (trust me this takes a bunch of strength from both people and it usually hurts the porteur, usually a brawny guy, but in this case, a fierce yet small woman). Appropriating her strength, he aims his teeth for her neck and bites. Game over. A long red fabric spills from the ceiling. Lucy performs a mid-air transfer, wraps herself in the symbolic blood and plunges in a triple spiral to her death. Unexpectedly, the red fabric that has just held Lucy 15 feet in the air is released and it drops to the ground beside her. The projections are weird colorful liquids dropping into water. Dracula departs wrapped in the fabrics, the black and the red, the darkness and blood. Lucy, dead, is alone on stage.

Janet and Brad return, clothed, to find poor dead Lucy. More pained faces - o no! O no! - Bad acting that might be campy fun but is only a hint of what camp might be. A more serious ballet pas de deux follows. I leave to pee, thanks to the beer they were serving before the show. But I’m fast so I have a couple of minutes to wonder why oh why a melodrama with camp punctuation? Why no queer anything? Why no theatrical risks or disruptions? Isn’t fire a destroyer, cleanser, purifier? I return and Buffy enters the scene, seemingly invisible to the couple dancing. It’s neither silly nor mournful, but all the indicators of serious ballet are well performed: arabesques, developpés and smooth lifts.

Lucy starts to move, her back arching from the ground, her chest reaching for the sky. The couple think this is a good sign, but scary. The music swells, seriously. The projections of dripping ink or color continue. Yes Lucy rises, but not for good, she’s evil! The aerial cable descends. She wraps her wrist and is lifted into the air. She flies and does a cool move that requires much strength and flexibility. Then she descends, releases the wrist strap, and leaps about the stage. Evil circus vampire girl Lucy goes after prudish geek guy Brad. Wooden stake handler Buffy intervenes and the two women engage in an acrobatic fight. Janet pathetically approaches vampire Lucy with a small torch. We laugh. Lucy smirks, grasps the flame, extinguishes it in her mouth, and goes after Janet. Buffy, just in time, stabs Lucy with the stake. Add very weird screams to the bombastic symphonic blasts. Applause. Darkness.

Janet dances a solo. She’s a lovely dancer but I have no idea what she’s doing, what her motivation might be, what direction she might have received. Fires are burning everywhere. The projection is a night sky with moon and moving clouds. Dracul soars overhead in an overhead crane that traverses the entire building. Wow. Janet is still dancing. Long reaches, legs extending, toes pointing. Pathos on the dance floor. Dracul is delivered to the balcony where he grabs a rope rigged to the ceiling. She spins. He flies over the stage. A choreography of rope maneuvers begins. (That’s cored lisse or web to you circus fans). He grabs the rope, quickly wraps himself and then tumbles in the air, or flings himself upside down and releases his hands. Dracul/Womack is so clear, impressive without effort. Top of his game. He draws Janet to him. Who wouldn’t fall under his spell? He pulls her off the ground, but no bite yet. He releases her for more ballet, more rope act. Suspended up high, with the rope securing his pelvis, he makes a loop of the dangling cord. She falls into the seductive trap. As he pulls her to him, she seems to roll within the loop (think DV8’s Enter Achilles). As she spirals towards him, he grabs her for a mid-air bite, suck, and drain. Now they descend and do ballet. The moon is red and full. Night clouds waft. He wraps her in the rope, which is stained red. She too wears a dress of dirty reds. Lights out.

The follow spot finds Brad entering from the balcony. He descends the stairs looking for Janet, Concern. Fear. Follow spot. When Brad finds zombie Janet there are quick scary fire blasts upstage. (Think Led Zepplin.) He realizes that she is lost to the vampires. Janet goes after Brad. Super strong, she tosses him about. OK this is the 2nd gender role reversal. He tries to hold her. She breaks free. Throws him to the ground. (She never loved him!) They struggle. And then he stakes her! More recorded screams and the symphony swells again again again.

Brad dances the dance that says, o shit! I killed my girlfriend! What now? He leaps, dives, slides, and throws his arms to the heavens. Then he does these crazy knee jumps, spinning 360 degrees to land on his again on his knees. Again and again, three aerial pirouettes to and from the knees. More screaming. Running. Looking everywhere. Darkness. Applause.

In the dark a heartbeat is heard. Then a chorus of operatic women’s voices, oooh ooooh. The fire pillar pulses a flame. Cool. More operatic ooooh-ing. Dracul arrives; walking the pace I call International Slow Motion. It’s not Butoh slow, or filmic slow, but it’s just slow enough to read as serious or ritualistic. With much drama he discovers the staked Janet. The entire edge of the elevated stage bursts into flames. He lifts her onto a metal table that two of the undead wheel towards center stage. Recalling Frankenstein/Frankenfurter but with the aesthetics of Mad Max/Burning Man, a postindustrial transparent half-dome lowers to cover her. All the zombies arrive. Opera voices continue. Big singing, men and women. Now a dance with everyone. Ballet, contortion, fire and blacksmithing. Projection of church stained glass, spinning. More opera, serious opera. Welding, contortion, fire. A zombie fire sculptor pours molten metal from the balcony as voices crescendo and music goes (classical) crazy. Big timpani, horns, strings, everything. Voices, fire spinning, leaping dancers. Janet comes alive in the plexi bubble. Dracul raises his fists to the air. The bubble rises. Zombies spin the table, fire spinners spin fire, and everyone circles the table. Janet lurches as her body circuitry re-boots into life. Dracul and Janet find each other, embrace. All music drops to a single violin, but no, that was only momentary, timpani and everything roar back.

Buffy, stakes ready, arrives to defeat the vampire ghouls. Lots of stage combat including escapes climbing up and plunging down the pole (Chinese mast). Brad cheers from the sidelines, go stake girl go! Dracul arrives to fight Buffy. She loses one stake but in a quick pirouette she thrusts the remaining stake into Dracul. He falls. She turns away. He stands, pulls out the stake, and then stabs her in the back. Hey that’s not fair! It’s not right that Buffy dies so unjustly. Buffy’s grrrl power is based on the fact that she always gets her vampire. After all the stage combat and acrobatics, Buffy stabs Drac but it doesn’t work and then he kills her. Stabs her in the back! That’s the only way he gets his girl. He should be falling for dead Buffy. Now that’s hot! But this is no morality play.

Meanwhile, stage left, super power Janet destroys Brad. Timing her attack to percussive symphonic blasts she snaps his neck and then sends him to his grave. Ummm why didn’t she bite his neck to join her in the infinite life of the undead bloodsuckers? Oh yeah, Dracul and Janet meet center stage. (Forever) young lovers walking among their beloved flames. They walk downstage, and turn from their lover gaze to us. They lick lips. We’re next. We giggle. Hand in hand they exit through the tomb portal. Projection of red and yellow sky, a new day dawning. We applaud. Music resolves with a final chord.

The air is thick with the malodor of burnt fuel. Then big rock music blasts for the bows. The dance quartet chorus does as staccato spazz dance that’s better than anything they’ve done tonight. We respond as if at a commedia, cheering and jeering with each actor as they vamp in character. The crescendo of applause peaks with Brett Womack’s bow. (To think I first worked with him as a 19 year old boyman.) Kerri K and Tom S are non-stop fun. All the tech guys come out, and the dragon too. Lots and lots of applause.


Dracul: Prince of Fire was a massive undertaking by hordes of talented people. Imagine a DIY Cirque du Soleil. It was also a show that couldn't really exist anywhere else on earth. The Crucible has not only ridden the wave of Burning Man culture, it has been a primary instigator in the communities, aesthetics and resources that make Burning Man possible. And the Bay Area, thanks to a legacy of DIY circus, vaudville and burlesque has an impressive talent pool for aerialists and acrobats of all kinds. Kuddos to everyone involved.

Check them out: http://thecrucible.org