The Performant

The Performant: Final Frontiers with “Sigh-Fi” and W. Kamau Bell

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Scoping out the local arts and culture scene …

So much fascinating shit is rooted in science — from the way things work to the way they fall apart — that it seems passing strange that more performance pieces aren’t written using scientific law as a unifying theme. Not that you’ll find a whole lot in your physics texts about Saturnade a spoofed drink mix with a long list of dire side-effects that belongs more properly in the frame of a John Kricfalusi cartoon. You probably won’t find mention in your astronomy handbooks about alien surveyors with invasion viability agendas either, but why split atoms over it?

In “Sigh-Fi: An Evening of Science-fiction Themed Comedic Shorts” debuting at the Darkroom Theatre, fictions may trump facts, but the undercurrent is endearingly nerdy. Written by Philadelphia Fringe Festival veteran Shawn O’Shea, “Sigh-Fi” includes what is probably his best-known (and fully realized) work, “Starlight Supply,” which stars Jim Fourniadis as thoroughly under-socialized uber-dweeb William William Williams, and Craig Souza as an uptight insurance agent from Universal Business Insurance sent to deny him a $20 million claim for his registered star which has vanished from the night skies.

Other sketches of note include “Dinner Guest,” a Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner spoof involving an affable yet menacing extra-terrestrial Bob (Phil Ristaino) and “Hail to the Queen” in which a planet ruled by women accidentally hijacks a Freddie Mercury lookalike BJ (Richie Lillard) whose initials no longer describe his occupation, in order to force him to impregnate them all. Too bad for these galactic gals William Shatner is no longer traveling around the universe in spandex, because fancy-pants BJ only has eyes for the yummy male slaves in leather tunics—giving the appropriate measure of stage time to the social sciences as well in addition to the natural and applied strains.  

Meanwhile, in a galaxy not too far away, W. Kamau Bell has been trying to “end racism in about an hour”….for over three years. And for a split second there, it looked like he’d succeeded. You remember that split second—it occurred somewhere between November 4th and 5th, 2008. But here it is, 2010, and post-racial has become post-post-racial, and all in all, it’s been a frustrating time for a comedian who’s somewhat unwillingly become the spokesperson for comics-concerned-about-entrenched-racism to be that. Hence the title of Kamau’s new show-in-progress: “Aaaaaarrrrrrrrgh: A Solo Comedy about how Frustrating Frustration can be” (which he performed as part of the Solo Performance Workshop Festival at Stage Werx on Saturday).

It’s such a universal emotion: I could imagine Alien Bob getting stuck at the credit union while they tried to work out how to cash his check from Betelgeuse, or BJ the intergalactic love-slut trying to avoid old cranky critics who want to give unsolicited “feedback,” or cops cracking down on the illegal consumption of Saturnade on the beach. These are the things that happen to all of us—but only Bell has had the foresight to try and work it all into a narrative that tries to make sense of the myriad situations that defy reason and provoke ulcers all across the universe.

The Performant: Nerds vs. Geeks and other four-letter words

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Scoping out the local arts and culture scene …

Are you a nerd, or are you a geek? A geek, or a nerd? I like to think of myself as a word nerd. Doctor Popular claims to be a super nerd. The organizers of the next San Francisco-based BarCamp claim to be geeks — though they do allow that one can “geek out” about almost anything, including peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Yet both nerds and geeks presenting at Noisebridge’s monthly “5 Minutes of Fame,” to a crowd composed of nearly 100 folks who mainly, though not exclusively, could be categorized as either, or possibly both. The premise of 5MoF is short (very) and sweet: in five minutes or less each presenter gives a talk, makes a pitch, or demonstrates a work in progress to the general public who may then in turn offer assistance or appreciation.

Topics this week included why dumb is good (‘cause Socrates said so), music you can make on your iPhone, how to combat global ignorance with a video game, the creation of a new Tenderloin performance space dedicated to “cutting-edge vintage,” the demise of the fourth estate, and what the heck is in my kombucha anyway? Best of all, during the post-show mingling, people who’d asked for assistance with projects were almost all approached by people equipped to do just that. Maybe that’s the vital ingredient in what makes a nerd a nerd or a geek a geek — that an entire social event can be built around the moral equivalent of helping people out with their trig homework. Journalist Quinn Norton inadvertently summed up the collaborative spirit of the event by promising in her talk “Manufacturing Dissent” to stop “only writing about the shit that geeks break, but writing about the shit that geeks build.”

What else do geeks build? Well, while some geeks are building pathways to newer computers, others are building pathways out of old ones. The Sculpture Garden at the San Francisco Dump has an entire walkway made of cement slabs with embedded ephemera — computer chips, silverware, random tools, colored glass. But it’s the sculptures lining the walkway that really dazzle. A dragonfly made of a propeller, a fence made of bicycle wheels, a double archway decorated with a dazzling mosaic of tiles and glass, nesting balls of webbed wires. Free tours of the garden, the facility, and the Artist-in-residence studios take place every third Saturday of the month, inspiring not a small dose of waste stream envy.

Wrapping up my dork-tastic journey a couple weekends ago was the They Might Be Giants concert in Stern Grove, where myself and all my pasty brethren were treated to an afternoon of unseasonal sunshine and a 25-song set stuffed with maths, geography, the periodic table, space ships, the alphabet, shriners, and drum-playing worms. Since TMBG has been crossing over into the kid market since 2002, there were lots of little’uns jumping up and down to the geek groove, but not nearly as many as there were awkwardly-limbed adults trying to frug to “Upside Down Frown”. Which in many ways proved just as entertaining to watch as the band — another one of my favorite four-letter words.

The Performant: The Witching Hour — Puritan girls gone wild and midnight museum marauders

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Checking out the local arts and culture scene …

There’s no doubt about it—San Franciscans love a rock opera. From the faux-real heavy metal anthems of “Live Evil” to the afterlife explorations of “Exit Sign,” the suicide art movement of “Thanatics” to the human sacrifices of “Wicker Man,” we like our rock operas loud, messy, and tinged with darkness and humor both. So an original rock opera about the Salem Witch Trials seems an obvious pairing between our love of the darkside plus power chords. Appropriately held at the Temple nightclub on Howard, “Abigail the Rock Opera” straddles the SF rock opera line between serious and silly.

There’s some damn fine singing, particularly from Alexis Lane Jensen who plays Betty Parris, and Daniel Knop, who plays her father Samuel Parris as well as a curiously fey Giles Corey in a silver mop-top/Andy Warhol wig and every 60’s British Invasion mannerism to ever make it onto the Ed Sullivan show. There’s some really solid rocking out thanks to the band, particularly guitarist Kurt Brown (who not coincidentally co-wrote the music with Knop). Plus there are dead babies, bloody aprons, moonlit excursions in the woods, goth-y girls in leather corsets and modest bonnets, and angry men wearing glittery facepaint, Thanksgiving pageant hats, and smug patriarchal entitlement.

There are some downsides too—namely over-reliance on video projection, hard-to-follow lyrics, and not enough campy abandon. I’d have liked to see the goth angle played up more as well as the glam. Perhaps a Klaus Nomi or Gary Numan homage tucked in between the standard rock anthems, or even a little synthesized EBM and some serious stomping. But for now they’ll be performing every Thursday at 9 p.m. through September, and one hopes they’ll make it at least to Halloween, with or without a darkwave makeover.

Meanwhile, it may have been midnight, but the YBCA was far from dark during the DIYbca party last Saturday. People dressed in hand-crafted costumes floated through the hallways of the museum like so many neon-colored moths, drawn to the flames of creative crowd-sourcing and hi tech/lo brow design hacks. In the Forum, reality television was getting a send-up with the Drinking and Dancing competition featuring fun-guy trio Adonisaurus, while in the gallery, old-school industrial noisemakers Kwisp jammed on bicycle parts, metal sheets and springs, and bits of old electronics before leading a hands-on, build-your-own thumb piano workshop (the best use for bobby pins and cigar boxes ever!).

A stencil workshop with queer street artist Jeremy Novy, creative cobbling with Mrs. Vera and SCRAP, a Puma shoe design competition, and a create your own techno music lab hosted by LoveTech rounded out the midnight hour, blurring the line between performer and participant to its most malleable degree. In other words, even the fun was being crowd-sourced, and pretty successfully so. Party promoters take note. You can hire all the big brand bands and fog machines and light-show designers you want, but for a really memorable event, you might want to consider adding a crafting circle to your lineup. Just saying. [Editor’s Note for craft aficionados — there is a wild Haute Gloo craft table every Friday night at the Stud‘s Some Thing drag party! And it totally works.]

The Performant: A mutable feast — or, theater, buffet-style

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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If the venerable San Francisco Fringe Festival is a full-on Circus Circus-style, all-you-can-eat-buffet, I like to think of its kid cousin the San Francisco Theatre Festival  — which took place Sunday, August 8 — as more of a pu-pu platter. Tasty little morsels of performance presented in manageable, bite-sized chunks designed to whet the appetite for the main courses (the full productions) to come. I don’t know about you, but when I’m confronted with the choice between dainty nibbling, or cleaning each plate as it comes, I tend to adapt the life-is-uncertain principle and gorge myself on all the available goodies in sight.


Gorging comes more easily than restraint at all-day festivals, and it’s hard to determine before you bite whether your picks will be sweet or savory. A delectable treat, first of the day, was an excerpt from a brand new company: The 11th Hour Ensemble. The 11th Hour members’ 20-minute preview of their movement-based, Lewis Carroll-inspired “Alice” was fresh, exciting, hilarious, and completely unexpected. If their full-length production (opening September 8th) is half as charming as their highlights reel, it’ll be a don’t-miss. A quick dash across the park and into the Metreon brought me to Mugwumpin’s excerpt of their current show “This is all I Need” (playing at NOHspace through September 4). Thematically-connected to their last, site-specific “Occurrence” which took place in a semi-residential motel in June, “Need” explores the relationships between ourselves and our possessions. A particularly funny bit involved a convoluted daydream of property ownership and a barricade of berry boxes, but over too soon, it was back outside for a glimpse of No Nude Men (ha! there weren’t any! But there were zombies!). On my way to see San Francisco Recovery Theatre’s modernized take on the Amiri Baraka classic “Dutchman” (opening in October, I believe) I slipped into Ray of Light’s “Jerry Springer, the Opera” (opens September 10). Classically-trained singers reveling in lyrics about adult diaper-play, stripping, and self-abuse? Someone ought to write a show about that.

*******
A one-man smorgasbord of theatrical tropes and truisms, Will Franken played the Clubhouse this past weekend,serving up a bubbling stew of new material mixed in with a few old favorites. As physical as he is cerebral, commedian Franken’s act conforms far less to the traditional stand-up routine but rather to that of the highly-refined, abstracted-reality sketch comedy of Monty Python, The Kids in the Hall, and The Cody Rivers Show. Jim Carrey might be the man with the rubber face, but Franken’s whole persona is as elastic as a rubber band, and in a whirlwind 20-minute set, Franken portrayed a panoply of distinct characters from cross-dressing panhandler to schizophrenic marriage counselor, Al Gore to General Petraeus, an outsourced solar panel salesman in China to a well-meaning yet ultimately self-deluding “condom lady” in Whitechapel circa 1888. No passively-progressive sacred cow ever emerges from Franken’s contrarian logic unscathed—he’s out there gleefully hacking off the hindquarters and serving them up on a slightly tarnished platter before you can say “yoga mat.” But even late on a Friday night with no BYOB, just a taste of Franken’s mad creations left us salivating for more.

The Performant: Adrift on survival riffs and life rafts

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Recent trends on the arts and culture scene

As long as there has been art, I imagine that the phrase “starving artist” has been in use. I like to imagine prehistoric cave painters stopping halfway through a particularly thrilling rendition of a successful buffalo hunt to halt operations and hold a fundraising party. “Grod, your donation of three chunks of limestone and a sharpened flint chip will help to fund the portraiture of no fewer than five renegade buffalo heading over the edge of the cliff.” But it helps put the sacrifices made in art’s name into perspective when confronted with art created on the very fringes, where “starving” can be more than just a catchphrase but a grim reality.

Friday night at the Redstone building I attended a performance at LaborFest — a month-long celebration of organized labor, worker’s rights, and solidarity. A POOR Magazine project, “Hotel Voices” was written by and about the denizens of SROs — those reviled bastions of affordable housing. Co-directed by Allan Manalo of Bindlestiff Theatre, and Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia of POOR the performance touched on themes such as institutionalization, infestation, violence, racial profiling, death of loved ones, and yes, starving, with a bite of humor provided by the flamboyant “El Bedbug” (Charles Pitts), a charismatic harmonica interlude played by “Nightmare Joey” (Dennis Wilmot), and a suckerpunch of survivalist wisdom from “Supertenant” (Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia).

Told in a series of short vignettes, like scenes of a documentary film about the often unsavory conditions “enjoyed” by the occupants of residential hotel rooms, “Hotel Voices” raised a collective voice against the daily marginalization of its principle characters. More importantly, it underscored the basic tenet of artistic expression that’s so often overlooked — that the need to create isn’t dictated by economics, education, or public demand. On the contrary, it can be an impulse as deeply ingrained as the need for food, shelter, or companionship. In other words, an act of survival.

A very different aspect of survival in the arts occurred to me Sunday night, while watching a shaky staging of “Gillian’s Island” which hadn’t quite found its sea legs. But at least it was at the Garage, a favorite low-key venue where the anything-might-happen vibe pulsates like a club beacon in the SOMA night. Which seems especially important to acknowledge now that three of its neighbors have either shut their doors or announced a pending closure in the last few months: the Climate, Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory (which closed Saturday), and the Off-Market Theatre (scheduled to close January, 2011).

Yes, it’s been a bad year for black boxes, yet the Garage, despite its non-existent booth, minimal grid, and limited seating, remains a competitive player in the performing arts community with a full calendar, focused curation, and an array of artist-in-residency opportunities. And just as “Hotel Voices” helped to remind that the creation of art is an essential aspect of our collective survival, hanging out at The Garage reminds of the importance of maintaining a space for those arts and their creators to survive in.

The Performant: Upright Citizen’s Brigade and Fly Trap Theatre spelunk the absurd

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Reviews of recent arts and culture happenings

When asked by the Upright Citizen’s Brigade touring company last Friday what his motto in life was, the random guy onstage we’ll call Nick (because that’s what he called himself) said “abandon all hope ye who enter here,” which seemed a little heavy for an evening of comedy, but the UCB took it in stride. This influential improv group, hosted locally by Bay Area improvisers Pan Theater, plumbed the depths of Nick’s predilections and peccadilloes with gusto. Got hit by an SUV on your motorcycle, must be those preciously extended pinkies, dude. Got slapped down by a bio-bitch down the street—why don’t you stick with the steampunk tranny hos in your own backyard? Why not launch a string of rockets into the street and call it installation art? Why not make sandwiches with a block of cheese containing the cremated ashes of your loved ones?

The second portion of the show was a series of short improvs based on text messages called out by the oddience (my personal favorite: “if they’re not playing D&D they should go to the demolition derby”) and included a round of double-jeopardy where the contestants drank themselves smart, a unique menstruation situation involving Beggin’ Strips, a few unfortunate deaths courtesy of the 911 call center, and a company policy of suicide handed down from “corporate”. Seriously, I can’t make this stuff up! But the lightning-quick, three-man-one-woman touring company of LA-based performers can and did, riffing on themes so absurd it made “The Young Ones” look like “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.” Or vice versa, depending on your brand of dada.
 
Dropping in on the “Fly Trap Theatre” at Paxton Gate Curiosities for Kids in the Mission on Saturday, I was treated to a different kind of improvisation, as Danielle Coe, a cheery volunteer from the Conservatory of Flowers dissected a pitcher plant for a handful of curious kiddies, who “eeewww”’d in satisfied unison when half-digested beetles plopped out into a plastic dish. The star of the “show” was indubitably the red-tinged Venus Flytrap snapping its leafy mandibles tightly shut on command (a soft nudge with a wooden dowel), a plant so insatiable that one of its several feeder “mouths” had closed tightly on the stem of another.

“I like doing the shows here in the Mission,” said Danielle, “it’s fun to work with the kids. You get to be less scripted, and more silly.” Sounds like improv
to me, albeit minus the beloved block of cremated mom + Montereyjack. But really, what could be more patently absurd than a carnivorous plant attempting to devour itself? The only auto-cannibal on the planet lower on the food chain than its usual meal.

Nothing to do with the above, but mention should be made somewhere of the Dan Plasma stage mural for “The 91’ Owl” which recently closed at the BurielClayTheatre. His distinctive design lent the bare bones set an air of urban authenticity, San Francisco-style.

The Performant: When I die I will be offcenter

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Scoping out the local arts and culture scene …

If there were a Best of the Bay category for performance space with the catchiest moniker, I’ve always felt that Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory had a clear lock on the title. That’s just one of the many things about the place I’ll miss when it shuts its doors, possibly for good, at the end of this month (though a loose association of affiliated artists including acting MCVF director Ernesto Sopprani, have announced their intention to continue as Theoffcenter, so look for future programming from them in an as-yet-undetermined location).

Speaking of clever monikers, for a last show in a vital location, you couldn’t ask for a better than Alicia Ohs’ dance-theatre production, “When I Die I Will be Dead.” But walking into Mama Calizo’s, instead of death’s muffled pall, a scene of lively chaos immediately unfolded. Each member of the oddience was given a number upon entering the space, split into two groups, and taught a quick dance routine that none of us mastered in the few short moments we were given to try.

As the casting director, Alicia Ohs, dressed in a white button-down short exhorted us to “Eat Nails!” we shuffled our feet and flopped our arms around lamely. Clearly Broadway bound we were not. Mercifully allowed our seats after about five minutes, the rest of the mostly comical “New York, I Love You! I Hate You…Now Dance” ensued; a “Chorus Line” send-up complete with a “One” finale. The evening’s second piece, “Dokuen,” was more nuanced. From the physical comedy of an auditionee being locked in a trunk of memories (Hana Erdman), to the raw anguish of dancers José Navarrete and Ay.Lin hurling paint at the walls, flowers across the floor, and abuse at each other, the self-revelatory vignettes spoke voluminously of loss though few words were used. The reappearance of Erdman as memory’s avatar made the act of saying farewell a study in grace—an appropriate finale for yet one more casualty in the trenches of the art wars.

Meanwhile, across town, in the crowded Café Royale, loss of life, limb, and the last tattered shreds of (in)dignity were being explored by San Francisco Theatre Pub with their free staged reading of “Ubu Roi” — adapted by company member Bennett Fisher. As the oafish would-be-king of Poland played by Sam Leichter cursed, spat, and clawed his way to the top, his power-hungry wife Mere Ubu (Catherine Lardas) gave the term Machiavellian a feminine touch as she urged him forward, then stood out of the way of his inglorious fall. Though it initially seemed that as many people came to hear the guest deejay (DJ Wait What) spin as to see the classic forerunner of absurdist theatre (overheard: “I think it’s about a king. It’s set in France.”), the café crowd soon became a cheering, catcalling, mass of enthusiastic participation. Directors of reading series take note: a spoonful of alcohol helps the medicine go down. And bartenders: a spoonful of Ubu can only help the alcohol sales go up.

Café Royale
800 Post, SF
(415) 441-4099
www.caferoyale-sf.com
sftheaterpub.wordpress.com

The Performant: Shrouds Illuminated at the LAB and Garage

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Nicole Gluckstern reports on the Bay Area arts and culture scene

It sounds a little strange, but I’ve been thinking about shrouds. Not in a morbid way, just in the practical sense. Mostly I wonder what kind of material gets used. Movie mummy shrouds always seem to be made of cheesecloth, but that strikes me as a little flimsy for a swaddled delivery into the afterlife. Actually, speaking of swaddling, doesn’t it seem a little curious that babies and corpses should be wrapped so similarly — at least in the days before they invented the Tickle-Me-Elmo onesie?

But back to the shrouds. I’m sure they’re on my mind because of the Illuminated Forest exhibit at The LAB, part of this summer’s Soundwave festival. I walked in and these great swaths of white tulle were draped, floor to ceiling in front of the entryway and all around the exhibit hall, separating each small nook from the next cranny, and providing screenage for video projections of forest color and form. Occasionally someone would get lost in the layers and have to flail their way out again. But the ghostly silhouettes of gallery-goers flowed smoothly, for the most part, like physical embodiments of the trickling water field recordings provided by Ben Bracken and Agnes Szelag.

Hiding behind one curtain/shroud/swaddle – a parade of turtle-like sculptures with rippling clam-shell bodies (Vaughn Bell); behind another –a Dr. Seuss-ian grove of calico trees and cuddly corduroy stones (Suzanne Husky). Oh to curl up on this forest floor and take a nap! Behind another curtain, some people were sneaking in, if not naps, then at least a bit of down time, watching a film clip of body as landscape while a nearby video installation shrouded within a hand-crafted nest screened the intrepid adventures of a burrowing mole (San Easterson).

Saturday, the theme remained intact. I walked into the Garage for Dark Porch Theatre’s “Comedy Ballet,” and a white curtain was hanging across the stage. While the curtain didn’t last long, death remained an almost constant presence onstage, as the assembled company riffed on Dia de Los Muertos, crematory ashes, Mesoamerican mythology, human sacrifice, and a journey to the underworld, as well as job insecurity, betrayal, bizarre sex fetishes, and other trauma
topics.

Margery Fairchild’s dance choreography, more comedy than ballet, brought a welcome leavening of slapstick to the action, and in particular to the menacing trio of “intrepid gentlemen” (Anjeli Jana, Matthew von MeeZee, Bryce Charley). Nathan Tucker’s out-of-work, off-his-nut, alcohol-soaked Foreplay embodied the term “blowhard” in the most bombastic sense of the word. And a deadpan Amy Seimetz as an increasingly frazzled interviewer for some unnamed project or research facility kept the metaphysical conundrums from over-powering the fun.

Slated for a November run at the EXIT Theatre, it’s easy to see this quirky square peg of a show fitting more smoothly into the traditional Halloween-tide niche, but the attentive crowd at the Garage didn’t seem to mind the head start. As for me, I’m sorry to report that despite the abundance of funereal themes, not a single shroud was featured in “Comedy Ballet”—but some fetching silver lame swaddling is, which pretty much made up for it.
 

Illuminated Forest at the LAB through August 7
Wed-Sat, 1 p.m.-6 p.m.
2948 16th St, SF
(415) 864-8855
www.thelab.org
 
“Comedy Ballet” at the Garage through July 18
8 p.m.
975 Howard, SF
(415) 518-1517
www.975howard.com

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