Last night I attended Fight With a Stick's opening of their latest performance, Oh What a Beautiful Morning!, at The Russian Hall. Frankly, I don't know what to make of the experience. Partly that's the point, as in their latest scenographic scrambling of our perceptions director Alexander Lazaridis Ferguson and his team of collaborators--especially video designer Josh Hite--are interested in taking what is in the background (and also off to the side) of the 1955 film version of the classic American musical Oklahoma! and moving it to the foreground. This results in some stunning visual effects, but at a scant 50 minutes the work feels a bit like a strung together series of scene studies rather than a fully realized deconstruction of the sensory and social environments of the film.
Placing the audience on risers that climb up the stage of the Russian Hall, and working with two scrims and a series of moveable walls, the piece begins by reproducing the widescreen opening shot of the film's cornfields. And then leaves us there. As the stuck first bars of the overture repeat on a loop, the video projection appears to start glitching, slowly advancing frame by frame as we plunge deeper and deeper into the thick rows of cornfields, a mash-up of genre tropes that makes one think that the creepy kids from the horror film Children of the Corn might leap out at us at any moment. Instead, we eventually are made to focus on a lone figure off in the distance toiling in the fields (a black sharecropper perhaps?), someone whose invisible labour is what helps to sustain not just farm girl Laurey Williams' romantic aspirations, but the entire state's territorial ones.
While I tend to be cautious about the aims of exposing an iconic work of art to contemporary critical scrutiny, I do want those aims to be clearly identified. Instead, I couldn't quite tell last night if Oh What a Beautiful Morning! was meant to be a study in performative decolonization (we hear stage directions referencing "Indian territory" in voiceover), a critique of capital accumulation (a windstorm blows the contents of Aunt Eller's farmhouse across the screen), or a Hitchcockian take on female hysteria. Here I refer to the fact that the piece's longest--and concluding--scene puts us in the kitchen with Laurey and Aunt Eller, the projected wallpaper on the back scrim seeming to advance on, and eventually absorb, them, as performers Hayley Gawthrop and Hin Hilary Leung slowly melt into the adjacent side walls. It was captivating to watch; I just don't know what purpose it served.
There are lots of similarly fascinating moments in Oh What, most of them abetted by Hite's uncanny video compositions: Shirley Jones dancing with herself courtesy of front and rear projections; the mirroring of live and recorded hand movements; and Gawthrop and Leung interacting with different screen avatars from the film like cutout figures from a carnival. Again, I found it difficult to figure out the connection between these moments and when the end credits and exit music from the film appeared I think everyone in the audience was a bit surprised. Oh, I guess that's it, was my response as the performers (which also include Logan Hallwas and Jessica Wilke) came out to take a bow. I'm still guessing.
P
Showing posts with label Alex Lazaridis Ferguson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alex Lazaridis Ferguson. Show all posts
Thursday, July 19, 2018
Sunday, June 25, 2017
Cinerama at Spanish Banks
Extending their enquiries into the principles of materialist scenography and the performativity of performance environments, Fight With a Stick's (FWS) latest production is called Cinerama, and is a site-based work set on Spanish Banks at low tide. At an appointed time (it varies each day) and regardless of the weather, audience members assemble just beyond the beach's western concession stand. After checking in with an attendant yesterday afternoon around 1:15 pm and receiving some general instructions, we are all issued noise-cancelling earphones and instructed to head off in the general direction of one of the many container ships dotting the horizon.
It was a surprisingly long trek, a good 12-15 minutes, before we arrived at the playing space, which was an instructive lesson in just how vast a sweep of shoreline is covered by the intertidal, or littoral, zone the closer one gets to the mouth of the ocean. This initial journey was also a crucial first phase of the performance. For me, the earphones accomplished two interrelated goals. First, they made me more aware of my breathing, which in turn put me more in touch with my body as a whole, including the feel of the sand underneath my bare feet and the warmth of the water collecting in different tidal pools. At the same time, the absence of sound extended my visual sense outward, so that the entire panorama in front and to either side of me--from the human and animal action on the sand, to those sublimely disturbing ships set against the backdrop of the north shore mountains, to the built cityscape to my right, and to the hazy, shimmery archipelago of Vancouver and the Gulf Islands to my left--seemed to present itself as a series of shifting relationships of scale that regardless of actual physical distances nevertheless felt collectively within and out of reach, all at once: as if my body might punch through a trompe l'oeil painted backdrop on an old-school Hollywood studio set at any moment. In this way, the opening walk in Cinerama sets up the context for the rest of the piece, which seeks to make manifest the mechanisms by which we frame--and, by extension, annex--the natural spaces around us.
Once we arrive at the playing space, which FWS has positioned several hundred metres from the edge of what is already the incoming tide, we are instructed by sound designer Nancy Tam to place our headphones in an awaiting wagon and to take a seat on any of the vertically staggered chairs not marked with an X that have been anchored into the sand. To the backs of the X-marked chairs have been affixed mini-iPods, from which issue Tam's score, a mix of recorded extra-diagetic nautical sounds (the whoosh of water ebbing and flowing, boat horns, the squawking of birds) that combines with the live diagetic noise being produced around us (including the curious and/or flummoxed comments from passersby who happen upon the scene). Produced through this hybrid double-act of DJing is an assemblage of the natural and the mechanical, the ambient and the amplified, that is in keeping with Cinerama's overall troubling of the categories of background and foreground, and that contributes to an exploration of an idea of "atmosphere" that is at once theatrical and climatological.
Thus seated and newly "attuned" to our environment, we await the next phase of the performance. Not that things aren't already happening all around us: folks of every age and shape and state of undress promenading on the sand and in the surf; dogs chasing after balls; kids water skimming; birds and the occasional float plane soaring past in the sky. And not that we aren't also, as previously mentioned, the surveilled object of other onlookers' more or less focussed gaze. But at a certain point these multiple circuits of looking start to shift in a single direction as, on our left (or western) periphery, we begin to become aware of something (and someone) advancing towards us from the horizon. Two large steel frames, mobile picture windows onto the vista's equally portable vanishing point, are being carried by FWS performer-devisers, one person on either side of the frame and similarly apparelled in designer all-weather hazmat-style suits that Natalie Purschwitz has assembled from fabric that seems to mimic the elements of sea and sky, clouds and earth, so that at a greater remove it appears as if the performers are at one with their surroundings and that the frames are moving all on their own (a trick of perception FWS had previously experimented with in the award-winning Revolutions). Somewhere in this process I must have looked away, because when next I focussed on the progress of the advancing frames and performers, two had suddenly multiplied to five (and four to ten); I can only surmise that three of the frames had been positioned to lie in the sand more proximately to where the audience was seated and that as the more distant ones crossed their paths, they were raised up and also started moving. At any rate, the peripatetic journey of the frames ends when they are installed at different junctures in between the staggered line-up of audience chairs, so that depending on where one is seated in this line-up one's experience of watching watchers watch is diffracted x-fold.
Had the performance ended here I would have been supremely (and sublimely) satisfied, so content was I to stare out through the four frames in front of me, this mise-en-abyme of human and non-human actants coalescing into a single long take that was refreshingly contemplative: an installation- or site-based version of slow cinema. However, the performance was far from over and the frames, no matter our initial expectations, did not remain stationary. Instead, over the next half hour or so the FWS performers (company co-directors Steven Hill and Alex Lazaridis Ferguson, alongside collaborators who included Scott Billings, Delia Brett, Elissa Hanson, Josh Hite, Diego Romero, and Paula Viitanen) manipulated the frames in a kind of mechanical ballet. The movement started slowly and subtly, with the frames being raised up and down a quarter-inch or so, and rippling backwards from the frame positioned closest to the water. Eventually the tempo picked up and the up-and-down movement was supplemented by the frames being tilted forwards and backwards, shifted horizontally to the left and the right, and arced vertically on their axes by incremental degrees. As this was going on, the tide was slowly (and then more and more quickly) creeping in, with the movement of the frames not so much mimicking as complementing the locomotive drift of the water, which swirls and eddies from different directions, picking up speed and force, until what seemed impossibly distant and at a safely calculable physical and temporal remove is suddenly lapping at your knees.
And this, finally, is what comprises the brilliance of this production, what I'll call the framing of the rhythms of diurnal events. The tide goes out and it comes back in. Still at this point in the anthropocene such a statement remains a dialectical certainty. Cinerama focuses our attention on the inevitability of waiting for what we know is coming. And the payoff is that we still end up surprised.
P.
It was a surprisingly long trek, a good 12-15 minutes, before we arrived at the playing space, which was an instructive lesson in just how vast a sweep of shoreline is covered by the intertidal, or littoral, zone the closer one gets to the mouth of the ocean. This initial journey was also a crucial first phase of the performance. For me, the earphones accomplished two interrelated goals. First, they made me more aware of my breathing, which in turn put me more in touch with my body as a whole, including the feel of the sand underneath my bare feet and the warmth of the water collecting in different tidal pools. At the same time, the absence of sound extended my visual sense outward, so that the entire panorama in front and to either side of me--from the human and animal action on the sand, to those sublimely disturbing ships set against the backdrop of the north shore mountains, to the built cityscape to my right, and to the hazy, shimmery archipelago of Vancouver and the Gulf Islands to my left--seemed to present itself as a series of shifting relationships of scale that regardless of actual physical distances nevertheless felt collectively within and out of reach, all at once: as if my body might punch through a trompe l'oeil painted backdrop on an old-school Hollywood studio set at any moment. In this way, the opening walk in Cinerama sets up the context for the rest of the piece, which seeks to make manifest the mechanisms by which we frame--and, by extension, annex--the natural spaces around us.
Once we arrive at the playing space, which FWS has positioned several hundred metres from the edge of what is already the incoming tide, we are instructed by sound designer Nancy Tam to place our headphones in an awaiting wagon and to take a seat on any of the vertically staggered chairs not marked with an X that have been anchored into the sand. To the backs of the X-marked chairs have been affixed mini-iPods, from which issue Tam's score, a mix of recorded extra-diagetic nautical sounds (the whoosh of water ebbing and flowing, boat horns, the squawking of birds) that combines with the live diagetic noise being produced around us (including the curious and/or flummoxed comments from passersby who happen upon the scene). Produced through this hybrid double-act of DJing is an assemblage of the natural and the mechanical, the ambient and the amplified, that is in keeping with Cinerama's overall troubling of the categories of background and foreground, and that contributes to an exploration of an idea of "atmosphere" that is at once theatrical and climatological.
Thus seated and newly "attuned" to our environment, we await the next phase of the performance. Not that things aren't already happening all around us: folks of every age and shape and state of undress promenading on the sand and in the surf; dogs chasing after balls; kids water skimming; birds and the occasional float plane soaring past in the sky. And not that we aren't also, as previously mentioned, the surveilled object of other onlookers' more or less focussed gaze. But at a certain point these multiple circuits of looking start to shift in a single direction as, on our left (or western) periphery, we begin to become aware of something (and someone) advancing towards us from the horizon. Two large steel frames, mobile picture windows onto the vista's equally portable vanishing point, are being carried by FWS performer-devisers, one person on either side of the frame and similarly apparelled in designer all-weather hazmat-style suits that Natalie Purschwitz has assembled from fabric that seems to mimic the elements of sea and sky, clouds and earth, so that at a greater remove it appears as if the performers are at one with their surroundings and that the frames are moving all on their own (a trick of perception FWS had previously experimented with in the award-winning Revolutions). Somewhere in this process I must have looked away, because when next I focussed on the progress of the advancing frames and performers, two had suddenly multiplied to five (and four to ten); I can only surmise that three of the frames had been positioned to lie in the sand more proximately to where the audience was seated and that as the more distant ones crossed their paths, they were raised up and also started moving. At any rate, the peripatetic journey of the frames ends when they are installed at different junctures in between the staggered line-up of audience chairs, so that depending on where one is seated in this line-up one's experience of watching watchers watch is diffracted x-fold.
Had the performance ended here I would have been supremely (and sublimely) satisfied, so content was I to stare out through the four frames in front of me, this mise-en-abyme of human and non-human actants coalescing into a single long take that was refreshingly contemplative: an installation- or site-based version of slow cinema. However, the performance was far from over and the frames, no matter our initial expectations, did not remain stationary. Instead, over the next half hour or so the FWS performers (company co-directors Steven Hill and Alex Lazaridis Ferguson, alongside collaborators who included Scott Billings, Delia Brett, Elissa Hanson, Josh Hite, Diego Romero, and Paula Viitanen) manipulated the frames in a kind of mechanical ballet. The movement started slowly and subtly, with the frames being raised up and down a quarter-inch or so, and rippling backwards from the frame positioned closest to the water. Eventually the tempo picked up and the up-and-down movement was supplemented by the frames being tilted forwards and backwards, shifted horizontally to the left and the right, and arced vertically on their axes by incremental degrees. As this was going on, the tide was slowly (and then more and more quickly) creeping in, with the movement of the frames not so much mimicking as complementing the locomotive drift of the water, which swirls and eddies from different directions, picking up speed and force, until what seemed impossibly distant and at a safely calculable physical and temporal remove is suddenly lapping at your knees.
And this, finally, is what comprises the brilliance of this production, what I'll call the framing of the rhythms of diurnal events. The tide goes out and it comes back in. Still at this point in the anthropocene such a statement remains a dialectical certainty. Cinerama focuses our attention on the inevitability of waiting for what we know is coming. And the payoff is that we still end up surprised.
P.
Monday, May 23, 2016
Revolutions at 3681 Victoria Drive
Because their usual performance space, the Russian Hall on Campbell Avenue, is being renovated, Fight With a Stick (formerly Leaky Heaven) is presenting its newest devised creation, Revolutions, at a former warehouse space on Victoria Drive. What's more, taking their cue from the space itself and invoking the principles of scenographic dramaturgy for which they are so well known (as well as the theories of Jane Bennett and other new materialists), FWS collaborators have built a show in which site is not just a container awaiting animation by human actants, but is actually the primary animating agent.
That said, the piece begins fairly traditionally. (***WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW!***) The audience, having assembled in an anteroom at one end of the warehouse's main floor, is ushered down a few stairs and invited into a jerry-rigged plywood performance space that appears to have been purpose-built. At one end there is a bed piled with mussed-up sheets and a desk and chair. At the other end there is a platform with risers for the audience. So far so proscenium. Following the curtain speech, the lights go down and ... nothing happens. Which is, of course, not true. As we wait expectantly, our trained perspectival gaze focused on the ambiguous domestic scene in front of us, Nancy Tam's atmospheric and vaguely foreboding sound score insinuates itself into our consciousness like a horror film soundtrack, the layered thrum of its synthesizers combining eerily with the ambient acoustics of the adjacent outdoor environment (including the swoosh of the passing Skytrain, which we learned during the talkback Tam purposefully picked up and amplified with two pencil mics hidden in bushes; she also recorded, reversed and delayed the sound of the Skytrain, and then pitched it on the other side of the interior room to make it seem like there was a train moving in the opposite direction). Then there is the damp and musty smell of the semi-subterranean space that we begin to notice. Finally, and crucially only after our other senses have been piqued, there is something to focus on at the front of the stage: slowly and almost imperceptibly the sheets on the bed have begun to move. So minute is the movement at first, and so amorphously shaped is the entire mass of sheets, that one is unsure whether there is a body underneath manipulating them or if they are moving of their own accord. Just to be clear, there is in fact a body, and it belongs to Delia Brett. Nevertheless, this perceptual doubt (and ethical philosophy) about the dividing line between subject and object, the material and the immaterial, is at the core of this piece, and it will be exploited elsewhere to amazing effect (especially in Josh Hite's video projections, where for example an animated picture of the surface of a concrete wall interacts with the very thing it is meant to be a representation of, making it impossible to determine where one begins and the other leaves off, and also creating a sense of doubled perceptual porosity).
But back to our domestic scene. Eventually a human actor--Sean Marshall Jr--does intrude upon our witnessing of the moving sheets. He emerges from a tiny corner bathroom upstage right and takes a seat at the desk, lighting a small kerosene lamp. He rubs his eyes wearily and taps his glasses mechanically, every sound picked up by a hidden table mic. He appears to take no notice of what is going on underneath the sheets on the bed--until, that is, a hand suddenly reveals itself and, rather dramatically, lays itself on the surface of the table. Shades of Thing from The Addams Family, or something out of the pages of Poe: whatever one's favourite gothic reference, it is the signal for Marshall to get up and fetch whoever is attached to the hand a glass of water--and a straw to drink it with. Not that these actions necessarily mean anything profound, beyond drawing out attention to the different objects which are ostensibly mediating the interactions between the two human bodies on stage--who legitimately should be the presumptive (and undivided) focus of our attention in traditional naturalist drama (and here it strikes me that FWS's work is productively in dialogue with the theatre criticism of someone like Andrew Sofer, both his book on The Stage Life of Props and his more recent Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater and Performance).
Even the book that Marshall begins to read and take notes from refuses to offer up any wisdom in terms of its content; instead, the increasingly trite aphorisms that get repeated to us serve as a very real distraction from the physical action and changes in material form that we should be concentrating on. That is, trained as we are as good theatregoers to prioritize spoken language on stage, we are wont at first to miss the fact that Marshall is slowly moving his desk table and chair (both are on wheels) forward as he is reading his aphorisms and, even more importantly, that we audience members on our platform are moving backwards. At the talkback following the performance, several of my fellow spectators commented on experiencing feelings of nausea, which was their first sensory clue that something uncanny was going on; in my case, I admit to cottoning on to the visual trick very slowly--though when I finally realized what was happening it was one of the most astonishingly rewarding experiences in the theatre I have had in a long time, a live embodied version of a cinematic zoom out that happens so subtly and incrementally as to make you both doubt and become more hyper-attuned to your senses in relation to your immediate physical environment. Indeed, in terms of the expanding and contracting of space in Revolutions, I was very much put in mind of Catherine Deneuve slowly going crazy in her apartment in Repulsion.
The reference is not so far off, as the walls of our original performance space start breaking apart, with outside objects intruding, and with individual wall panels eventually taking on a life of their own, shooting across the floor of the warehouse (the entire expanse of which we can now see) like toy cars on a racetrack (the ingenious lego-like set is by Jay White). There are of course FWS performer-devisers (including co-directors and FWS co-ADs Steven Hill and Alex Lazaridis Ferguson) behind these panels manipulating them, just like they were behind our platform pulling us backwards. But that doesn't make the non-human ballet we are watching (which includes lighting design trio Kyla Gardiner, Gabriel Raminhos and Jaylene Pratt's trick of having the warehouse's built-in hanging ceiling fluorescents flicker on and off like they are extemporizing a conversation in morse code with each other) any less thrilling to behold. For what FWS have so brilliantly managed to do in this piece is flip theatrical frames mid-performance, turning a proscenium staging into an immersive experience in which space acts upon us rather than the other way around.
P
That said, the piece begins fairly traditionally. (***WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW!***) The audience, having assembled in an anteroom at one end of the warehouse's main floor, is ushered down a few stairs and invited into a jerry-rigged plywood performance space that appears to have been purpose-built. At one end there is a bed piled with mussed-up sheets and a desk and chair. At the other end there is a platform with risers for the audience. So far so proscenium. Following the curtain speech, the lights go down and ... nothing happens. Which is, of course, not true. As we wait expectantly, our trained perspectival gaze focused on the ambiguous domestic scene in front of us, Nancy Tam's atmospheric and vaguely foreboding sound score insinuates itself into our consciousness like a horror film soundtrack, the layered thrum of its synthesizers combining eerily with the ambient acoustics of the adjacent outdoor environment (including the swoosh of the passing Skytrain, which we learned during the talkback Tam purposefully picked up and amplified with two pencil mics hidden in bushes; she also recorded, reversed and delayed the sound of the Skytrain, and then pitched it on the other side of the interior room to make it seem like there was a train moving in the opposite direction). Then there is the damp and musty smell of the semi-subterranean space that we begin to notice. Finally, and crucially only after our other senses have been piqued, there is something to focus on at the front of the stage: slowly and almost imperceptibly the sheets on the bed have begun to move. So minute is the movement at first, and so amorphously shaped is the entire mass of sheets, that one is unsure whether there is a body underneath manipulating them or if they are moving of their own accord. Just to be clear, there is in fact a body, and it belongs to Delia Brett. Nevertheless, this perceptual doubt (and ethical philosophy) about the dividing line between subject and object, the material and the immaterial, is at the core of this piece, and it will be exploited elsewhere to amazing effect (especially in Josh Hite's video projections, where for example an animated picture of the surface of a concrete wall interacts with the very thing it is meant to be a representation of, making it impossible to determine where one begins and the other leaves off, and also creating a sense of doubled perceptual porosity).
But back to our domestic scene. Eventually a human actor--Sean Marshall Jr--does intrude upon our witnessing of the moving sheets. He emerges from a tiny corner bathroom upstage right and takes a seat at the desk, lighting a small kerosene lamp. He rubs his eyes wearily and taps his glasses mechanically, every sound picked up by a hidden table mic. He appears to take no notice of what is going on underneath the sheets on the bed--until, that is, a hand suddenly reveals itself and, rather dramatically, lays itself on the surface of the table. Shades of Thing from The Addams Family, or something out of the pages of Poe: whatever one's favourite gothic reference, it is the signal for Marshall to get up and fetch whoever is attached to the hand a glass of water--and a straw to drink it with. Not that these actions necessarily mean anything profound, beyond drawing out attention to the different objects which are ostensibly mediating the interactions between the two human bodies on stage--who legitimately should be the presumptive (and undivided) focus of our attention in traditional naturalist drama (and here it strikes me that FWS's work is productively in dialogue with the theatre criticism of someone like Andrew Sofer, both his book on The Stage Life of Props and his more recent Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater and Performance).
Even the book that Marshall begins to read and take notes from refuses to offer up any wisdom in terms of its content; instead, the increasingly trite aphorisms that get repeated to us serve as a very real distraction from the physical action and changes in material form that we should be concentrating on. That is, trained as we are as good theatregoers to prioritize spoken language on stage, we are wont at first to miss the fact that Marshall is slowly moving his desk table and chair (both are on wheels) forward as he is reading his aphorisms and, even more importantly, that we audience members on our platform are moving backwards. At the talkback following the performance, several of my fellow spectators commented on experiencing feelings of nausea, which was their first sensory clue that something uncanny was going on; in my case, I admit to cottoning on to the visual trick very slowly--though when I finally realized what was happening it was one of the most astonishingly rewarding experiences in the theatre I have had in a long time, a live embodied version of a cinematic zoom out that happens so subtly and incrementally as to make you both doubt and become more hyper-attuned to your senses in relation to your immediate physical environment. Indeed, in terms of the expanding and contracting of space in Revolutions, I was very much put in mind of Catherine Deneuve slowly going crazy in her apartment in Repulsion.
The reference is not so far off, as the walls of our original performance space start breaking apart, with outside objects intruding, and with individual wall panels eventually taking on a life of their own, shooting across the floor of the warehouse (the entire expanse of which we can now see) like toy cars on a racetrack (the ingenious lego-like set is by Jay White). There are of course FWS performer-devisers (including co-directors and FWS co-ADs Steven Hill and Alex Lazaridis Ferguson) behind these panels manipulating them, just like they were behind our platform pulling us backwards. But that doesn't make the non-human ballet we are watching (which includes lighting design trio Kyla Gardiner, Gabriel Raminhos and Jaylene Pratt's trick of having the warehouse's built-in hanging ceiling fluorescents flicker on and off like they are extemporizing a conversation in morse code with each other) any less thrilling to behold. For what FWS have so brilliantly managed to do in this piece is flip theatrical frames mid-performance, turning a proscenium staging into an immersive experience in which space acts upon us rather than the other way around.
P
Sunday, February 8, 2015
PuSh 2015: Steppenwolf
Steppenwolf, on at the Russian Hall in Strathcona through this afternoon as part of the PuSh Festival, is the debut production of Fight with a Stick, a new local company formed by my SFU colleague and former Leaky Heaven artistic director Steven Hill and veteran theatre artist Alex Lazaridis Ferguson. The work is an adaptation of Herman Hesse's 1927 novel of the same name, about a lone wolf writer, Harry Haller, who feels out of step with his times. (My lazy punning notwithstanding, the title of Hesse's book comes from the manuscript within the manuscript within the novel that Harry is given by a hawker on the street--and from which Ferguson reads in the show.) Ferguson and Hill also adapt, with this production, a design conceit from an earlier Leaky Heaven show, project x (faust), a take on Goethe by way of Rosemary's Baby that positioned the audience in front of a bank of mirrors, so that we became part of the action and also the object of our own categorical (and categorizing) gaze--you can bet that Hill has read up on his Lacan.
However, unlike in project x (faust), all of the action in Steppenwolf happens behind the audience, which we then see projected in reverse through the mirrors. And herein lies my chief problem with the piece: much of it was just plain hard to see. This became immediately obvious at the top of the show, when the performers hold up a bank of laptops, each cued to a series of interior images (rehearsal footage, I'm assuming). Besides the occasional hand that gets in the way and the rather clumsy choreography as the performers begin to move side to side with the laptops, the display screens were simply too small to be meaningful in any capacity other than as a nifty lighting effect; instead, I concentrated on the plinks of sound (street traffic, birds chirping) introduced during this sequence by the ever-talented Nancy Tam. Other video projections (by Josh Hite, working with Parjad Sharifi) were more effective, especially when combined with live bodies, as when Hill suddenly appears from behind a digital image of himself pacing the length of the Russian Hall stage, the image itself being "wheeled" back and forth by another performer in front of the red curtains.
As for the story by Hesse, Ferguson plays Harry, narrating a good portion of the text (and the aforementioned "Treatise on the Steppenwolf," in particular) from inside what I took to be a mini broadcast booth--or maybe it was supposed to be a television screen. I could listen to Ferguson read the phone book and be seduced by his voice, and the effect of what appears to be the actor reading the book backward is initially uncanny. However, this is also the part of Hesse's novel that rails against all the pleasure-seeking bourgeois folks with whom Harry feels at odds and I didn't really need this point driven home by the hand-held spotlight positioned above the mirrors that illuminates individual members of the audience in turn; the desired épater effect comes across more as biting the hand that feeds.
Things pick up when we enter the dance hall--via a whirling wooden house with multiple doors (the set is by Natalie Purschwitz, who has certainly been kept busy by PuSh shows this winter). There we meet the super-sexy trio of Hermine (Nneka Croal), Maria (Brette Little) and the saxophonist Pablo (Sean Marshall Jr.). They turn our Harry onto sex, drugs and other illicit pleasures, which culminates in a riotous orgy of onstage violence involving, among other things, several mannequin limbs (Nazli Akhtari, who danced with me in Le Grand Continental, and the wonderfully named Anais West round out the cast). This, one assumes, is the Magic Theatre that Harry has been searching for throughout Hesse's novel, and that Pablo finally introduces him to at its end. It is a space of reflective fantasy, a corridor of the mind with a row of doors on one side and, of course, a long mirror on the other.
I'm not sure that one needs to know this detail to "get" Fight with a Stick's take on Hesse's novel. However, it does help to understand that, as the creators note in their credit sheet, that this version of Steppenwolf is "a design driven theatre installation"--rather than, say, a devised play. It's also interesting to note that in the description printed in the PuSh program guide, the show is described as being "staged for" rather than in the Russian Hall. This is one of the things I have always loved about Hill's practice, including his previous collaborations with Ferguson on Der Wink and To Wear a Heart So White: how the specific material space of the Russian Hall has always been co-constitutive of the work.
I just wish, in this instance, that the audience didn't seem so superfluous to the process.
P.
However, unlike in project x (faust), all of the action in Steppenwolf happens behind the audience, which we then see projected in reverse through the mirrors. And herein lies my chief problem with the piece: much of it was just plain hard to see. This became immediately obvious at the top of the show, when the performers hold up a bank of laptops, each cued to a series of interior images (rehearsal footage, I'm assuming). Besides the occasional hand that gets in the way and the rather clumsy choreography as the performers begin to move side to side with the laptops, the display screens were simply too small to be meaningful in any capacity other than as a nifty lighting effect; instead, I concentrated on the plinks of sound (street traffic, birds chirping) introduced during this sequence by the ever-talented Nancy Tam. Other video projections (by Josh Hite, working with Parjad Sharifi) were more effective, especially when combined with live bodies, as when Hill suddenly appears from behind a digital image of himself pacing the length of the Russian Hall stage, the image itself being "wheeled" back and forth by another performer in front of the red curtains.
As for the story by Hesse, Ferguson plays Harry, narrating a good portion of the text (and the aforementioned "Treatise on the Steppenwolf," in particular) from inside what I took to be a mini broadcast booth--or maybe it was supposed to be a television screen. I could listen to Ferguson read the phone book and be seduced by his voice, and the effect of what appears to be the actor reading the book backward is initially uncanny. However, this is also the part of Hesse's novel that rails against all the pleasure-seeking bourgeois folks with whom Harry feels at odds and I didn't really need this point driven home by the hand-held spotlight positioned above the mirrors that illuminates individual members of the audience in turn; the desired épater effect comes across more as biting the hand that feeds.
Things pick up when we enter the dance hall--via a whirling wooden house with multiple doors (the set is by Natalie Purschwitz, who has certainly been kept busy by PuSh shows this winter). There we meet the super-sexy trio of Hermine (Nneka Croal), Maria (Brette Little) and the saxophonist Pablo (Sean Marshall Jr.). They turn our Harry onto sex, drugs and other illicit pleasures, which culminates in a riotous orgy of onstage violence involving, among other things, several mannequin limbs (Nazli Akhtari, who danced with me in Le Grand Continental, and the wonderfully named Anais West round out the cast). This, one assumes, is the Magic Theatre that Harry has been searching for throughout Hesse's novel, and that Pablo finally introduces him to at its end. It is a space of reflective fantasy, a corridor of the mind with a row of doors on one side and, of course, a long mirror on the other.
I'm not sure that one needs to know this detail to "get" Fight with a Stick's take on Hesse's novel. However, it does help to understand that, as the creators note in their credit sheet, that this version of Steppenwolf is "a design driven theatre installation"--rather than, say, a devised play. It's also interesting to note that in the description printed in the PuSh program guide, the show is described as being "staged for" rather than in the Russian Hall. This is one of the things I have always loved about Hill's practice, including his previous collaborations with Ferguson on Der Wink and To Wear a Heart So White: how the specific material space of the Russian Hall has always been co-constitutive of the work.
I just wish, in this instance, that the audience didn't seem so superfluous to the process.
P.
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