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REDCAT Festival of New Original Works: Program Three
Reviewed by Paul Birchall
RECAT
Closed.
For your evening of Difficult (but still Engaging) Theater, you might have done worse than attending the New Works Festival at REDCAT. Staged over the past three weeks, the festival has featured numerous performance pieces from promising local artists, fleshed out within the luxurious environs of one of the city’s most beautiful spaces for ambitious and edgy art. The final set of performances was this last weekend and, while these pieces hued identifiably to some familiar “performance art”-sy tropes, their energy and humor were beguiling.
The impressive execution notwithstanding, even assured types of performance art such as these are not entirely successful in fighting the uphill battle to appear fresh and new. Yes, in every generation, artists strive to make a unique statement, but in so many cases, the art reinvents a wheel that might have first been created during a revue at Highways 15 years ago – or in the back of a bar in the West Village 20 years before that, with a tendency to fall back on workmanlike ideas – the vignette about women goddesses, the number about gay men finding pleasure in illicit surroundings. It may also be that much of this era’s performance art is focused on the needs and desires and outrages of youth and sensation, over experience and maturity.
Festival Program 3, which performed August 13 through 15, started with “Stellar Tears,” a vibrant rock medley featuring the women’s collective, Cassandra. Performing in front of a set of glitter-covered, Styrofoam Stonehenge columns, the women rock out to a variety of fierce ballads and melodies, all with a ferociously feminist sensibility. The work appears to be intended as a female response to male oppression, drawing parallels from the Ancient Greeks to today.
In director Laurel Butler’s taut production, the mood puts one in mind of what one of the Bacchic mysteries might have been like. The pink menhirs in the background, a screen showing images of the moon and of the Goddess Hecate, and the performers dancing either in spandex or in sparkle-grey colored shmattas underscore this mood. The women flirt and primp sexily – but it’s not a sexiness that is targeted at a person, certainly not at a man: It’s an experience that suggests something outsiders are simply not meant to see. At the same time, Butler’s luscious vocals remind one of the smoky renderings of Stevie Nicks, further amplifying the nicely witchy mood.
In stark contrast to the rather innocent-seeming feminist anger of Cassandra’s piece, Takao Kawaguchi’s amusingly bizarre “Touch of the Other” is ostensibly a meditation on the notion that oppressed gay men in the past were forced to resort to furtive, underworld liaisons in men’s rooms in order to connect with other gay men. This performance piece crackles with astonishing images: The piece opens with Kawaguchi, in his underwear, crouching over a toilet bowl, greedily guzzling brackish fluid from a tube leaking out of the cistern. From there, a long worm-like tube of mesh is unwoven over the stage, and Kawaguchi wriggles through it, moaning and grunting in lustful abandon as he rhapsodizes madly about the wonder of glory holes. Three young male dancers enter and start to gyrate acrobatically against each other’s bodies, rather like they’re playing Twister, albeit without the board. Left hand goes on blue, right next to the other boy’s bottom, while right foot goes on red, next to the other boy’s groin. Tennis balls are thrown through plastic windows containing sinister holes at crotch level – and the boys shimmy and crawl and squeeze over them.
It’s all faintly disturbing, but it also has an oddly reined-in quality: Only the first image of the guy slurping the toilet water actually achieves the desired shock value – the rest is a rather prosaic statement about the inability to assuage gay desire. The work’s balletic nature crafts a dreamlike quality, but the limited narrative context ultimately comes across as insubstantial.
The evening concludes with choreographer Kevin Williamson’s “Trophy,” a beautifully adroit hip hop ballet in which three dancers start out with an acrobatic dance in sweatclothes, before stripping to swim suits. Two of the dancers (a man and a woman) engage in a close, sensual pad a deux, while a third dancer covers himself with athletic trophies. It’s a little hard to understand the point of all this – is it about the youthful quest for pleasure and awards? Is it a simple homage to the body? Still, the dancing is crisp and delightful.
REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd Street, Los Angeles. CLOSED. https://REDCAT.org
