dicey art
What do you get when you cross a gay Scottish cowboy, a world-weary French starlet, and a Hasidic Jamaican pirate?
Usually, Portland’s annual experimental art hoo-ha is all over the papers, radio, Internet, etc. Sadly, T:BA 2007 was so far off the radar that we only got word in time to attend one event. It was a doozy, though—more on that in a sec.
At last year’s T:BA, Lynn and I indulged in a glut of activities, from a game of sketch-you-sketch-me over the Internet, to wordless season-themed movies of nekkid people, to a temple of wax and electronica assembled around us by two enthusiastic Germans, to one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking data visualizations I have ever seen (counting things like country populations, X-Box owners, and malaria victims as grains of rice).
And in a previous year, I deliberately splashed some frigid water on my senses by attending an extremely abstract modern dance performance. Since I’m not usually into abstract art, modern things, or dance, you can imagine I was a bit out of my depth. But exposure to wildly different things is good for you, and the dance was spectactularly executed—I had a blast.
So I had high hopes for this year, but as I mentioned, we could only attend one event.
Was it the get your hair cut by a ten-year-old exhibit, you ask? No, tempting as that was, we decided to go with Nature Theater of Oklahoma (despite the name, there’s no nature, and they’re from New York) with their wacky iPod-powered play, No Dice.
How was it? Well, I liked it, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
The premise: record a bunch of random conversations, stick ‘em on iPods, jam the earbuds into the performers’ ears, and dump the actors onto a stage.
The performers: talented, excited, and willing to make ham sandwiches for the entire audience before the show (really!).
It should’ve been a slam dunk. But I can’t quite count the show as a success. For one thing, it was four hours. Which is one thing if you’re an opera company with a full orchestra putting on Die Götterdämmerung, but quite another if you’re a miniscule New York acting troupe with six cast members, only three of whom carry on any dialogue.
Deciding to stage a show of that length with that little to show for it is a huge lapse of judgment.
The show starts with two cubicle-dwellers going through the motions of their humdrum jobs, synchronously pantomiming elaborately mechanical and sometimes crudely sexual gestures. The shirtless cowboy engages two other wandering performers into a series of faux-accented conversations as his silent, bunny-ear-clad co-worker reacts facially to their lines. A deadpan Marie Antoinette wanders on and off stage in a unitard and plays keyboards.
You’ve gotta figure that with choreography like this, they found some really juicy recorded conversations to play out for us, right? Wrong. Apparently, the minds behind this play only recorded the idle chatter of theatre folk, which - believe me - is just as mundane as everyone else’s.
They had the whole spectrum of humanity to record, and instead they settled with a few of their colleagues’ phone calls. Which means they couldn’t have learned much from the process. If creating the piece didn’t enlighten them, how the hell is watching it supposed to illuminate anything for us?
Which is not to say there weren’t sparkling moments. At one point, a character patiently describes the phenomenon of dinner theatre to another who seems never to have heard of it. (“They really murder someone? How exciting!” “No, they’re acting.” “Acting? While you eat?!?” “No, after.”) So all at once, you get the explaining-Earth-culture-to-Mork kind of vibe and the I’m-a-bit-player-in-a-dinner-theatre-production-but-I-take-myself-soooo-seriously vibe.
Lynn pointed out a really cool facet of the choreography, where they used silly bicep-grabbing or surfing gestures as one might use crutch words such as “um,” “like,” and “you know” in a conversation.
But on the whole, the bits worth watching were rare in the endless first act. I suppose a theatre geek reading this would admonish me that this tedium is the point of the piece: real-world conversations, even among artists, are mostly dull. If that truly was the message, Nature Theater could have printed “Everybody’s Dull Most of the Time” on a bunch of business cards and saved the audience the time and money.
Ninety-six minutes (!) later, one of the directors glided onto the stage and did a parody of directors who write themselves into starring roles. “Oh, the irony,” we’re meant to shout.
After that, the actors danced their way to intermission, accompanied by a beatbox number from Mr. Rabbit Ears—partially lipsynced, I might add. Lynn and I emptied our bladders and then went outside for some fresh air, debating what to do.
We speculated that maybe the whole point of the piece was to dare anyone to bother showing up for the second act. I’d be astonished if the house were even half full after intermission. But we didn’t stick around to find out. We were having much more fun talking about and dissecting the play than watching it.
So we caught a pedicab into the cool night air and retired for tea to continue our armchair analyses.
Lynn noted that the performers were probably doing all that madcap “meta” stuff to break free of the conventions of theatre (like the “fourth wall” separating audience from performers).
If that was their aim, then they need more target practice. For one thing, they didn’t actually engage the audience at all—I’m sorry, staring fixedly into the crowd is not the same as connecting with people. For another thing, doing in-jokes on the structure of theatre is not the same as commentary.
I think the reason the play has to be counted as a misstep in the end is that it misses its own stated goal to
effect a shift in the perception of everyday reality that extends beyond the site of performance and into the world in which we live.
They broke conventions, but no boundaries. They shifted accents, but not perceptions. They didn’t explore anything.
What they did wonderfully, though (and it’s the reason I can honestly say I liked the piece) is pull off a performance that forces you to appreciate just the surface form for what it is. If you lapse into analysis (or more likely, sleep), you’ll start feeling left behind or even lost.
In other words, for all the technical faults of the show, the skilled performers still managed to
create an unsettling live situation that demands total presence from everyone in the room.
They nailed that. And that’s why they get a C+ instead of a D.