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Festival of New Original Works: Program Two

Reviewed by Bill Raden

REDCAT

Closed

Were it not for the fact that the evening was titled “New Original Works Festival 2015” (NOW) and the venue was none other than REDCAT, an institution that has never shied away from the subversions of cutting-edge performers of any stripe, veteran director Robert Cucuzza’s “Circle Jerk” might be dismissed as the puerile figment of a profanely twisted imagination.

But the source material for Cucuzza’s irreverent, music-accented send-up of the French Surrealists, which provided the climactic closer to Program Two of REDCAT’s annual three-week showcase of Los Angeles’s multidisciplinary performing arts, turns out to be far stranger than any fiction.

Between 1928 and 1932, Surrealist cofounder André Breton (played with officious bravado by Brian Tichnell) conducted a dozen formal interviews with 40 of his mostly male artist comrades, whom he grilled on the most intimate details of their sexual idiosyncrasies. The interrogations were part of the group’s broader attempt to pierce the veil of bourgeois propriety in order to assemble an archive of direct human experience unfiltered by the censoring superego. They called the project the “Bureau of Surrealist Enquiries.”

The crude sexological surveys canvassed the men on their tastes for masturbation, fellatio, homosexuality and bestiality, attitudes about coming in a woman’s ear and eyeball licking, preferences for fucking in a church versus with a nun, and finally explored unlikely prejudices such as having sex with a woman who didn’t speak French. Eventually, the material produced a volume of the kind of ludicrously leering material that Clement Greenburg might have called “avant-garde kitsch.”

What more could a satirist ask for?

Cucuzza, who cut his artistic teeth as an actor with stage auteur Richard Foreman, whittles Breton’s original transcripts into a taut, seven-character, one-act burlesque where women play all the male artists with the sole exception of Breton himself: novelist Raymond Queneau (Lola Kelly); American painter-photographer Man Ray (Susan Tierney); art provocateur Jean Genbach (Kristina Pilskaia); communist poet Pierre Unik (James Cowan); and the poet Louis Aragon (Chris Farah). Tessa de Baudenière makes a fantasy cameo as Nadja, the object of desire from Breton’s novel of the same name.

As the men comically ricochet between embarrassed self-consciousness, Victorian prudery and the competitive one-upmanship of their threatened masculinities, Cucuzza neatly foregrounds the material’s 85-year-old ironic patina of subsequent social and feminist history with what amounts to a literal drag parody of the constructedness of the gendered body.

Cucuzza’s Forman-esque choreography, the ensemble’s slapstick clowning (abetted by Stephanie Petagno’s silly non-sequitur costuming) and the coolly counterpointed commentary of singer-songwriter Juli Crockett’s live Western Swing trio (with Michael Feldman and Danny Graziani) complete the piece’s playful indictment of the Surrealists’ chauvinistic posturing and emotional blindness.

Setting the stage for “Circle Jerk” was “Bit,” the thrillingly kinetic dance-performance created by director, designer and avant-electronica composer Mint Park and choreographer Hee-Eun Jeong.

The Korean-born duo, both recent graduates of CalArts’s schools of music and dance, already have collaborations under their belts. Additionally, Park, whose instrumental virtuosity includes electric jazz guitar, has attracted attention from the cultish experimental electronic music scenes here and in San Francisco as one of the few women composers to have mastered the venerable Serge modular analog synthesizer as her instrument of choice.

That may simply be because the powerful 1970s-vintage music boxes tend to be the size of a Volkswagen. But their ability to evoke the “Bit”’s bleak sense of retro-futurist menace in the hisses and skips, and the low-frequency drones of imperiled worlds, becomes the sonic force that propels Jeong’s convulsive choreography.

“Bit” opens with male principal dancer Jung-Woon Jung in what is not so much a solo but a violent physical duet in which he reacts to the pounding industrial machine chirps and rumbles of Park’s drum ‘n’ bass-derived score as if each beat is a body blow. Jung is soon joined by the all-women ensemble (Jeong, Kat Hernandez, Yvone Lacombe and Elizabeth Houlton) in a series of synchronized duets and group dances that all unwind under a large upstage screen projected with Park’s scratchy analog, video animation of vertical lines pulsating in time to the music.

Structurally the dance draws from the chaos and organized anarchy of the rave, including Park’s extreme low-key lighting, which for much of the show is reduced to flashlights aimed by the dancers themselves. Eventually the dancers begin to organize themselves into various pairings, building to a coordinated group finale as Park’s discordant soundscape reaches its percussively discordant and heart-pounding climax.

The curtain-raiser for Program Two was “Sammanfläta” by the Swedish dancer-choreographer soloist Sina Ahlberg. Sammanfläta translates as “Intertwine,” and Ahlberg, who recently relocated to Los Angeles, merges a vocabulary that includes elements of classical, modern and South Asian traditions. She began the piece with a balletically leaping homage to her new home on a darkened stage that was set to the eerie sound of passing freeway traffic, courtesy of Austrian computer-sampler Christian Fennesz.

That shifted to a second movement flavored by the haunting, almost liturgical harmonies of Georgian folk singer Hamlet Gonashvili that seemed to mix Christian and Muslim song. Under triple spotlights (by lighting designer Katelan Braymer), the focus shifted to the upper body as Ahlberg accented her lyrical port de bras with poetically delicate and birdlike hand movements.

Sammanfläta then moved into its third section that featured the dancer in a literally show-stopping side-crawl that seemed to measure the full depth of the REDCAT stage. The fourth movement shifted into a more contemplative and transcendental dance, decorated with gestures drawn from both Buddhist and Hindu iconography and climaxing in a stunning tableau under a harsh light of Ahlberg, her features frozen in a rictus scream.

REDCAT, 631 West 2nd St., dwntwn; CLOSED. Redcat.org.