“Off Book: Stories that Move”
ODC Theater Presents Festival 3
Theater Artaud
San Francisco, CA
Oct. 9 and 10, 2008
by Rita Felciano
copyright © by Rita Felciano
ODC Theater’s major overhaul of its physical plant necessitated temporarily locating its presenting functions to Theater Artaud, a few blocks away. Unfortunately, the venue proved to be too expensive. So until whenever its new home is finished the organization is moving its presentations into ODC Dance’s largest rehearsal studio, which can seat about a hundred. It is affordable but not ideal for Theater Director Rob Bailis’ ambitious plans. His collaboration with Litquake, the West Coast’s annual writers’ feast, was such an intriguing even though not entirely successful pairing of language and dance, that one can only hope that it will continue in a suitable, larger than a 100-seat venue.
The first evening showcased Performance Artist Jo Ann Selisker and, more innovatively, paired three choreographers, Katie Faulkner, Scott Wells and Erika Chong Shuch, with authors who read their writing on stage. The following night featured Los Angeles dance/theater artist Rosanna Gamson in high-production values “Ravish” for which Bailis had contributed a collage of 19th century music.
Astutely matched as all three pairs were, by far the most successful was Faulkner’s with Tess Uriza Holthe’s “Road Ahead” because it so lusciously physicalized the internal process of dying. The narrator’s voice was that of a disinterested observer tracking one man’s final journey. In Faulkner’s choreography it became a story of emotional connectedness. Recently retired ODC/Dance’s Private Freeman eloquently danced the father’s final moments of confusion and lucidity; Janet Das, Rebecca Gilbert and Mo Miner were the grieving daughters who attempted to forestall the inevitable. Faulkner’s fine choreographic response included moments of robust physicality as well floating breathlessness. Particularly effective was the daughters’ emerging from their upstage two-dimensionality into more personalized individuals, as the father seemed to remember them.
Michelle Tea and choreographer Scott Wells “Untitled” couldn’t have been more different from “Road Ahead.” Tea’s memoir of a wild night of drugs, booze, bathroom sex and female bodily functions seen from the perspective of a confused, perhaps-no-longer Lesbian is raunchy, tongue-in-cheek and hilarious. Scott Wells’ brought his own not so subtle humor to the contact improv-inspired choreography for his eight differently endowed males who at point stripped to their skivvies. Good natured that these rough and tumble and encounters were, they couldn’t compete with the zaniness of Tea’s prose. The dancers were at their most fun when Wells made them line up on the sidelines and divide into couples, as if trying to impose some order into this melee of Robert Bly manhood.
The program switched gears one more time in the collaboration of Erika Chong Shuch and poet Alejandro Murguía. Chong Shuch, who is a theatrically savvy dance/theater maker, was remarkably restraint in her comments on Murguía’s poetry. At times it almost looked as if she hesitated intruding into his strongly rhythmic language. The modesty and self-effacement served her and the poetry well.
For “Tango Rota” she kneeled by a chair and placed objects, among them a glass, a beautiful shoe, on it as if were an altar. Again and again she returned her gaze to the hypnotically reciting poet. Jennifer Chien danced “The Bolero of Lupe Velez”—an early twentieth century Latina Marilyn Monroe figure—with a full-bodied sensuality that, nonetheless, felt contracted.
Chong Shuch is also a practical dance maker. For “10 Men”, Murguía’s evocation of the endless waves of humanity from Latin America that stream into the country as the result of the U.S’ policy of “aggression, intervention and destabilization”, she recycled some of the choreography of her recent “After All, Part I.” It worked well. White clad figures wandered, carried each other or were dragged like carcasses across the stage and ended up on a pile, with a lone survivor (Jesselito Bie) standing on top. Unlike war memorials this survivor didn’t look heroic, just confused and tired.
The program had opened with Chris Black, a literate and smart choreographer, and Selisker’s “Off Leash.” It was not a good match. Selisker, a reasonably agile and affable performer, based her text on quotes from how-to-care for animals manuals, among them “good citizenship” training for dogs and instructions on what to do with mail-order baby chicks. Recordings of Rex Harrison as Dr. Doolittle and the talking horse in the TV show “Mr. Ed” were part of the sound track. Selisker can’t be faulted for the thoroughness of her research, and while her timing honed into some of the absurdity to this animal paraphernalia, there was not enough meat for Black to dig into.
The second program of ODC/Theater’s collaboration with Litquake introduced Los Angeles’ Rosanna Gamson/World Wide in “Ravish”. The hour-long dance theater piece apparently was inspired by the lives of the Brontë sisters and their brother Branwell. It featured a quintet of superb dancers: Michael Gomez, Sarah Goodrich, Li-Ann Lim, Lopez and Carin Noland. Each one shone individually, with Gomez particularly attention-demanding in aerial leaps and Noland in furiously churning solos.
Barnaby Levy’s elaborate and at times spectacular video—on the floor and on a screen—and Ted Mather’s lights contributed more than their share to what was a visual extravaganza. Bailis’ collaged a rich and multi-hued score. Calvin LL. Jones’ sound design, suggesting a creaky view of the past, worked. The only thing “Ravish” lacked was telling choreography.
The videos projected words, phrases, and letters at various speeds. Sometimes you caught but a glimpse of a word, at others the timing allowed for connections. It was all quite garbled but did suggest a place that breathed language. One has to assume that some of the phrases, such as the “Dear Reader” addresses, came from the Brontës. But Gamson never told us anything about their individual lives except in their most superficial terms. They loved each other and enjoyed circle and line dancing. At its most specific, five lines of handwritten prose projected on the floor adjacent to each other, gave a glimpses at differences in the siblings’ personalities. The videos on the floor also called up moments of comfortable domesticity, all of it seen from a bird’s eye perspective. Fingers slid along the edge of dinner plates resting on a lace-covered table; sleeping bodies tossed among piles of pillows; a hand engaged in furious painting. And then, of course, there was that acme 19th century social life, ballroom dancing. The camera caught wildly whirling skirts as if they were a child’s tops.
Unfortunately, the choreography was too monochromatic to create a convincing portrait of the individuality of these people. Gamson did create a difference between their artistic and quotidian lives. The illuminated dance floor—a lovely conceit—was sthe place of the Brontës’ creativity. Standing outside of it, they watched, whisper, hugged and behaved recognizably. But as soon as they stepped inside that magic square, they found themselves tossed about in tornado of flailing, lashing and rebounding as if off a hot griddle. It was a place of hell and ecstasy. The relationships between these storm-whipped dancers were always full-throttle but arbitrary. Gamson did create an ecstasy-suggesting vocabulary, which the dancers delivered admirably, but she didn’t develop any of it. Despite its frenzy, the choreography sat on “Ravish” like the fog on the moor of “Wuthering
Comments