print Summer 1990

Creation Production Company

The givens are these: two characters, a man and a woman, with no proper names; subject matter culled from a cross-cultural laundry list; and a dramaturgical methodology that depends on mixed-media technology and consists of collaged vignettes separated by blackouts. Sound familiar? These are the essential ingredients of the post-Modern performance, a theatrical exercise built around a handful of by now familiar formalisms and a thesis which is no less vehemently terroristic for being the conventional wisdom of the day. The agenda might besummarized thusly: no one story is “the story,” experience

print May 1990

Watchface

While the theater world occupies itself with tricked-up British musicals, antique revivals, and the occasional serious effort, the idea of theater continues to mutate in unexpected quarters. Rock concerts, dance and performance art, site-specific sculpture, and cabaret acts are all working changes on traditional definitions of theater. Watchface is one of the handful of groups that approach theater in the classic avant-garde performance style associated with troupes like the Living Theater, the Open Theater, and Mabou Mines. The company employs a repertory ensemble of performers, and combines

print April 1990

Blue Man Group

Blue Man Group (Chris Wink, Matthew Goldman, and Phil Stanton) is the latest in a line of gross-out performance artists that traces back to the Kipper Kids of the mid ’70s. Unlike the Kippers, who evince a Teutonic fondness for the scatalogical (fake-caca smearing, spitting, and fart-sound chatter), Blue Man Group is a buttoned-down version of bad behavior; their messes are cleanly executed and tidily contained, rather than anarchic and stumbling. While they don’t sprawl into redundant offensiveness, neither do they generate the inspired, squirm-in-your-seat moments that the borderline acting

print March 1990

Momix

Since the ’60s, anti-illusionism in its many forms has ruled contemporary dance, theatrical illusionism often being equated with cultural as well as philosophical deception. Of course it’s entirely logical that out of the current welter of kinesthetic truth-tellers would arise yet another restatement of illusion in movement. Moses Pendleton, a founder of the determinedly sleight-of-foot Pilobolus troupe, takes magic over the top in the choreography for his own company, Momix (company members are also credited as creators of individual pieces). Each of the 14 dances on Momix’s recent program (13

print February 1990

Industrial Symphony #1

Artists who traffic in dreams run the risk of confusing profundity with silliness. Dream motifs too often degenerate into hackneyed psychobabble. David Lynch’s films, such as Eraserhead, 1978, and Blue Velvet, 1986, have resolved the problem by joining logic and illogic, thereby conjuring disorienting truths out of the most banal dream elements. For Industrial Symphony #1, his live presentation that kicked off the New Music America Festival, Lynch and composer Angelo Badalamenti created a large-scale operatic dreamscape that combined goofy, cartoonlike characters and actions with a deadpan

print January 1990

Can We Dance a Landscape?

The brand of Japanese dance-theater called butoh has typically been performed on an empty stage, a dark void penetrated only by noirish light that underlines the metaphoric idea of earth as a nightmarish environment. For Peut-on Danser le Paysage? (Can we dance a landscape?, 1989) performed by Min Tanaka and his butoh group Maijuku, Karel Appel created a visible context of hellish surroundings in the form of several backdrops and a few drop-in flats. With large-scale, slashing brushstrokes and blunt, blaring colors, Appel’s quasi-abstract hilly landscapes were an appropriate visual realization

print December 1989

Jack Benny!

Those who are unfamiliar with the original Jack Benny television program of the late ’50s and early ’60s may be pardoned for thinking that composer John Moran and the Ridge Theater Company have performed a distorting deconstructivist exercise on a hapless cultural cliché. The Jack Benny Show, however, was itself skewed to an amazing degree. The theme of most segments was the effort by the host, Benny, to “put on a show”—which his regular cast and guest stars often deliberately prevented him from doing. Endless and repetitive interruptions, ad -libs, and digressive chatter about personal problems

print December 1989

Joe

With its Everyman title and its effacing costumes of drab overcoats, fedoras pulled down tight, and clunky boots for men and women alike, Joe presents itself as a post-Metropolis fable for our time. First presented as part of the international festival of new dance in Montreal, this performance piece, choreographed by Jean-Pierre Perreault, has been revived in an expanded form. The setting is one of generalized, industrial bleakness, a vast blue-lit area marked off by rectangles, with a stage-wide ramp upstage leading to “windows” (which open onto blank space). In this logical hell of a futuristic

print November 1989

Trisha Brown

This outdoor concert of works by Trisha Brown was a mini-retrospective, a double bill featuring one of the choreographer’s earliest works followed by one of her most recent. Raft Piece, 1973, demonstrates two elements typical of most early Brown dances: a structure in which movement accumulates over time, and a quirky physical setting—here, the four dancers performed flat on their backs on four floating rafts. The governing concept is a perceptual conundrum aimed at creating phenomenological doubt: how to see a rigorous structural ordering subjected to the whimsical factor of chance, as represented

print October 1989

John O’Keefe

John O’Keefe’s Shimmer, 1989, a monologue about life in a juvenile home in the mid ’50s, is a singular concoction. It is as sociologically acerbic as Eric Bogosian’s sketches yet with an affecting autobiographical edge; as emotionally revealing as Spalding Gray’s performances yet more complexly dramatized. O’Keefe plays several roles and performs his script with an athletic exuberance. The piece filters its Huckleberry Finn theme of escape from oppressive civilization and its Beat-era humor through a fine mesh of haunting magical realism. Like its title, which refers to a homemade philosophy in

print September 1989

Dr. Charcot's Hysteria Shows

Freud called Jean-Martin Charcot, the late 19th-century director of Salpêtrière, the Parisian asylum, an “artist, a man who sees.” What Freud and other doctors saw were Charcot’s présentations des malades, “hysteria shows” in which the doctor staged demonstrations of his experiments with hypnosis, seeking to analyze, control, and correct hysterical behavior. To 20th-century sensibilities, his methods come off as equal parts snake-oil charades and progressive medical practice. Charcot was among the first to insist that hysteria was a genuine affliction, and he used art as an important diagnostic

print Summer 1989

Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane & Co.

Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane’s signature style came out of a visual and kinetic dialectic. Jones—black, tall, and lyrically athletic—was paired off with Zane—white, short, and frenetically antic—in duets that explored the ways such extreme contrasts could connect through movement. This trademark esthetic became diluted almost as soon as it was established, becoming submerged to the point of invisibility when the duo moved on to evening-length, company-sized works. These dances seemed to sprawl shapelessly under the weight of too many ideas. Now, a year after Zane’s death, their enterprise has

John Howell