'above under inbetween,' like a minimalist circus

I accept said law of cultural consumption, and so, during the festival, I try to see lots of shows.  This year, however, I felt I couldn’t run the marathon.  I experienced anxiety at the thought of making a new matrix – my method of taping sheets of graph paper to create a big chart that allows me to narrow down the dozens of shows whose descriptions intrigue, to a more humane viewing schedule.  I must take gambles on what’ll be the best, hope that tickets are available to the performances I choose, and let other shows fall into the slots still free.  This year, I stuck mostly with Live Arts – the invitational portion of the festival, where the odds are better (but not fixed) that you’ll see higher caliber performances.  My first three nights: STORE; The Last Cargo Cult; above under inbetween.  Some thoughts follow.  But first, in case you don’t make it to the end of this piece of writing, I want to convey my experience last night, 9/15/2009, because that’s the only show I’ve seen which you still have a chance to see.

Eugine Ionesco was born in Romania and exiled from other countries.  He wrote The Chairs in the early 1950s, and it’s being performed here by the Philadelphia company called Ideopathic Ridiculopothy Consortium.  They’ve done absolute wonders with Beckett and other absurdist plays in past years on the red-velvet-lined stage L’Etage Cabaret; this year, they’re using a very intimate space called The Red Room, at Society Hill Playhouse.  If you like existential humor, you absolutely must go.  (Through Saturday.)

There is a very delicate balance in the humor of the absurd, a tense sort of humor at the precipice of existence and nothingness.  I’ve been lucky enough to have experienced it through theater on a few treasured occasions.  IRC did it in the past with Beckett; the Irish Repertoire Theater )which coincidentally has similar initials but is a more so-called professional group) did not achieve it with Beckett when the came through town two years ago.

IRC did it again this year with Ionesco.  I knew nothing of this author but his name, but when you see this production, you understand why it has a place in the cannon.  Tina Brock, who directs the company and also acted, coaxes you to the absolute brink of the canyon, the precipice of existence.  She has a co-star; the two are essentially the only characters in the play.  Against a semicircular wall of white doors, she plays an old lady, hunched but darting around, in an immaculately conceived costume – a white gown with trail of lace, and white slippers, setting off eye-popping red socks matched to her red lips.  From the first movement on the stage – her step onto a stool to reach up, struggling to light a hanging lantern, she channels the futility of existence with a fiery dignity (“there’s a bit of Lady Macbeth in her,” she said of the roll afterwards).

The plot is a conventional absurd one: a man and a woman – husband and wife – sit in their small dwelling, in the delirium of old age and failed hopes, believing that (invisible) guests are arriving to listen to the old man’s “message” – in which is to be a revealed something wonderful.  It conjures the same anticipation as the arrival of the title character in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.  Yet of course the two are pathetic, and they great the arrival of a cast of invisible characters – the colonial, the emperor – obsequiously, embarrassingly.

And what is the “message” that the old man will give?  We’re promised Big Wisdom – the explanation of everything important .  Most absurdly, he can’t speak it himself – he’s scheduled an orator to come deliver the message.  “He will radiate to the universe the light of my mind — my PHILOSOPHY.” says the old man, with the kind of pity-inducing gusto that we get from the moribund Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s depresso-classic Death of a Salesman. He’s played by Bob Schmidt, who gives the roll his all, and doesn’t let up the energy for a moment (neither of them do), but he his natural disposition is ultimately not the right fit for the character.  He instills too much pity for my tastes, which offsets the balance of the humor that’s particular to absurdity.  Tina, meanwhile, is an absolute tour de force.  The theater’s teeny, and you should sit close enough to watch her face register the pain or hope of every word the old man speaks.  She’s a delight to behold, and I’d urge you to go see it (or the next IRC production, which they plugged – upcoming in March).

There is a third character, though he doesn’t appear until the very end.  He is the orator, who we’d presumed was also imaginary, and he is a very tall man with the swagger of a pirate.  After building up to the “message” the whole play, the orator bows graciously and commences the “message” in grunted, slurred gibberish.    Allow me to say only that I laughed harder at this final moment than I have in perhaps twelve or eighteen months.  (And in that hard laugh, in the humor of the absurd, something about the nature of humor itself is revealed, and it’s got something to do with nothingness.)

The great thing about theater  – unlike art galleries – is that the actors generally get better toward the end of the run.  So go see THE CHAIRS in one of the remaining shows.  It will wash over you.

A fascinating discussion after in the intimate theater, on the night I went.  Tina and Bob both emphasized how much energy their rolls take – emotional energy, really — because they’ve got to maintain the illusion that they’re under the illusion.  “If you stop to think, you’re dead” said Tina – but indeed, they’ve got it.  Someone even asked how long the play went – clearly, he’d been so enraptured that he was oblivious.  Had it been 40 minutes, he asked?  Or 60, or 80?

The program offers a note from Tina.  She describes her first time seeing The Chairs years ago, and sounds like she was washed over by a wave.  Then leaves us with a thought on the nature of the Fringe festival itself  t– a question I’ve turned over, trying to pinpoint exactly what, for me, sets the festival apart as an almost sacred interruption from the rest of the year.  Tina puts it like this:

“For the next two weeks, in spaces tucked here and there throughout Philadelphia, over 185 “messages will be communicated” [that’s the old man’s phase] at over 80 locations, and we’ll all be richer for having experienced these together.”

This, precisely, is what makes the critical mass of the Fringe Festival so magical – much more so than going to an occasional performance during the rest of the year.

Funny thing about Live Arts is that the cutting-edge and innovate performance art gets headlined, and the absolute gems of more conventional theater get some sideshowed.  You must either seek out the smaller shows, or else be in the know.  I hope I can convince some of you to go see Chairs, because it, and Tina Brock, are really gems.

We do, however, have other news to report.

Each year on that big retail day which follows Thanksgiving, the lesser newspapers carry a photo of a parking lot at dawn, with shoppers clustered at the entrance to a big-box store offering limited-quantity bargains.  A similar scene outside a vacant drugstore at dusk, last Thursday, as we waited for doors to open to STORE, a dance/spectacle choreographed by Kate Watson-Wallace.

The Fringe provides an annualized structure for artists with trilogy ambitions. Thaddeus Phillips did it with Lucidity Suitcase between 06-08. STORE is the third in Kate’s trilogy, which she calls “American Spaces.”  Last year, I failed to see CAR, which quickly sold out due to limited seating: each performance was viewed by exactly one automobile of people.  (Before that, CAR, there was HOUSE, also sold out and limited-audience.)

But I made it this year.  Funneling through the doorway, a talking (blonde) head greeted us from a wall projection.  “Welcome to STORE,” she said, as a succession of retail interiors flashed behind her, bluescreen-style.  Then, a real docent directed me to seats in “Convenience Foods”  — the different section names still marked out on the vacant store’s walls; an appropriately conceptual entrance to this show.

Clothing, gobs of it, strewn about a platform stage.  Around the perimeter, perhaps ten TV sets, facing sideways and askew, glowing grey with analog fuzz.    No movement.  Then a low, throbbing sound grew into new-day-dawning synth refrain, and as stage lights came on, bodies I hadn’t noticed began squirming, awakening, gradually  rising.   Now with taut posture, they curtseyed slowly, in formation, across the stage – a motion not particularly riveting until the tempo sped and the dance tightened, becoming more palpable.  A short piece, then the performance, broke for a commercial.  A futuristic-dystopian voice-over advertised bagged air – “breath with the universe.”

Makato Hirano and Heather Murphy are both (young) veterans of Philadelphia’s very intra-linked dance scene.  They re-mounted the stage, and to a tense beat, Makoto began rapidly dressing Heather – grabbing at the garments all around him, violently fitting them on her figure, as she stood with arms up, receiving.  Amazingly, a clearing grew in the clothing mess, as Heather bloated with layer upon layer, until she could accept no more.  The music cut, and we heard only her panting, as she staggered and spun – as if in a spacesuit, arms unable to hang straight – euphoria and exhaustion registering on her face.

Another absurd advertisement (“Chickens…and other bird roasters…can be found in the GREEN section…”).  Makoto danced a seizure, and bumps into a stack of merchandise boxes, sending them flying.  Another performer rolls and gyrates on the floor, slowly, as he embraces one of the television sets like a lover.  All this hits me in the vein, because I experience that of which this is representation, every day, for my job: I work in basements of low-income Philadelphia, where sit endless 1990s-era TV sets stacked atop one another, and trash bags full of clothing, awaiting only mildew, while upstairs, daytime infomercials bombard living rooms and their occupants.  Just like everything depicted that evening.

The critique in Store isn’t too heavy-handed.  I missed the transition, but dancers suddenly busted into the final piece, a rawkus dance to one the most booty-shaking rap tracks of the past decade (Lil’ Wayne’s A Milli).  They bowed.  The show was over, and I sat taking in the immense amount of clothing now strewn everywhere.  Pathways of jeans had even been laid along aisles, as if to say, look how dispensible these commodities are.  This choice of prop design is itself material example of Store’s critique.  And to the curious, it begs the question: how does one procure such quantities of clothing?  And how do they arrive?  Bundled? Bailed?

Store unavoidably stands in comparison to the only other work performed in that venue: last year’s Flesh Blood Fish Fowel.  That play succeeded stupendously at cranking sublime beauty from the dingy, dropped-ceiling space.  Store took on a big topic – consumer culture – and through dance, performance, and multimedia, ultimately didn’t quite cohere – it just needs more work.  Except for Makoto-Heather piece, we could feel a creative vision not fully developed.  Heather said afterwards: “It was bigger – there were 10 windows open this summer…and we had to choose.”  The dancers participated as performer-creators, she said, while Kate Watson-Wallace brought in both a theatrical co-director (Brian Osoborne), and a dramaturge (Sebastienne Mundheim), halfway through rehersal.  This is an unusual move for choreographer; I was curious how those two participated.  Heather grinned – “well…they’re loosely defined rolls.”   Given all these voices, the show perhaps simply needed more workshop time.

The next night I saw Mike Daisey (brought to town for the Fringe) launch a critique similar in theme to Store but with more invective.  Daisey’s field is a narrow one: he’s a professional monologist (or, as he called himself, a “storyteller”).  Four and a half years ago, a flyer for his show MONOPOLY caught my eye.  On it, a rotund man sat hunched over a table, Spalding Grey-style.  I went, to the Ohio Theater in New York, and was floored.  He interwove several narratives – some historical, some personal accounts – and he was side-splittingly (really) funny, and smart.

Here, at the Philadelphia Theater Company, he gave a new piece called ‘The Last Cargo Cult.’  One usher gave me a program, and another handed me a dollar bill.  I shrugged – a gimmick – and stuffed it in my shirt pocket.  The lights dimmed, and a  voiceover warned that anyone whose cell phone rang would be fed to wild dogs.

Under the faintest of blue light, Mike parted the curtains and walked silently – like a ghost, only outlines of his plentiful figure visible – to the desk at stage front.  He paused, and took a seat.  Except for occasionally wild gesticulations, this was to be the only movement on stage for the next hundred minutes.  And when the lights came up, Mike was off – like a horse race – launching into his piece with all the intensity I remembered.

How does one review a monologue?  On must re-tell it, in parts.  He begins with a crowd gathered at a tarmac’s edge, ready to stampede a prop-jet as soon as the gate opened.  Mike was in the South Pacific, headed for the most distant of a chain of islands, from which was the only weekly flight to the mainland.    He is replete with anecdotes to convey the bizarreness of the journey — the airplane pilots, for example, had knives sheathed on their belts, and resembled pirates.

The island of Tana sits at the farthest reaches of anthropological study, and it is particularly unique in that the French and English used it as a base during World War II.  Mike puts it bluntly: “imagine if you lived as you did for the last four thousand years, then one day these white people arrive with bulldozers and build a runway.  They bring chocolate bars…and vacuum cleaners…and after a while, they simply disappear.”

Mike has honed a special skill of wrapping our attention entirely around some narrative element, and then suddenly taking a leap back, out into the meta-perspective of narrator.  So, after whetting our appetites with all this that he’s read of Tana, he pauses, shifts tone, and says slowly “And -  that – is – why – I – am – there.”  In particular, he’s planned to arrive for the national U.S.A. worship ceremony, which he’d seen in the pages of National Geographic.  (I can’t do it justice with an explanation; you’ll have to hear it from him.)

The nearly unspoiled inhabitants of Tana do not get the concept money, and this is what so fascinates Mike (and us).    The island has a weekly marketplace.  Few traders have set up blankets on the day he visits; all one man has laid is several moldy potatoes.  Through his translator, Mike inquires why he bothers to sell these, and here, gets perhaps biggest laugh of the evening.  The man shrugs, and explains: “I didn’t have any use for them.  I thought maybe someone else would, and that maybe they’d give me some money.”  His apathy toward currency stands for the utter dissonance between primitive and modern societies.

The monologue channels poignancy as well.  Mike likens his first year of college – he, unadulterated from rural and poor Maine, arriving at an exclusive liberal-arts college – to the Tana islanders’ experience with descending westerners.

Those colonists attempted and failed to incorporate some islanders into the currency-based economy that they transplanted.  They took in certain invidivduals, dressing them, and giving them jobs.  The Tana either rejected it or didn’t get it, and held giant bonfires where they burned the money.  This deeply unsettled the French and English, who took severe reproach.  Mike uses this to riff on the alienating nature of money – and calls up Marx’s image of prices detaching from their objects and floating away – leaving only real value.

Here, Mike pulls off the trope of his deft rhetoric: he shifts narratives while staying with a theme.  After describing the Tanas’ rejection of money, he pausesb, and then says: “Tonight, I am an artist – [pause] –  AND a businessman.”  Why does he come up on stage and do this, he asks?  “You could consider this a gift from me to you…it’s something I am driven to do, to want to tell stories.”  Then, he requested that we pull out the dollar bill we were handed at entrance.  I got a one-dollar note, but others fives, tens, and some even fifties.  Mike explained that he’d given back all the money he made that evening, in an attempt to briefly, briefly, subvert the cash nexus which mediates so many social interactions.

Of course, just before the piece ends, Mike bowed to necessity, and placed a large glass bowl at the front of the stage, spot-lit, asking us to give back the money if the evening had been worth it.  He bowed; a celebratory tribal chant came over the sound system, and slowly, they all start to file down to the stage – one line from either direction, slowly passing each other at the glass bowl, nearly the entire audience returning the cash to whence it came.  Awesome.

Mike was in the lobby pretty quick afterwards, talking with a small crowd of suitors.  Someone asked a typically money-minded question: he wanted to know the rates of money-return from audiences in different cities.  I scoffed; this was indicative of the very attitude Mike hoped to spring us from even for just an hour or two.  Nonetheless, he assured us that so far, it’s varied INVERSELY with the crowd’s well-to-do-ness.  (I’m not sure if this is true, but if not, it’s a white lie.)  Others asked Mike more edifying things, about e.g. his process.  “The act of making an outline fixes it in my mind,” he said, though he wasn’t actually reading much from the pages he periodically flipped on stage.

…

Australia is the farthest place a Live Arts act came from this year, but I wagered that the group from Austria would be bring the most refined work – known, as it is, for both its culture and its cultural funding.  Choreographer Willie Dorner was here last year for Bodies in Urban Spaces; this year, he brought a show which, to date, they’d only performed in a small industrial town in their home country.  Here, they had the Ice Box – a giant former refrigerated store room.   I’ve seen, in that space, a Pig Iron production with seating on risers, Sebastienne Mundheim’s Sea of Birds with seating on bean bags, and others on folding chairs.  Tonight, however, no seats were provided.  Ushers told us simply to stay on one side of the space’s invisible centerline, and to sit on the floor if we wished.

Once again, as much good performance art does, ‘above under inbetween’ began with a surprise.  From amongst us, the audience, seven dancers nonchalantly came forward.  They crossed into the stage area, converged on a 3 foot square marked in tape, and froze, facing every which way.  Pause; they broke formation, and then re-converged, this time, in orderly formation – all facing the same way – watching us watching them.

This show’s title was well chosen;  “above under inbetween” strikes you as quite meaningless until, suddenly, it clicks a few minutes into the piece.  For the third variation on the taped square, the dancers entered it one at a time, in height order, bending perpendicular at the waist, so that each nested into the other – except for the last one, who plugged herself into a void created by the others’ legs and torsos.  It was a physical movement which elicited laughs.  Again: freeze, then break formation, all in silence, with only swoosh of pants and scuffle of feet.  They next introduced a chair, then a table, then several, and held poses alongside and entangled with these objects.  One dancer crawls under, another sits on top, and the chair is pulled out; or the table is tilted onto a dancer frozen in half-summersault, and another balances on it.  The title, I realized, is utterly literal.   Everyone is “above, under, [or] inbetween.”

Indeed Cie. Willie Dorner answered Mike Daisey’s (rhetorical) question about why he does monologues at all.  Mike’s answer was, he’s driven to do it – art for the sake of art, essentially.  And while dance pieces usually follow some narrative, however vague – here was only series of formal figurative compositions, a sequence of body sculptures – dance for its own sake.

Each movement in above under inbetween added additional furniture-esque objects, and grew in complexity of poses.  And as it progressed, the dancers moved linearly down the length of the Ice Box.  The audience, without direction, followed the slowly transporting performance.  I began to understand the show as a minimalist circus: slow, deft feats of balance and focus in making precarious structures with humans and furniture.  By the time they’d hit the far end of the space, they’d arranged in their trail (without us realizing) a sequence of objects – roller-carts, ladders, a trampoline, bookcases, tables, and chairs – stretching back to the starting point.  Have you ever seen a child’s toy where a marble rolls and hits a lever that release a spring that propels a weight into a domino and so forth?  I don’t know what such a thing is called, but this is what happened.  In a truly stunt-devil climax, a dancer jumped onto the bookcase, tilting it onto a chair, which propelled another dancer onto a rolling cart, that knocked into a ladder, from which a third dancer jumped, just in time, onto a trampoline, et cetera – all the way down the length of the Ice Box.  The entire company then dashed back across the space, and burst through the side doors out into the courtyard of the rainy night.  It was exhilarating.

Two nights previous, exiting the vacant Rite-Aid at 43^rd and Walnut where Store was performed, I half-noticed a large flat-screen, displaying what resembled election results.  An usher handed me a cardstock leaflet.  I smiled, assuming this was the last gimmick of the production – some spoof on retail surveys and futuristic-dystopian ubiquity of TV screens.  In fact, I was wrong.  The same set-up greets you at the exit to every headlining Live Arts show this year.  Yor’re asked to vote by text message your rating of the show you’ve just seen.  In cozy conference rooms over the past twelve months, I presume, Fringe fundraising staff and the major corporate donors concocted this superfluous use of technology.

Lars, a Fringe tech who rigged up the communications system, explained that one of PNC Bank’s funding stipulations was that the festival ‘use technology to encourage the audience to be active participants in culture.’  [I’m paraphrasing.]  “We looked into making an iPhone app,” Lars said, “But it was way too expensive.”  Broadening critical participation is entirely laudable, but in the wake of recent Iranian democratic protests mobilized through Twitter, using the technology to vote on performance art strikes as grandiose and anemic at the same time.  Anyone who’s written grants knows the feel-good moment of proposing your brilliant visions to funders.  But if PNC really wanted to incite discourse, they should have spent their money to bring underserved high school kids to see some of this year’s fantastic performances.   Regardless of text-message voting, the intelligencia will anyway go to the festival bar and trade one-line reviews of the show’s they’ve seen, but you can bet your behind that no black kids from the ghetto made it down to Mike Daisey’s monologue or IRC’s The Chairs.

I expressed my skepticism to Lars.  He smirked.  “Some people loved it, and some people hated it.”  Frustration focused on the one-through-five voting system.  “Funny,” he said, “the text message system sparked more debate about itself than about the Live Arts shows it was designed for.”  Ultimately, I think Tina Brock nailed it when she wrote that “185 ‘messages will be conveyed’” across Philadelphia, and “we’ll be richer for it.”  PNC is trying to innovate unnecessarily with an already successful festival – and in particular, they’re trying to bring technological mediation to bear on those 185 “moments,” which are what they are precisely because, as Tina says, it’s “the designers, the actors, and the audience creating together a magical island.”  That island only lasts as long as the curtains are up, and it gets somehow trivialized when you ask the audience to rate it a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5.

Too bad salons have died.  In lieu, I’ll tell you the one other show I’m most looking forward to:

Please Make Us Happy…I know nothing except from what’s printed in the guide: a group of performer-creators, from visual arts/puppetry/dance backgrounds, trained by movement theater legend Jacque Lecoq (responsible for many of Pig Iron’s antics), and camped out in Providence for the last 8 months to create it.  Like The Chairs, it runs only thru Saturday.  Only $10!

photo credits:  Katharina Heistinger (‘above under inbetween’); Mike Daisey (himself).

When I arrived at the armory, a crowd of 15 were left outside, sold out, until admission was deemed possible.  As we stepped through the entryway large enough for a tank brigade, we saw that the entire dance floor and seating area took up a mere half of the giant space.  A “full house,” it seems, meant only a shortage of folding chairs.

The rough granite cladding the Armory’s exterior is façade-only, for the inside is vast and open, supported by steel trusses very much one with the classic European railroad terminals of the same era.   Except for two shrouded Humvees behind us, nothing marked the space’s military function.

The lights dimmed, and from the distant corner, the incantation of hoof steps commenced it: a horse trotted in through the bright archway, paused, circled, and trotted out.  To us in the modern world, this sound evokes something poignant and long ago.  Only now did I make the connection: the armory was built for war fought by horses, not Humvees; only latter did I read the program’s note on the venue: it housed the First Troop Cavalry, which was formed in 1774 and missed no action from the Revolution up through World War II.  The piece is titled Battle Hymn, and it’s a collaboration between choreographer Leah Stein and composer David Lang.

Leah Stein has made her career working in unusual spaces; long before I’d heard of Hidden City, I was drawn to a staging of Carmina Burana she did at Girard College.  I left that performance somewhat unsatisfied; the 1935 opera ranges over the whole of human emotions, and is so forceful by itself – beginning and ending with the cymbal-smashing ‘O Fortuna’ – that it doesn’t need enhancement by gesamtkunstwerk.  I couldn’t appreciate the dance, the space, and the music all at once.  Lang’s composition here, contemporary and more minimal, brings the dancers, and the space, into better balance.

From the darkness opposite us, six dancers took position. Behind us, a strange percussive instrument beat wildly.  As the dancers began to move, utterly dwarfed in the armory, it was immediately clear that space was as important as bodies in constituting this dance.   Each in her own spot, they began to play along lines – forward and back, or side-to-side – lunges and squats.  They wore frayed khaki uniforms with a vest of cloth loops – an artistic riff on chain-link.

Then, also from far across the space, the Mendelssohn Glee Club emerged, as infantry: six rows of bodies in plain dark uniforms, ammo bags slung across shoulders.  First, silently.  Then, a few sparse piano chords.  Then, striking the ear as pleasingly as only a chorus in stone architecture can, a succession of single, sustained notes.  The fifty-person chorus marched forward nearly imperceptibly, stepping and pausing, moving with each syllable they sung.  Leah had fun setting this larger mass against her dancers, who first keep their distance; then, from slow, elegant walks they break into light-footed scampers and twirls, down and through the rows of the chorus’s military formation.

Lang drove the narrative.  He researched Civil War texts, digested them, and set them to music.  In the final piece, the percussionist gave a rapid snare-role of battle, and the soprano section soared above it.  At center, all six dancers engaged in what could only be bloodshed: loose bodies, spinning, flailing limbs.  Their movements generally are modest, not trying too hard to stun or impress.  At the most striking moment, in fact, the chorus breaks formation, and rove at random, with the dancers, filling the enormous floor space.

I asked Leah afterwards – the First Troop Amory was not the original site; rehearsal began at an armory in Frankford: “a very different feeling – abandoned, beautiful.  I walked in here and my heart sunk.”  But she worked with it.  Unlike other dances for “unusual sites” (Leah’s term – fresher than ‘site-specific’) where the architecture offers niches and variations, I commented twice that here, space seemed all she had.   But Leah insisted – “and the content.”  I wish I could see it again, because my experience had been only sensual.  I didn’t realize until too late that the program gives lyrics to all David Lang’s five compositions.

Sunday afternoon, I checked two more sites off my list. First, Girard College – approach up Corinthian Street, which leads directly to Founders Hall, a temple of a building. One year ago, Peregrine had Steve Roden pilot his piece, to get a feel for pulling off nine such things simultaneously.  He performed live, synthesizing audio samples made during a residency there.  But he evidently felt the restlessness that I felt – seated, and wanting instead to wander.  “It’s not about coming up with a piece and performing it in a space,” he said at the time – “it’s having a dialogue with the space.”

So, up three flights of stairs, step first into the Archive – a sepia-toned room, musky and silent, lined with old tomes and files that constitute the college’s history.  Anyone with a taste for institutional decay will bug out. Steve’s only intervention here, it seems, was to sweep the debris into small piles and leave them – as if to say, this is a real space, subject to the real decay of history.  If you linger a few minutes, you’ll shed some awareness of the outside world, and better experience the next three spaces – domed rotundas, identical in layout but in varying states of dilapidation, each with its own art work.

In the ‘white room’, on a simple table, Steve laid out all five feet of an accordion-style book letterpressed for the exhibition.  Bend over and read it; it contains an alphabetical list of sentence fragments excised from documents in the archive.  Leading off: “among the large mass of books and papers, an entirely different sensation.”  And, for ‘D’, a reference to the founder, whose grew wealthy as a merchant: “during a period that he built the splendid fleet of vessels which he principally named after distinguished French philosophers.”  Roden calls this book a collage, but I didn’t get the requisite sense of composition – perhaps, after hours in the Archive, you feel the enormity of all that’s come before us in even one small place, and you can only cull an interesting list.

In the next room, peeling green paint has left the wall speckled.  Steve constructed a set of shipping crates, which lie tossed about, a drawing propped against each – colorful, abstract, perhaps riffs on nautical maps, but I’m not sure.  They are spot-lit, but by the oculus – a round opening to the sky at the top of the dome.  Each crate is stenciled as if belonging to one of Girard’s ships – “GLORIE,” “HELVETICUS,” etc.  The lettering, however, is only penciled, and fails to satisfy visually – I have in mind the dark, bold text on the shipping crates my father would bring home regularly from the curbs of Chinatown, circa late 1970s.  (Granted, Steve worked from across the country, and it’s difficult to control stuch details.)

Round the corner, and you’ll find Vessel of Silence standing colorfully but starkly, firmly in the center of the final rotunda.  It’s a messy latticework of colored beams, the most striking object of the installation.  Each beam’s length corresponds to the whole installation’s title, ‘nothing but what is therein contained,’ which itself was plucked from a document in the Archive room.  This sort of meaning does not interest me; I think Steve does best with sound.  From speakers mounted at the sculpture’s center plays softly mesmerizing music written for crystal goblets, a choice born of Steve’s fascination with the ‘glassychord’ – a word he discovered in the Archive.  It was Ben Franklin’s original name for his glass harmonica, as well as the title of the letterpress book.  The resonating crystal blends well with the sad banjo notes plucked from within the shipping crates next door.  Though composed, both pieces filter through the space, more ambient than a defined score.

Finally, just before 7pm, I ascended 18 floors of the Inquirer Building on North Broad to see Aleksandra Mir’s piece titled Newsroom Philadelphia.  I anticipated it too literally; the elevator opened to only a small office with dropped ceiling and a secretary facing me – whoops, that’s the docent.  No typewriters dangled from above, nor was there re-mixed audio of editors and writers hollering across a newsroom.  ‘Installation’ is not an applicable term.  Instead, Aleksandra has cut up and re-mixed headlines, images, and copy from the past nine years of the Inquirer, and hung them in staid frames around the room.  Every re-created page makes clear the absurdity of biased gender coverage in our society’s most venerable of institutions, the daily paper.  Trifling headlines like “Girls Left Wounded By Hook-up Culture” are juxtaposed with articles on e.g. the dearth of females on corporate boards, mismatched to photos of…Hillary Clinton and…women in lingerie.

I fully endorse Alexandra’s agenda.  I also share her stated concern that “the future of newspapers is under increasing threat.”  However, for a site-specific festival, you do not feel that she spent much time stewing in her particular spot.  (The docent seated by the giant corinthian columns at Girard College, in contrast, shared with me her take of that piece:  “it seems to come up from the ground of the place.”)  Visually, in its materiality, Newsroom Philadelphia also fails to satisfy.  I’d have loved real collages, but Alexandra only got to the paper’s digital archives.  Short of newsprint, I wish she’d worked with her digital printer to make them bigger –  they’re a bit diminutive compared to the morning paper’s full spread – and blacker – everything’s got a dark blue hue, not a true newspaper black.  Finally, the work itself was quite quotidian; I saw the irony but not the art.

Interestingly, Alexandra did manage to rile some powerful elements at the Inquirer, who, after its opening weekend in the building’s lobby, ordered the work moved up to the unused 18^th floor.  The paper even covered the controversy themselves. Whoever was offended clearly misunderstood the target of her critique: she’s pointing to a society-wide gender bias, with the Inquirer only an easily visible manifestation.

Backtrack to opening weekend – I visited Shiloh Baptist, which, like the Armory, was also discovered for me by Hidden City.  Unlike other Frank Furness buildings, this church doesn’t exude his singular style – typically called Victorian gothic.  (Recall his bondage-esque ironwork on the front steps of PAFA.)  Roberta describes the art work there, and the docent at Girard College, who’d been stationed at Shiloh previously, insisted that the installation grows on you.  It helps, too, that she heard the piece talked through many times by the warm and outgoing volunteers from the congregation, who staff the site.  Part of Philadelphia’s charm is that the docent seated atop the back staircase to the former locker room at Shiloh is Thaddeus Squires’s mother.  He runs Peregrine Arts, and came up with Hidden City.

Visionary creative endeavors inevitably narrow as concept turns into reality.  Thaddeus, I think, had dreamed quite big; the final program encompasses nine sites, and we probably can’t appreciate how tough are the logistics for such an event.  I presume, however, that Peregrine already plans to work on this scale again, because they ask earnestly for feedback.   Me, I’d like to hear their story – of Hidden City’s three-year genesis, the negotiations with the communities and owners, the hoped-for sites which failed to work, and how Peregrine selected the artists they did. For now, I’m most looking forward to Revival, a performance at the Old Met this week.

In vaudeville style, Dali’s Liquid Ladies began by welcoming us to the performance, a maneuver charming not because it has, indeed, waned, but because it demarcates the experience.  Playwright Savannah Reich (also playing one of the three ladies) has here re-imagined the 1939 World’s Fair, where Dali assembled a surrealist funhouse.  The simple set, cast in eerie red light, is a fabric-draped armature that gently embraces the performers.  The costumes give the visual kick: collages of ripped fishnets, multi-colored swaths of vinyl, star-glitter bras, and neon tassels.  (The star is dressed as he always is.) 

Dali is wild-eyed, mustached, with an accent that mixes Spanish and French.  The Liquid Ladies form his coterie, as both models and muses.  They help Dali spin his own myth.  One poses for him; he intently adjusts her so that four lemons balance on contorted limbs, chin, and shoulder. (Is this a reference to a painting?)  Consumed with his vision, he madly commands her to freeze, then stares, utterly enraptured yet as far away as his own landscapes.  That stare alone accomplished more than the entire lead character in a play I saw earlier this week.  Indeed John Mac Cole’s performance is the gem of the show; his unflinching wide eyes and tense composure counterbalance well the overall tone of dada silliness.  “Silence!,” he thunders, when disturbed at his canvas. “The wizard of painting needs silence!”  Roaming the stage, imposing and obstreperous, Dali is left to offer a soliloquy on his “paranoid-critical method.”  Though he delivers forcefully, he struggles in articulating his concept of art, and so a cool, detached female voiceover asks: “Could you please restate that as a manifesto?”

A soldier stumbles in, tall and strapping, bearded and uniformed, asking directions to the National Socialist Party.  Dali informs him that he’s indeed found it, though the lair doesn’t resemble anything of a military headquarters.  The Party has changed!  “These days, we have new ideas…we are no longer concerned with the color of hair or eyes, but what is in the mind!”  Samantha Reich has read the history, and if you know it too, you’ll get more out of this surrealist spoof of Dali’s murky politics. 

Samantha has written Dali to play up his megalomania, and it comes off well.  As the Liquid Ladies fall under his spell, jealousy rears.  The soldier joins the cult of surrealism as well; he poses, naked, and proclaims with chin held high: “he is going to give me the head of a giraffe!  (This takes the performance’s loudest laugh.)  Rather than infighting, they mutiny against Dali; Dali confesses to the audience that his mystique is empty; and there is general surrealist pandemonium. Her head between the curtains, the playwright has the last word: “Whose dream are you watching?  It’s supposed to be mine!”

This meta-comment gets precisely at what’s special about the Puppet Uprising genre.  ‘Theater,’ even experimental, is too narrow a term for it, while ‘performance art’ is too laden with conceptual connotations.  More than other creative forms, Uprising shows welcome you into artists’ crazy dreams.  Sometimes, you get a grab-bag of short acts, and sometimes, like tonight, a single longer piece.  The work shares in theater, in costume-art, in sculpture (qua set and props), and in conceptual creativity, but is itself none of them.  I spoke afterwards to Kait Sergenian, who played one of the three Ladies, and couldn’t quite find the word: “It’s always…”, I searched, and she nailed it: “…fun.”  “We’re crazy people,” she continued.  “Bedlam, it’s an old word for asylum.”  And where were the wandering fools headed next?  “Pittsburgh.  We’re playing in a backyard.” 

At this point, Morgan Andrews inquired.  He’d brought Bedlam back after their apparently wonderful puppetized version of King Lear at Philadelphia’s Shakespeare festival, but didn’t recognize any of these five performers.  Kate explained that Bedlam encompassed many individuals and many projects.  She used the n-word.  “We’re a network.”  This term often reeks of self-advancement, but in the creative segment of Minneapolis, networking makes flourish the best energies.  While Dali travels, for example, the folks at home are staging a new piece; meanwhile, Kate’s regular gig is manager of Bedlam’s restaurant.  “In the new space,” she added, “we also have a bar.”  Damn Philadelphia, follow suit.

In the meantime, you can see two more Uprising events this weekend: Beth Nixon’s Suitcase Showcase at 50th & Baltimore, and Trutheater Theater at Space 1026.    The latter calls itself “a spirited troupe of actors, silkscreeners, puppeteers, noisemakers…and illusionists from Providence, whose performances are akin to mystical rites of passage.”  The former: “five small suitcase shows, each presenting a different facet of possibility for the boxy baggage that might otherwise be sleeping in the eaves of our attics.”  Admission is sometimes a sliding scale, and generally irrelevant.  Please go.

The literature on Sufism will inform you only generally about the obscure Sidis; theirs is community of just 15,000 that detached from its East African origins eight hundred years ago.  Like the whirling dervishes (also Sufis), their ritual performance is not just for the audience’s sake: its acrobatics and aerobics are intended to elevate the dancers towards the divine.  The program at Painted Bride included a panel discussion in the lobby an hour prior to curtains, with a UPenn ethnomusicologist, the Bride music curator, and – most vocal – the tour manager Katrina Pavlakis, who’s apparently working pro-bono.  She also had the most relevant knowledge: we wouldn’t see fire-dancing that night, she told us, as some elements of the ritual don’t leave their village.  And is the Sidi community self-sufficient (read: isolated)?  She answered, impatient at the idealizing inherent in the question: “well, yeah, if that’s what you call subsistence. Because of discrimination, access to education, and the size of their community, few are employed in the [formal] economy.”  

I didn’t absorb ethnographic specifics, but I left appreciating that we are about to see performed in a theater what’s usually done in a shrine.  Seated, waiting, and reading the program, three pairs of words popped out from its first sentence: JOYFUL & EXUBERANT / (devotional) MUSIC AND DANCE / (from the) HIDDEN & MYSTERIOUS community.”  Lisa Nelson-Haynes, one of the venue’s directors, emerged and amped the crowd with all the warmth and unselfconsciousness of a Baptist church.  “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a big and beautiful audience tonight…” is how she prefaced her request that we squeeze to fit the sold-out house.  The lights dimmed, and before leaving stage, she added: “We lost one on the way – visa issues – so we’ve got 11 and not 12.”  Leslie’s fear had been confirmed, and, it was a nasty reminder of things as they are and things as they should be.  The show, however, wouldn’t suffer.

Said two teenagers: "They was kissin' " / "They was NOT kissin' "

For their final number, the Sidi Goma did the inevitable: they gestured for the audience to join them. After the first brave few came forth from the front, it was barely sixty seconds before the stage filled.  My appreciation for the evening only grew when I discovered how hard it was to move my body to their exotic, syncopated timing.  (Afterwards, others concurred.)

The flood of strangers onto stage made me consider that the Painted Bride must be a special place.  I didn’t know its history; I had only categorized it as establishment by its generous space in Old City, and the major acts it hosts.  I also met no fewer than four people there involved either in philanthropy or publicity.  Strange when I read the info sheet: it was founded in 1969 by six PAFA grads “hungry to present non-mainstream visual art” where there was none.  It’s certainly joined the establishment, but Lisa Nelson-Haynes, when she introduced the show, stressed that the Bride “marks itself by promoting access to the artists” – through meet-the-artist receptions and pre-show talks (in philanthropy parlance, they call it a “member engagement”).  This, after all, is precisely why I love Philadelphia over tier-one art market cities: artists are more accessible; fewer pretensions come between the art and the community of appreciators.  

Just minutes following their bow, Sidi Goma joined us in the lobby for grilled vegetables and brownies; several of us gathered around the dancer with the best English.  Someone asked what, in their villages, were their livelihoods?  He pointed to his compatriots – M____ has juice stand; O____ has small area for farming; D___ does, how do you say, BUSI – goes around to the houses, giving blessings, playing malinga.”  As we’d learned earlier, they are a subsistence people.  The troupe, I imagine, are among the few Sidis that have traveled outside their country.  

So come to the Painted Bride next season, their 40^th.  Artists on the fringe tend to dismiss big-bill cultural performances at theaters that sell subscriptions and draw their share of bourgeois empty nesters.  But we must remember: we are so so lucky to be able to see performers from far-off places.  (Next season, e.g.: a 6-member tabla ensemble.)   Western culture wrecks much as it spreads, but not decisively.  The positive potential in global information flows, jet travel, and consciousness is that, from the comfort of our city, we get to experience [ok, watch] religious ritual of a subsistence people as if we were in their village – a privilege recently unimaginable.

That most outgoing Sidi dancer – I asked for his take, briefly, generally, on this dialectic of cultural globalization.  Here is what he said:  “It’s good when people have tradition in their community – when they keep this thing – this instrument, or this song – going.  But when they say – ‘my family HAD this thing, and we don’t know it now’ – that’s not good.”

Music and video (ugh, video) of Sidi Goma here

The audience flooded the dancefloor.

Ahem, attention please.  This is your contributing writer Jacob speaking.  Know how some people don’t bother telling others it’s their birthday?  Well, I happened to mentioned artblog’s age in passing, and here’s what I received in response:

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 6:44 AM, roberta fallon <robertafallon@gmail.com> wrote:...
> artblog celebrates its 6th birthday ...OMG....today!  April 14, 2003
> we began.  We had a first birthday party at Libby's house and a second
> at Standard Tap but nothing  since...We're overdue another one. In May,
> maybe, or June...???

Happy birthday Artblog.

You may have caught word of the month-long event called Hidden City — Peregrine Arts has been planning it for years (literally), and artblog covered a trial performance at Girard College last May.  Finally, in late May and June, we’ll get to see a slew of site-based works and performances commissioned for normally inaccessible spaces, including abandoned theaters and power plants.  

The project is a huge labor of love, and it needs 120 volunteers!  Help is needed each Saturday and Sunday, from 11AM – 7PM, between May 30th – June 28th.  The sites are:
 
23rd Street Armory                               Disston Saw Works
German Society of Philadelphia        Girard College
Metropolitan Opera House                 Mother Bethel AME Church
Philadelphia Inquirer Building          Royal Theater
Shiloh Baptist Church
 
…and volunteer tasks include:
 
• Usher at performances
• Answer questions about your assigned festival site (handouts will be provided)
• Managing visitors at your assigned venue
• Volunteering at a May event in Love Park
 
 
All volunteers will receive a deck from the Hidden City Philadelphia card game, an invitation to the volunteer appreciation party, and admission to the performance at their assigned site.  Depending on how many shifts you volunteer for, you may also be eligible for a poster, a ticket to the performance of your choice, and 2 tickets to the June 25 Hidden City Philadelphia soiree. 
 
Any interested Artblog readers?  Please visit hiddencityphila.org, send an e-mail to volunteer@hiddencityphila.org, or call the Volunteer Hotline at 267.597.3807.
 
    Cheers!

Different approaches to the assignment “map the global economic crisis”

The workshop kicked off a global tour; Lize Mogel [pronounced ‘Lizzy’], who co-curated the exhibit, heads next to Utrecht  The assignment: draw a map of the global financial crisis, with yourself in the middle.  Lize collects the resultant drawings – “a public archive of maps” – and will then re-interpret them, finding patterns, making a meta-map.  A fertile mix of artists and non-artists were in attendance at Basekamp.  One young-ish man who didn’t fit any artistic stereotypes programmed computers for a map company; he showed up because his boss had passed him an email.  Knowing that Basekamp endorsed Marxist tenets, I was able to pick out the maps made by co-founder David Dempewolf.  His stick figures centered around the text-bubble “CAPITALISM -FUELD CONSUMERISM GONE WILD.”  Everyone found the exercise nearly therapeutic.  Mary-Ruth Walsh, a Dubliner currently in residence at Basekamp, commented, “making maps to work through a particular problem – it’s a methodology I would use in my practice.”

Sorting through the finished maps

Lize followed the workshop with a lecture that interwove the past 10 years of her own practice with a millennium-spanning history lesson on maps.  Her cartographic bug, she explained, developed out of an interest landscapes.  She began her slideshow from this purely aesthetic approach, paging through her images shot from airplane windows — “Here, I was just interested in patterns.”  Then, we saw in situ images of “Public Green,” a heavily annotated schematic map of Los Angeles parks that was printed for hundreds of bus stops and invited close reading.  Lize would be the first to admit that, like all maps, this one was ideological.  It encouraged the low-income bus-riding demographic to utilize parks.  (How does a young artist get exposure on ad space which mostly promotes movies to passing cars?  Only by chance: Lize happened to meet a ClearChannel exec.)

From the L.A. region, Lize’s focus grew to encompass the world.  On common maps, she explained, geometric distortions enlarge and center the west (or what the astute call “the global north”).  To flatten the globe onto paper is to ‘project’ it; “my favorite projection,” Lize told us, “is the azimuthal…”  The azimuthal?  Yes; it places the North Pole squarely at the center, and became the emblem of the United Nations because of its egalitarian depiction of the continents.  Lize’s 2008 piece ‘Area of Detail’ zooms in on that central void and denotes shrinking ice boundaries and currently contested national boundaries.  (Remember when Russia planted a flag on the ocean floor several summers back?)  The sharply designed map was printed on a rotating table top; on the wall adjacent, neatly arranged correspondence between national governments and the UN Commission on Limits to the Continental Shelf regarding of oceanic rights. “If you’re me,” she said, “it’s hilarious.”

My favorite work, however, is Lize’s series (one of which is included in the current exhibition) of stark black-on-white forms, like a Rorschach but less chaotic.  They represent the contours of shipping ports and other nodes in the flow of trade, traced from aerial imagery: visual distillations of globalization.   Nearly all of the work on display exudes graphic design professionality.  The only piece with painterly quality is Pedro Lasch’s “Latino/a America,” a reproduction of series of red maps which traveled across the Mexican boarder in the pockets or luggage of a particular person – each faded and worn differently, all beautiful.

To my disappointment, each piece in “An Atlas” is a crisp, computer-printed image on beautiful matte paper. The exhibit has been traveling, with modifications, since summer 2007, hence the expediency of doing without originals, and the project’s raison d’etre is really the published volume. Still, wouldn’t it be more fulfilling if original drawings traveled from city to city? Only Lize’s personal copy of Radical Cartography had this art-object aura. She passed it around after the talk. Its ragged condition, I first assumed, was an affect from the publisher, like “distressed” jeans, but no – this was Lize’s, and, like Lash’s piece, it has accompanied her on many travels.  

           Except for the all-professional Mum Puppettheater, most puppet troops grace Philadelphia with only single-night runs.  Artblog likes to tell you about things you can still go see for yourself – so consider these jottings from recent fringe theater as anticipation of the upcoming Puppet Uprising Cabaret, tonite 12/5 and Saturday 12/6 at the Rotunda.

            Missoula Oblongata takes its aesthetic more from puppetry than from theater: conspicuously home-made sets, heavy on patchwork and paper mache.  Via the Puppet Uprising network, they brought ‘Last Hurrah of the Clementines to a yoga studio on Baltimore Ave. one Friday in late November.  The show opened with the dreamy twang of a guitar, and a woman bent over a telescope at her bedroom window.  Just outside, an egg dangles; a charming trick of planetary scale.  “The question of life in outer space is only for lonely people to ponder.”  Was this a voiceover, or her words?  I don’t recall, but either would preserve that scene’s ambience.  Mr. and Mrs. Clementine,  an elderly pair, are now under their covers; the old trick where the bed is vertical, and they stand against it.  On each square of their patchwork quilt, a prime number is emblazoned large.

The Missoula Oblongata telescope.

            They are self-employed mathematicians, and sing a song on the therapeutic function of prime numbers for the monotony of marriage: “When you get tired of talking about 167, there’s always 169.”  This sounds bizarre, and possibly not even entertaining, right?  Well, you have to see it to get it, but you also should know about two the troop’s creative process. – “a specific collaborative method,”  Madeline ffitch [sic] explained, “We don’t have  narrative – just a list.” The things on this list are image-driven, visual.  “I wanted to build a tree; Donna a giant red tent [?]. I wanted to be an athlete; she to do play about prime numbers.”  So they exchange lists, write first drafts, then swap the drafts.  The process iterates until a play emerges.  In this case, it involves many fortune cookies, and the athlete who abandons her team — a yearning for individuality.  It’s a silly play, but the acting is solid – they maintain the line separating absurdity from mere goofyness.  (Ontological Theater has invited Missoula Oblongata for a 2-week run in 2009.)

            Donna is Baltimore-based Donna Sellinger, and she also a directed  ‘They Should All Be Destroyed / A Jurassic Park Play’ that came to PIFAS the previous weekend.  I expected high avant-garde, because of the venue, and because we’d heard that the company, Wham City, had already been picked up by the New York Times.  Not until we arrived (late) and heard the riotous laughter, did I realize it had anything to do with Spielberg’s film. 

PIFAS, packed for Jurassic Park (the play). 

            PIFAS was more packed than I’ve ever seen it (e.g. the Architecture w/o Architects series – stay tuned next week), with folks quite literally perched on the rafters.    Rarely, if ever, have I used the word ‘zany’,’ but now is the appropriate time.  Characters are taken stock from the movie, whom I’d forgotten until then.  Dennis, the overweight and sleazy geek who operates the security system, parodied himself by stuffing raw meat into his mouth as he brags about his network wizardry.  Recall his famous confrontation with the velociraptor?  In this version, when his glasses are knocked off, he yells “I can’t afford new ones,” and instead of saliva, the raptor hits him with spray-foam.  

 Dennis, stuffed fat with pillows, meets the raptor (note the shadows).

Everyone’s shadows are thrown up huge on the warehouse wall behind – not a horror-effect, but a charm of the DIY lighting.  Corrugated cardboard backdrops, hastily stenciled with leaves, mimic the rainforest.  Dennis’s computer monitors, though equally basic, are more beautiful: cubes faced in duct tape, with colored light gels for screens.  And remember when Tim climbs down a dormant electrified fence just as the power comes back on?  Here, he screams, they scream, he laughs, the audience laughs – “just like the movie,” he chuckles.  Which raises the question: why, exactly, does this play exist?  It follows the contours of the movie so closely – taking many lines unedited – but it blends in whimsy (electrocuted Tim is revived by séance, rather than CPR). 

My partial answer to this question is: consider these performances not under the category of ‘theater’, but in the slightly narrower sense of art.  They’re born of the same impulse to make and create, without economic rationale.  For the first several rehearsals, says Jared, roles were unassigned; parts were swapped.  The play ends with a grand musical number which was emphatically not part of the movie: “Jurassic Park / is a place / where man and lizard / can come together in peace.”  I still couldn’t quite grasp why (of all things) a play based on Jurassic Park.  Jared explains Wham City: “it’s constant collaboration – we’re all hanging out, excited about different ideas, and things just come together.”  Then, the 15 players tour in their vegetable-oil school bus, and present the play for free.

Remember, if this intrigues you, go Friday or Saturday to see something even more firmly in the realm of performance art: Puppet Uprising’s Year-End Cabaret.  4014 Walnut, 8pm both nights.