Irish Modern Dance Theatre artistic director John Scott”s Fall and Recover is currently running at La Mama thru April 9. He and I recently met to talk specifically about his process working with survivors of torture who now live in Ireland. He spoke to Andy last year for a previous Five Questions.

How did you come to this project? You should look up the UN definition of torture. In summary: “Torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted by or at the instigation of a public official on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or confession, punishing him for an act he has committed, or intimidating him or other persons.” It is meant to destroy a person without killing them. I was asked to do some workshops and I’m not a therapist or anything, but the survivors were doing art therapy at the Centre for Care for Survivors of Torture in Dublin and they’d asked for dance. They’d been working in drama and one of them, Kiribu, said it was too close to therapy because you’d talk about yourself and they didn’t feel safe doing it. There’s shame and guilt and trying to comprehend the horror of it all. Kiribu said that in Africa you dance all the time – when you work, when you’re happy, sad, at funerals. Dance is so much a part of their feeling that they wanted to try it and to feel good in their bodies again. They’ve said that the effect of the torture is something like having your shadow in front of you all your life. Sometimes they can’t get out of bed in the morning, they have skin problems, allergies, one of the performers has a severe asthma, so she carries a letter for doctors, and she was a gymnast. They have insomnia and paranoia and there is always the risk of that an event, anything, can be a trigger for a flashback. Laying on a cold floor can trigger a flashback. There’s a piece I hope to bring next year where the dancers stand still for a long time and one of them said “I can’t do that. When it happened to me I had to stand still for hours and I can’t stand still anymore.” So it can be a position or a sound. The composer had a sound in rehearsals that reminded several of them with aerial bombardment. They asked him to take it out and he did. It’s all about listening and respecting each other.

How did you start the process with them? I did my normal dance workshop based on what I learned with Pablo Vela, Meredith Monk, Anna Sokolow, etc. We did these exercises with our names – singing and moving, writing your names in space. I’d say something like run your name across the room and all the Arabic speakers ran to the other side of the room because the script runs the other way and we had instant choreography. I was told to never ask what happened to them. You could ask names and where are you from. So I walked into a room and they looked just like people, you know and I’d been asked if I’d like having a therapist to sit in the workshops. I said no, that was in 2003 and I haven’t needed one yet. Dancers are sensitive and this work requires a heightened sensitivity. People sometimes become aggressive or very quiet. When you’re working with longtime collaborators you know if they’re in a difficult mood, you see it coming. But with these guys it’s very quick. It may have been festering for a week, but suddenly BING! They pull themselves through it though. So I said: “My name is John, I’m a choreographer. I haven’t come a very long distance. But, I know some of you have left your homes and left your countries and I’m sorry for what you have been through. I want you to know I will never ask you what happened. My work is abstract and I don’t use stories. I use symbols and ideas. My dancers bring in ideas and we have fun. You can call me anytime day or night. Say anything you like.” It was two years later when one of them told me that made them feel safe and they knew they could work without giving anything away. Imagine, if a woman was tortured maybe her husband, son, daughter, mother could have been killed and she might feel shame for surviving. Your life is never the same.

Clearly, this project presented very different challenges. How do they manage working on this while recovering from the unspeakable? They also have the issues of a strange country, a strange language, culture/racial hostility and suspicion and then, having your case accepted and receiving refugee status. For every 100 people in Ireland who apply, only 6 to 10 might get that. It can take 2-7 years to go through this process. One guy in our group (who couldn’t come because he doesn’t have status) has been waiting 6 years and he’s 22 years old. He’s covered in beating marks and burns. The other performers told me he would never take his shirt off in the changing room. When he asked me and my manager to help him with his case, I said I can ask an immigration lawyer who can help you, but were you beaten and then he took off his shirt. It was shocking and those scars are 6 years old. He said when he did dance classes and performed, he didn’t have to take his medication. He’s still waiting to hear if he’s going to be deported. You can also apply for Humanitarian Leave to remain and if you can get 5 years out of that, then you can apply for citizenship. He has a file, psychological evaluations, they interview them, but the hearing is alone – basically with retired judges. You have to prove you will be killed if you go home. They can acknowledge the wounds, the medical file, that you will have trouble if you go back. But, if there is not enough evidence to prove that if you go back to your country you will be killed, they can’t grant you status. There’s a powerful book Human Cargo by Elizabeth Morehead. I couldn’t read it all, I’m too close to it, but she talks about what’s happening to refugees around the world especially after 9/11 when the US shut its doors and it all came down to Europe. Different countries in the EU have a lot autonomy and they don’t cooperate, but when it comes to immigration they cooperate very well. There’s an EU organization that deals with border enforcement. They will round up people and stop in a few EU countries. In Ireland, you apply for status and you’re usually living in a hostel. You get breakfast at 8, Lunch at 12, dinner at 5, a dorm room, your medical expenses covered and are given 19 euros a week. So, if they had dance practice til 5, they’d miss their dinner across town. It all could really make you give up. But, I wasn’t aware of any of that when I started.

When did you begin actually making this work with them? In our first exercise, we stood in a circle and were raising arms and they were looking at me and I felt this huge responsibility and great need in the way they were moving. I wanted to cry and I was inspired. Kiribu just kept reaching up and there was this young kid who had a perfect second position. He was a shepherd from Sudan, but he could jump and I thought he was a professional dancer. He’d gone up to the hills one day and some group had sacked the village and his mother and brother were killed. His father gave someone money to get him out and he was brought to Turkey and got on a plane thinking he was going to America and got off in Ireland. The trafficker tricked him. Everyone in the group was very gifted, with technical and beautiful qualities. I kept thinking this is so interesting. We’ll make a little piece in 2003 for the UN’s International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. I kept thinking it would be amazing to make a piece with them, but they’re not used to any kind of rehearsal structure. So, we got a grant to bring in 2 professional dancers and went through a 2-month rehearsal process that was the most enjoyable experience creatively and personally. It was joyous and funny and stressful. We did it at The Project Arts Centre in Dublin, in the small auditorium. Word got out and radio show interviewed me and, suddenly, there was a line around the block. We brought it back 3 times, toured the country. I put it to bed in ’06 and continued working with some of them on a different piece. We toured to Rio, Israel, etc.

I saw your work at La Mama Moves last year. It was highly physical and pretty virtuosic. You brought two professional dancers into this. How does that integration work in your cast? It’s so interesting. My dance dance is often very technical and virtuosic, but this particular group of people have different levels of spiritual and physical virtuosity. It’s a great human palette. In Ireland, the people don’t notice the massive change in our culture. All these people with new skin colors identifying themselves as Irish. We found someone from Eretria, he’s 65 and dancing. He’s incredible. So, we have people of many skills now. We’re working with a retired ballerina. At 71 years old, she’s dancing with us. I’ve started to perform more, even as my body is in decline. We have different bodies different sizes and shapes. We put everyone in this work. There is no disqualificaiton. Everyone who was in a rehearsal could be in it. We never turned a person away, the door was always open. It’s been joyous seeing people grow in confiedence, get married, having kids getting jobs. As one of the dancers described the process as thus: ‘We are fallen. We have come up. When you get the chance to move on, we move on. It is essential that someone has to lift you up – when you get up you can help the next person up.’

For more information, you can listen to John and cast on with Leonard Lopate last week and with the BBC a couple years ago.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Arts Funding & Ethics: Leading off this week’s Digest is a pair of piece from art critic Eleanor Heartney. Back in 1996, following the last dust-up over the NEA and controversial arts, she wrote a piece for Artnet magazine called “Out of the Ivory Tower: Social Responsibility and the Critic.” It turns out, it’s every bit as applicable 15 years later, and she offers a contemporary addendum, “Art & Money: The Umbilical Cord of Gold.” Despite being about visual art, both are very relevant to the current moment, and both should be read in full.

Both pieces raise very powerful questions about the ethics and reality of arts funding, and the relationship of donors to art. I don’t have a lot to add, because neither piece is particularly prescriptive–instead, both suffice to pose questions, questions I’ve been mulling in one way or another for a while. What is the social value of art, for instance, if art is increasingly curtailed to supplicate the ideological whims of wealthy donors? And given the way in which art has become corrupted by dirty money, do we really have a claim to being part of the critical discourse, deserving of limited public funds?

Department of Dumb Ideas: Over at Theaters Ideas, Scott Walters has a suggestion based on the entire #supplydemand issue. He was on Studio 360 and is following up. His suggestion for NEA funding of theaters? One, the NEA should only provide “seed money” for new companies for a total of five years, after which they have to be self-sufficient, and two, only support companies opening in “underserved communities.”

I have four responses. One, five years? How long does he think the average start-up theater company survives? Two, underserved communities? The most recent Americans for the Arts Vitality Report says the number of cultural and ethnic-oriented institutions has doubled in the last decade. “Underserved communities” are where the lion’s share of growth is already. Three, if a community already doesn’t have a theater, why do we assume they’ll ever be able to support one absent government funding? And four, why should everyone else accept the moral argument that only this sort of theater is what should be supported?

Rethinking Audience Development: An interesting thought-piece that doesn’t go half far enough over at the Guardian‘s theater blog. Taking a few contrasting examples from the West End and London’s fringe, the author notes, “Theatre is constantly pre-selecting its pool of potential audience members on the basis of context, timing of performances and venue.” The tension in the piece, never really resolved, is what this means. Is the differentiation primarily a mechanism of how a company or festivals markets itself, or is the reality just that the perceived universalism of good art is itself an illusion. It’s a tricky topic. For a more meaningful discussion of some of these issues, check out Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator.

Odds & Ends: East of Borneo on staging Handke’s Offending the Audience with children – Irish Theater magazine on turning the critic into the emblem of abusive political power – Parabasis‘ series on narrative, installment two – Portland, Oregon’s dance community launches its own newspaper – nothing like a good controversy to move DVDs – Tony Kushner talks controversy himself – Wendy Perron on Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer – Paul Mullin on the continuing fiasco around Seattle’s Intiman Theater – Seattlest.com on why religion doesn’t feature more in the American theater.

Popularity: 6% [?]

It is a long story about how I ended up at Lincoln Center on Tuesday night for NYC Opera’s presentation of “Monodramas”. Suffice it to say that I’ve been trying to get up to speed on contemporary music and when I heard about this opportunity to hear the work of Schoenberg, Feldman and Zorn on one bill, I knew it was important for my education. I was not disappointed.

Basically “Monodramas” is a collection of three one-act solo operas: “La Machine de l’Être” by John Zorn, “Erwartung” by Arnold Schoenberg and “Neither” by Morton Feldman. Each of them is engaging with essential ideas of modernism and the evening as a whole is like a primer in the evolution of the contemporary aesthetic.

The evening is directed by Michael Counts (of Gales Gates fame) and he manages to weave the three pieces together into a surprisingly cohesive whole. Though each piece stands on its own, Counts creates an aesthetic reality that binds them through costume, staging and video. The supernumeraries are rocking burqas and two evil-looking guides (a man and a woman) lead us through the proceedings – unveiling the singers one at a time.

The sets, lighting and video are stunning but what is really amazing are the singers. Zorn’s piece, inspired by the drawings of Antonin Artaud, is sung by Anu Komsi; Schoenberg’s is performed by Kara Shay Thomson; and the Feldman piece (with a libretto by Samuel Beckett) is sung by Cyndia Sieden. Each singer is exceptional. This is incredibly difficult music to interpret and without exception they deliver astonishing performances.

Zorn is the new kid on the block and his piece is the first on the bill, kind of setting the stage for what is to come. His atonality and complexity, his non-language libretto, is the culmination of the work that Schoenberg set in motion nearly 100 years earlier. Schoenberg’s piece is a Freudian stream-of-consciousness thrill ride into a woman’s surreal subconscious. And Feldman, setting Beckett to music, creates a hypnotic existential landscape that is at once terrifying and beguiling.

I’m not a music critic, so I can’t really write about this with the authority I would like to. But I was struck by how adventurous the program was and how curatorially acute. George Steel, the artistic director of NYC Opera, has put together a program that not only contextualizes modernism, but pushes the audience to the edge. What an exciting, challenging program that any downtown venue would be hard-pressed to equal for experimentalism and daring. I was really blown away and from what I hear there are affordable tickets to be had.

If you think you know what’s what in contemporary performance, then don’t miss this extraordinary program. I think it runs ’til April 8. Click here for more information and to buy tickets.

Popularity: 3% [?]

REDCAT TO LAUNCH RADAR L.A., AN INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY THEATER

PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH CENTER THEATRE GROUP (LOS ANGELES) AND THE PUBLIC THEATER’S
UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL (NEW YORK)

Preliminary Highlights Include:
Teatro en el Blanco (Chile),
Toshiki Okada and his company Chelfitsch (Japan),
Visual theater artist Fleur Elise Noble (Australia),
Teatro Linea de Sombra (Mexico),
Jose Miguel Jimenez and The Company (Chile/Ireland),
Los Angeles Poverty Department (L.A.),
Rude Mechs (Austin),
Latino Theater Company (L.A.),
Moving Arts (L.A.)
Sekou (tha misfit) & Steve Connell (L.A.),
and more

Multi-event Passes Go On Sale in April

REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) is proud to announce preliminary program highlights for RADAR L.A., an international festival of contemporary theater running June 14–20. The festival is produced by REDCAT in collaboration with Center Theatre Group and The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival (New York), and a consortium including Theatre Communications Group, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, LA Stage Alliance and the Los Angeles Theatre Center. $50 multi-event passes go on sale in April and will allow audiences to attend performances for as little as $10.

Influential theater ensembles from Australia, Chile, Japan and Mexico are among the companies to be featured alongside Los Angeles artists when REDCAT produces the new international theater festival this summer. REDCAT serves as one of several venues for the groundbreaking festival, which will feature more than 15 productions that are fueling the dialogue about the evolution of contemporary theater, with a special emphasis on artists from Latin America and the Pacific Rim. Additional partner venues include the Los Angeles Theatre Center (LATC) and CTG’s Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City.

The complete program for RADAR L.A. will be announced in late April, but the exciting preliminary line-up features adventurous international artists alongside companies from L.A. and elsewhere in U.S., including:

Teatro en el Blanco (Chile), Toshiki Okada and his company Chelfitsch (Japan), visual theater artist Fleur Elise Noble (Australia), Teatro Linea de Sombra (Mexico), Jose Miguel Jimenez and The Company (Chile/Ireland), Los Angeles Poverty Department (L.A.), Rude Mechs (Austin), Latino Theater Company (L.A.), Moving Arts (L.A.) Sekou (tha misfit) & Steve Connell (L.A.), and more.

RADAR L.A. is presented in conjunction with the Theatre Communication Group’s national conference, June 16–18. Hosted by LA Stage Alliance, the three-day national conference will bring more than 1,000 influential theater organizers, producers, artists and journalists to Los Angeles on the occasion of TCG’s 50th anniversary. RADAR L.A. and TCG will offer a special two-day symposium June 15–16, which will include RADAR L.A. performances as well as panel discussions, workshops and work sessions geared to provide professional development for artistic directors, dramaturgs, theater artists, arts marketing professionals, arts education specialists and theater educators.

“I see this as a great chance for REDCAT and our partners to help provoke meaningful discussion about the evolution of contemporary theater,” remarks REDCAT Executive Director Mark Murphy. “It’s exciting to have a mix of international and L.A. artists prominently featured in the conversation, and to have so many prominent theater producers be a part of it. It’s also an amazing opportunity for LA audiences.”

Largely inspired by the success of The Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival (New York), RADAR L.A. benefits from the involvement of the two main forces behind that program, Mark Russell, producer of Under the Radar and Olga Garay, Executive Director of the Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles, as well as Mark Murphy, Executive Director of REDCAT and Diane Rodriguez, Associate Producer of the Center Theatre Group. As co-curators of the festival, Murphy, Rodriguez and Russell aim to highlight influential theater ensembles and artists from South America and the Pacific Rim alongside emerging and established talents in Los Angeles.

“I am excited about bringing the international companies who will join us in June and introducing to the world our great selection of West Coast theater makers,” said Under the Radar Producer Mark Russell. “The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival is honored to celebrate the vibrant L.A. theater scene.”

“Hosting the national conference of the Theater Communications Group is a big deal in itself, but I’m thrilled that we are making the most of it by presenting such a bold and provocative mix of contemporary theater companies at the same time,” adds Diane Rodriguez of Center Theatre Group. “The high impact of the Festival really expands the conference into a large community event of truly historic proportions.”

Popularity: 5% [?]

Sarah Maxfield made me cry. On Saturday night. At The Chocolate Factory. In her performed love letter to the NY performance community titled We deserve each other. I’d spoken with her a few days earlier for an interview and I wasn’t caught off guard. I knew the nostalgia would hit and felt the sentimentality and, you know, I’m okay with that. Maybe it’s a mom thing. Maybe it’s an age thing. But, I get it. I live Here. Now. But, I miss what’s gone because precious things dissolve and shift and everything changes. And, being okay with the present doesn’t mean that I can’t feel a kind of tenderness for that which has passed and that which is past.

The relative mildness of Maxfield’s manner mixed with the various items in her installation in the basement and the various voices that provide a lot of the substance of the work provide a lot of space for reflection. She asks a couple questions about first subway rides and the first time we saw the city at night and opens doors for our own reflection inside her autobiographical, oral history, retrospective that includes a few other people’s highlights from their time here. She sets me off to thinking about the first work I saw – Muna Tseng’s The Pink at La Mama – and I’m recalling how that’s where I first laid eyes on the man who puts my children to bed every night (while I continue to feed my addiction to Maxfield’s beloved community).

And, yeah – I miss those days. There is a discussion about what was and what isn’t anymore – not simply the ephemeral performances, but the ways of being, of being with work and with the body and issues around quality of living, and I thought of Arturo Vidich’s Body Island and how some artists are still willing to put the body on the line (not to mention his participation in THEM which bridges the what was with the what is in a real, deep, stinky, and gut wrenching way) and I found myself grateful that there are presenters like the Chocolate Factory that can support both kinds of work in the space of one week and still collectively think with others about how to sustain artists lives in performance. The work succeeded in its intention. It drew me back, pulled me forward, and made me think about all the art that’s been made since I’ve been here and left me grateful that someone’s been watching, including me and including you.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Technically this is addressing the visual arts, but I can only assume it works just as well with contemporary performance. If not better.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Saturday night took us to the Joyce where we were fortunate enough to see one of the final performances of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company before it disbands in December. The program consisted of three pieces – CRWDSPCR (1993), Quartet (1982), and Antic Meet (1958).

After hearing about Merce’s company and his influence for so many years it was a thrill to actually see the work performed live. It also felt like a history lesson. It was interesting to see how his work evolved over the years in the course of one night, and it was easy to see how much Merce influenced today’s dance world. The movement vocabulary, the spacing, the costumes, even the choice and role of the music all point to today.

Watching Merce’s company was like watching the urtext of contemporary dance – it is one of the main sources of everything we see today and in a strange way the experience of watching it is like deja vu – you’ve seen it all before but you aren’t sure where. And then you realize you’ve seen it all before everywhere, because this is the origin. It was a pleasure to watch such incredibly skilled, precise and athletic dancers bring this esoteric and abstract work to life with emotion, depth and humor.

I recently read Kyle Gann’s book No Such Thing As Silence, which is all about John Cage and his groundbreaking composition 4’33”. The book discusses Cage’s influence and influences – and briefly touches on his relationship with Cunningham. One of the the things that is exciting about the book is learning about the stew of intellectual and creative activity that was New York in the 50s and 60s.

Watching Antic Meet from 1958 was like a remarkable trip back in time. With music by Cage and decor by Robert Rauschenberg complementing Cunningham’s choreography, it was as if we were magically transported to a time when these ideas about art where new, exciting and challenging. Humor and intellect combine with abstraction and athleticism to create a work that must have been startling to witness at the time.

CRWDSPCR with music by John King and Quartet with music by David Tudor were equally compelling. The abstract soundscapes worked in surprising consonance with Cunningham’s geometric movements.

I’ll be honest, I need to read more to be able to write about this with any kind of authority. I can really only speak to the subjective experience of watching the work for the first time. Confronted with so much non-dance dance and so many artists who resist meaning and interpretation, it was rewarding to see dancers dancing beautifully, articulating a new language and mapping out a new landscape of movement. Even if at times the work seemed more historical than contemporary, it still was delightful to watch.

There are several more performances of the Cunningham Company scheduled over the next 9 months or so, and it concludes with a season at the Park Avenue Armory. If you get a chance to see this legendary company while they’re on tour, don’t miss it.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Friday night took us to Danspace Project to see Adrienne Truscott’s new work HA: A Solo. We’ve long been a fan of Ms. Truscott’s blend of humor and performance and HA: A Solo did not disappoint. Working with her same band of collaborators – Neal Medlyn, Natalie Agee and Carmine Covelli – Truscott presented another one of her whimsical concoctions, blending quirky nonsensical snippets of dialogue with pedestrian movement sequences.

This time, however, she was very overt with her tricks. At the very outset Natalie Agee comes out, in drag as Adrienne, to explain that they are going to place a bunch of things in juxtaposition to each other and that it is up to us, the audience, to make meaning of it. She says, simple, that there is no idea – but that is obviously untrue. The idea would seem to be – judging from the fact that for the better part of the first half Carmine, Neal and Natalie all sport wigs, jean jackets and engineer boots that make them look like Adrienne clones – that this is a kind of refracted solo show with other people.

The night I saw it they burned the toast. Literally. There was a sequence where they put bread in a toaster and I guess it malfunctioned because the entire second half of the piece was performed with a light haze of toast smoke and the smell of burning.

One of my favorite things about Truscott’s work is her use of space. In this case she had video projected on the ceiling and on the back wall, multiple sequences in the Danspace balcony (including the toast) and multiple comic entrances from all the various doors to the playing space. Neal Medlyn was his kooky self running around and shouting like an untamed id, Carmine was unflappably understated and Natalie was gamine and spacey.

From a dance perspective the two girls – Natalie and Adrienne -are the actual dancers of the group and they bring a precision and grace to the pedestrian choreography that reveals the thought that went into it. Neal and Carmine add a kind of “everyman” quality to the proceedings.

In the end there’s a kind of indie-rock feel to Truscott’s work, a kind of DIY aesthetic that brings together found objects and ideas and snippets of music and sound with a definitively ironic sensibility. Its not pretentious but its not overly ambitious either. It is fun and offbeat and engaging and every once in a while hints at something larger than itself.

One way or another its fun to watch this ensemble play together – they’ve got great rapport and each one contributes their distinct talents and personalities to create something unique.

Popularity: 5% [?]

On Thursday night, I concluded a very Vidich month at Arturo’s performance-installation-video shoot Body Island, a co-presentation by the Chocolate Factory and Abrons Art Center, after a ringside (seat side, really) view of his Gia-kissing moment in Yvonne Meier’s Brother of Gogolorez 4 weeks ago and his own latex wrapped Shitopia performance 2 weeks ago (both part of Danspace Project’s “Body Madness” platform).  Meanwhile, he’s also been diligently preparing for this one-night-only collaboration with Madeline Best (video), Ashley Rawlings (dramaturgy) and Maximillian Balduzzi (performance) and his company of rats. Yes, if you haven’t heard about this event yet (or read that most of Culturebot was present for this in our weekend plans), he had a company of performing R-A-T-S.

Over the past month, in the midst of his other shows, he’s been training a company of Petco procured rats for this show, as well as building the wooden and tiled structure that houses Balduzzi and his little pals during the performance. As part of his master’s work at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, he’s been maintaining a blog and with many interesting entries related to his lengthy design, development, and building of the installation as well as his month-long training intensive with the animals. It’s a fascinating process and speaks to the potential depths of artistic and social investigations. An early entry from May of last year:

What is it about rats that makes people hate them?

I’m asking you. Most people say it’s the tail, or disease, or that they’re greedy and quickly outnumber us, or some combination. I am interested in understanding rats as more than these fear-based surface attributes. I’m also interested in understanding rats as a threat to our way of life, and why efforts to eradicate them have been so wide-spread, long-standing, and unsuccessful. I don’t have any answers, even after all the research and work I’ve done in the last few months. If nothing else, I have more questions.

Rats, specifically Rattus Norvegicus (AKA the brown rat AKA sewer rat AKA wharf rat AKA the Norway Rat) live because we support them. They are our pets, our laboratory heroes, our dark half scuttling through our garbage. I have to ask myself, where does my interest in rats come from? Being our more uncivilized neighbors marks rats as a reflection of our ways and attitudes. Being a close genetic relative proves useful to our scientific quests. Rat bodies are boundary breaking. They fit neatly into the physical and analogous boxes we describe for them in some contexts, and yet we cannot control them in others. They have a dark vitality we cannot overcome. Simply put: they are awesome. I am in awe of them.

In addition to my geek-filled appreciation of Best’s management of three separate live video camera operators in her creation of the projected video that most of the audience saw and my geek-gadget-envy and general layman’s awe at the entire set up, I carried away a consideration of species-ism. The work provided me with enough time to consider why I giggled, squirmed and even cackled when the rats joined Balduzzi in the enclosed room where he had been delivering text and moving for the previous 20 minutes. When they climbed all over him, some even licking at his closed eyes, I was aware of how I negotiated my gleeful repulsion. The imagery is so closely tied to disease and death that I was physically twitchy (and responded with laughter).  However, a mental shift settled in when the Chocolate Factory’s Brian Rogers told me they were from a pet store and had been trained. Suddenly, that level of consumerism and domestication allowed me to view them like the loveable protagonist of Ratatouille (for those of you without small children, this is an animated Pixar film about a gourmet chef in Paris who happens to be a rat…and who also washes his paws a lot).  When the room began to fill with water and the rats climbed aboard Balduzzi’s island, a commentary about cooperation and survival revealed itself alongside the humorous image. I began thinking about other flooded spaces and bodies and appreciated how the bizarre event included a kind of social consciousness that I hadn’t anticipated.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Jon Hoche and Bonnie Sherman in the Vampire Cowboys' "The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G" at the Incubator Arts Project, through April 16.

In May 1988, playwright Qui Nguyen’s aunt and uncle and two young cousins boarded a small fishing boat with 104 other Vietnamese setting out towards the Philippines and, hopefully, a better life. The trip was supposed to be short, but the engines died, leaving the boat adrift in the South China Sea for over a month. Nguyen’s aunt and uncle both succumbed to hunger and dehydration. The older of the two cousins, Huy, following his parents’ death, fell off the boat and drowned. In desperation, some refugees resorted to murder and cannibalism, but as Nguyen is at odds to explain, such gruesome details are merely a backdrop–albeit a lurid one of depressingly compelling interest to arts producers–to his family’s drama. The younger of the two children, Hung, merely eight years old, survived the ordeal and joined Nguyen’s family in Little Rock, where he grew up as Nguyen’s brother.

That story lies at the heart of The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G, the latest show from the Vampire Cowboys, the geek theater company co-founded by Nguyen, which runs at the Incubator Arts Project through April 16 (tickets $18). Now, this was my first Vampire Cowboys show, and if that story–by turns rubberneckingly lurid, sweetly inspiring, and, in Nguyen’s experience, ethnically tricky–sounds heavy for a company primarily known for presenting genre-movie-inspired pastiches with a comic book aesthetic, well, it is. Or maybe I was just misled by descriptions of the company’s work. Certainly their reputation rests on how they use aesthetics to explore (hopefully) complex questions, and certainly those hallmark aesthetics are there. The play careens sometimes satyrically, sometimes inexplicably, between kung-fu spy movie send-up and Oscar-wannabe drama, with a porno chorus, b-boys, dance-offs, and rap battles thrown in, all occurring within a self-consciously meta conceit in which the playwright Qui Nguyen (played by a black actor) constructs the work in real-time, responding both to his characters’ demands as well as his critics’ put-downs.

The latter actually plays a pretty big role in the show. Nguyen has tackled the story before, in Trial by Water, produced by Ma-Yi Theater Company, a production that was apparently (to judge by the script) met with as much ambivalence as praise by both critics and the Vietnamese community, who nitpicked the shit out of it, leaving with Nguyen adrift in a sea of his own, trapped between a desire to be true to himself as an individual and artist (all that stuff written off so easily as the “geek” part of his aesthetic), while navigating the doubly treacherous trek between the theater world (where he’s obligated to fulfill a tokenistic slot as “Asian American” for artistic directors) and the more politically correct members of his “community” who question whether his representation of “Vietnamese” people doing something that actually happened negatively reflects on his…what? Ethnicity? (Depends on who’s asking.) Nationality? (He’s American, mother-fuckers.) It’s a clusterfuck to find yourself in, and Nguyen the playwright (both person and character) can’t find a way out to actually tell the story he wants to tell, which is just plain his family story.

So what the hell am I supposed to do with this? Nguyen’s re-telling a story because the first time it didn’t seem to work for everyone, so he sets out to tell the story of how impossible it is to make everyone else happy as well as to do the story justice, and make the point that he can’t make everyone happy. So does it matter that I didn’t like the play? Or does it matter more that despite not liking it I’ve been grappling with why since seeing it? That writing this is a pain because the issues he’s raised are so complex I find it hard to do them justice as a writer, which is, of course, the issue at the heart of the play? Honestly, I didn’t like it but I think that I have to tell people to go see it. One way or another, it’s provocative, and has to be dealt with, and that’s certainly one form of success.

So let’s get back to the script of our review. What is the audience gonna get going in to this show? The play opens in stereotypical Vietnam War remembrance fashion, complete with the Stones’ “Paint It Black.” A super secret agent, Hung (Paco Tolson) killing a bunch of Viet Cong in cone hats, on a stage with large projection screens in the shape of letters spelling “Vietnam.” Then quite literally, the actors get tired of the ridiculousness of the story and drag the playwright Qui Nguyen (William Jackson Harper) onstage to torture him into returning to their story and doing it justice. Forced by titty-twisters to comply, the playwright begins a hackneyed tale in which Hung and his hot superspy girlfriend Molly (Bonnie Sherman) are drawn back to his native Vietnam by a mysterious letter from San (Amy Kim Washke), the daughter of a man Hung killed while fleeing Vietnam. The story of the man’s death is a dramatization of Nguyen’s family’s experience: Hung’s younger brother is killed and eaten by the man on the boat adrift in the South China Sea. So Hung kills the man and cannibalizes him. Now the man’s daughter is his only link to what happened to his own parents.

Pretty hackneyed right? Well, the characters agree and constantly interrogate the playwright about their ridiculous directions (hot chick licking the barrel of a gun after dispatching a foe, really?) and the playwright’s general inability to tell the story “right.” Oh, and why exactly is he portraying himself as a black man? And what’s with his male Asian characters always dating white chicks? And speaking of gender, why are all his Asian female characters either hookers or suffering virgins? Could we get more Asian cliche? Why yes! Let’s have them speak “Vietnamese” as an endless repetition of the phrase “ching-chong,” and throw in a rapping muppet named Gooky!

Meanwhile, the playwright is recounting his own “actual” self-doubts. His wife is tearing his script apart because it’s not his voice, but adding himself into the play as a character is way too literal. Oh, and fuck him for making her a character. And then there’s the theater world, where he’s always going to be the “other Asian-American playwright” behind David Henry Hwang, and oh, didn’t Hwang already use the “playwright constructing his own play” device?

So what we get is a fragmentary narrative in which different aesthetic skins are overlaid onto the basic story, in attempts to either make it play for what it is or to make it play for a certain audience, as playwright continues to fail to do the story justice. It is, after all, his family story. And ultimately, what the play tries to do is to cover its bases, to problematize the act of storytelling such that the when we’re finally given the unaffected story itself, we have no choice but to deal with the story, to experience it as it is, for what it is.

So why don’t I like the play? There’s a lot of things I want to say, but just as Nguyen himself counters his own critics, I’m forced to be ambivalent about pretty much everything. For instance, take the humor. With its meta-pastiche and winking irony, the play sits comfortably in the same vein as Family Guy. It sets up its transgressive humor–by turns sexist or racialist–within a framework of knowingness. But is the humor provocative and forcing us to consider it as an object through its distancing techniques, or is it really just letting us have our cake and eat it too?

And does it make a difference if the subject is ethnicity versus gender? Is the ironic embrace of stereotypes more okay for Nguyen to tackle if the subject is his Asian-American identity (a construct foisted on him as a function of being American, rather than Asian…because, you know, there’s no difference between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, whatever…) than gender? The play does sort of want to have it both ways. Its representation women is deeply geek, in the Joss Whedon vein, where, apparently, we’re still supposed to believe that turning a stereotype on its head is liberating. Nguyen even pokes fun at Vampire Cowboys’ conceit of weak male characters and strong female ones. But isn’t there a relationship between Whedon’s Buffy and the grotesque misogyny of emo music? Buffy turns the putative victim into an ass-kicker more physically powerful than her male cohort, but the psychological price is immense and serves as the dramatic basis of the story, leaving me to wonder why more people don’t question Whedon’s intense sexism. Buffy is a victim, because she’s victimized. She just happens to fight back rather than take it, but the result is the same, which isn’t so different than the emo vision of feminity, in which “sensitive” guys are victimized by the victimization of the women they pine for.

So that’s one thing, but obviously it’s a complex thicket of meta-devices, conscious irony, and distancing techniques that seem to hope to make a point without ever saying anything, because if nothing can be taken at face value, then we haven’t said anything, and therefore couldn’t have said something disagreeable. Problematization becomes an end in and of itself, and indeed, that’s actually what the play does. For instance, look at the opening paragraph of this review. Is that story actually true?

The play would have us believe so, because the play is about telling that story correctly. But this is, I think, why I don’t like the play: for all Nguyen’s willingness to grapple with the issues of authenticity that he’s confronted with as “Asian-American” or “Vietnamese” (depending on who’s demanding his authenticity), he never actually seems to address why authenticity is important at all. Quite the opposite, after flipping a middle finger at everyone else’s demands that he be “authentic” to their specification, he still seems to want to audience to see something “authentic” in the story, even though it’s in a play, a fictional, artificial reality he’s already made clear is highly plastic.

So why should we believe it? Really. I’m dead serious. It always strikes me as odd when I see something like this, where a writer grapples with so many issues of authenticity of representation yet still, after excoriating the very idea that authenticity is anything other than someone else’s expectation, wants the audience to accept his own expectation of authenticity. If you’ve made authenticity as aesthetic ideal by tackling it in many ways, there’s absolutely no reason to believe in anything. In fact, I read several interviews with Nguyen before writing this trying to discern whether the “actual” story at the end of the play is the true one, and couldn’t. Were there really two brothers on the boat? For Trial by Water, it appeared that the one who died was concocted as a plot device. And what about the parents? Did they actually die on the boat, as Agent G says, or did they stay behind as in Trial by Water?

The audience actually has no way to know, but I’m not convinced that Nguyen actually appreciates this. Recently, there’s been a conversation about the use of narrative in theater, and I took the position of doubting the value of narrative when others (usually playwrights) were defending it. But here’s a case in point: it’s amazing to me that an artist who works in such an irony-laden, lustfully aesthetic form is, in the end, as beholden to witness-bearing authentic truthfulness as the memoir-loving Oprah Winfrey.

For all the aesthetic and narrative differences, both remain entranced by the power of a story to reveal truth. But taking in Agent G, I come to completely the opposite conclusion that, I think, the play intended: stories are malleable to the ends of those interpreting them. Nguyen wants us to understand the story as he understands it. That’s fine, but I’m not sure that’s the “truth” of the story, either. Nguyen, like Oprah, believes the author isn’t dead; he wants the story to be understood for what he believes it is. In the process he discounts the audience, the individuals taking in the story and, potentially, being affected by it. There is one right way to understand it, and the play itself is a contextualization of the story rather than the story itself.

But again, as an audience member, I simply have no way of knowing what is or is not true. I suppose it’s equally possible that Nguyen is a complete hipster nihilist, that none of it’s true, that all the meta irony just sets up the audience to take in and deal with a story that’s pure fiction, to truly focus on how we consume the story. So which is it? Is this Adaptation, a complete rejection of truth, and succumbing to the pure vapid pleasures of story-telling and the ability of the artist to use artifice to move the audience, or is this Ararat, Atom Egoyan’s amazing film whose irony reveals the inability of artifice to actually represent experience, focusing the audience, through its artifice, on what it cannot actually find a language to say?

The short answer is: I don’t know. And that’s probably why I left both deeply thoughtful–yes, moved–but skeptical, all at the same time. So I’ll reiterate: you should see Vampire Cowboys’ The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G. But I do think that for all its heroic attempts to deal with so many complex issues, it’s flawed. But fuck, props–mad props–to Qui Nguyen for aiming so high. People who want to write off the Vampire Cowboys as nothing more than hipster or geek crap miss by a long shot. Even if Agent G is flawed, it proves, by the end, the capacity for performance of this nature to ask deeply problematic questions. And I fully accept that I may be wrong. But I don’t think so. My story is, er, the right one.

Popularity: 3% [?]