The Performant

The Performant: Neat stuff

Charles Russo
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TechShop San Francisco gets busy, Writers With Drinks gets drunk

Just when it felt like San Francisco could not possibly Do It Itself more than it already has, Jim Newton’s TechShop moved to town. Now it will be almost impossible not to succumb to the temptation of learning welding, soldering, molding, screen-printing, and quilting — not to mention CAD (computer aided design), CAM (computer aided machining), 3D modeling, laser-cutting and etching, and so much more. Whee!


At Saturday’s grand opening, after a short introductory speech by Mythbuster Adam Savage, a squadron of “dream coaches” gave walking tours of the 3-story, 17,000 square foot premises. Dream coaches are TechShop staffers who person the machinery and help patrons with their on-the-spot needs: answering questions, providing support. As Melquiades Olivares, a recent graduate of the Stanford School of Mechanical Engineering, took us around the giant, state-of-the-art workshop, it became quickly apparent that the scrappy, low-budget definition of DIY does not apply to TechShop. This is not a place where you’re likely to spin your empty toilet paper tubes into golden birdhouses.

But if you’ve been looking for the equipment to build your backyard lunar lander, TechShop’s got you covered. Equipment that made my internal geek organs go pitter-pat included: the Saw Stop, a basic table saw fitted with an electric monitor that can sense almost instantaneously the moment a finger (or carrot, or hot dog) comes in contact with the blade, shutting it down immediately; the Flow Waterjet cutter, capable of slicing through six inches of steel; and a 3D printer busily “printing” a smiling bust in microthin layers of UV-curable acrylic. Memberships, which are $125/month for individuals, are on the pricey side for a cheapskate like me, but certainly cheaper than buying a Waterjet cutter of one’s own.
 
“Tonight we’ll be giving each other Spiritual Wedgies,” promised MC Charlie Jane Anders last Saturday evening, at another monthly installment of San Francisco’s favorite reading series “Writers With Drinks.” A genial mashup of fiction and non, erotica and sci-fi, comedy and drama, WWD has been packing ‘em in for almost 10 years now (April 9 is the anniversary show, mark your calendar).

But it’s more than just the ecstatic crapshoot of the lineup that gets oddience crowding through the door at the Makeout Room. The event’s real secret weapon is Charlie Jane, whose introductory patter is legendary. After discussing our spiritual wedgies, and leading the crowd in a rousing affirmation “I am a sunflower and my underwear is a beautiful bumblebee” — Charlie Jane introduced poet Jason Morris as a man who is most famous “in the giant-cockroach reality,” Comedian Alex Koll as a shoe-fetishist who’d briefly been hired as the replacement Mr. Rogers, erotica author Hanne Blank as “the go-to person for dealing with hive minds that want to be dance instructors.” Event Wrangler isn’t exactly the most glamorous title in show business, but as a person who’s sat through more uninspired introductions that I can bear to recollect, getting to watch a true pro work a room will always keep me coming back for more. And judging from the usual attendance numbers, I’m not the only one.
 
*In the spirit of full disclosure it should be mentioned that the author of this piece read at Writers With Drinks on April 14, 2007.

The Performant: Enter the Platypus

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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French “Art” and Fringe wins at the EXIT Theatre

Of all the theatre companies in the Bay Area currently operating, the most specifically focused may well be our premiere (or rather only) amateur Francophone company Le Theatre Platypus. Though the Goethe-Institut sometimes hosts touring productions, such as Bridge Marklund’s “Faust in the Box” which will play in the Institut auditorium March 3 and The Mission Cultural Center hosts occasional Spanish-language plays such as Dolores Prida’s “Coser y Cantar” (playing March 17-19), dedicated multi-lingual local troupes are unfortunately scarce. This makes going to see a Platypus play more than just a night out, but a bona-fide cultural immersion experience.

Thursday night at The EXIT Theatre Mainstage is not usually where you’d expect to find a sold-out house, but Platypus pulled it off with their French language presentation of Yasmina Reza’s “Art” a satirical look at the world of art commerce as well as an exploration of the relationship between three friends whose differing feelings about an art piece underscores the divide in their characters.

There are many things about watching the play in French that are just the same as watching it in English—or any other translation. The appearance-driven shallowness of Serge (Michel Tassetto) is no less shallow in French than in English, and the zealous arguments against “the modern” of his acerbic buddy Marc (Arnaud Merceron) are no less self-righteous. The insecure hypochondriac Yvan (Thomas Marigne), who wobbles between trying to placate the feelings of both and obsessing over his pending marriage, is no less a schlub en Francais, and the piece of art in question—a $40,000 canvas painted all in white—is no less an eyesore.

The difference definitely lay in the crowd, half of whom appeared to be bona-fide expats, half of whom appeared to be French American International School scholars out for extra credit, and all of whom most certainly appeared to be having a great time. It surprises me that there aren’t more dedicated non-English Language theatre companies in the Bay Area, considering our diverse population, and while the Bay Area is a breeding ground for new translations, it’s interesting to consider what sort of impact these same companies might have mounting a non-translated work.

Because it’s never too early to start obsessing over the San Francisco Fringe Festival, which will be celebrating it’s 20th year in September, a hard-core crew gathered at the EXIT café on Saturday to witness the annual lottery — the process by which all entrants are chosen. This year 25 out-of-town companies, 10 of whom were alternates, and 35 locals, ditto, were drawn out of the “hat” by Christian “Nothing-up-my-sleeves” Cagigal and Michelle Talgarow. The San Francisco Fringe, as well as all Fringe Festivals part of the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals are 100% non-curated, which means literally anything goes. Working titles of this year’s chosen productions include “Hamlet vs. Zombies,” by The Skinny Improv, “Hitler’s L’il Abomination,” by Annette Roman, and “I Love You, We’re F*#ked,” by Kevin J. Thornton, worthy Fringe titles all. The only question now—how do I wait six more months to see them?

The Performant: Of eggs and robots

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Thomas John’s “The Lady on the Wall,” and the Slave Robots of Carl Pisaturo

A few years ago, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, I saw Dov Weinstein’s imitable Tiny Ninja Theatre enact “Macbeth” on a dollhouse-sized stage, which one viewed through cheap plastic binoculars from a distance of about ten feet. It will always remain one of my favorite versions of that particular play. Weinstein’s ability to perform as a literal cast of hundreds and run his own tech without fumbling his lines nor cues put many much larger (and taller!) companies to shame, and though the intention was quite obviously to amuse, Weinstein and his tiny plastic ninja cast still managed to convey the nuances of a more  serious artistry. Thomas John’s puppet noir “The Lady on the Wall,” which played at the Garage last weekend, displayed the same perfect balance of dorky and deliberate, featuring an unlikely cast of, not ninjas, but eggs.

Dressed in a nice suit just a little too big (like an adolescent boy clad in his father’s clothes for the talent show), Thomas narrated the piece with the deadpan delivery of a professional street performer (which he is), making every bad egg-related pun in the book, as bacon, and eventually eggs, sizzled on a hotplate grill beside him. Maneuvering his fragile characters from the countryside to “Carton City” and back again, Thomas also incorporated small moments of juggling, shadow-puppetry, and DIY lighting effects into his 45-minute thriller. The somewhat scrambled plot (ha!) involved the mysterious death of a lovely lady egg named Maud, aka “Humpty Dumpty,” done wrong by a cad named Frank, and perhaps the victim of a mysterious marauder: “The Poacher”.

Other members of the cast spanned the gamut of noir archetypes, including a gruff, “hard-boiled” private eye (Bob), an ingénue (Molly Meringue), a suspect aristocrat (Sir Benedict), and a whole carton-full of doomed ovum -— the final body count of the show ultimately rivaling “Hamlet”. As for-adults puppetry in the Bay Area has been experiencing a bit of a slump of late, with the majority of produced shows coming in from out-of-town (here’s looking’ at you, Avenue Q), it was great to see such a unique spin on the medium by such a dexterous, likable, and local performer.

Speaking of unique spins, it would be hard to think of a more unique spin on classical dance than the Slave Robots of Carl Pisaturo, on display during MAPP in his studio workshop-cum-gallery, Area 2881. With a meticulously-arranged workspace in the back, and a front room full of spinning, whirling, brightly-lit, kinetic sculptures made of  mostly mechanical components, Area 2881 is a low-key, yet entirely reverent, church of geek. Pisaturo’s centerpiece creations, a pair of skeletal humanoid figures with an astounding degree of hand and arm motion, and nightmarish Frank Garvey-designed body “panels,” are known merely as “Slave Zero” and “Slave One”.

As stirring instrumental music and projections of building demolition looped behind the backlit slaves, they “danced” along, using an expressive range of gesture to surprisingly emotional effect. More proof, if proof were needed, that robots — in addition to eggs and tiny plastic ninjas — can be artists too.

The Performant: Homing instinct

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Performance thrives on the Living Room Circuit

What are the barest fundamentals of theatre once you remove it from “the” theatre? This is one of the questions site-specific performances are always confronted with, and the answer is not immediately clear. Does “theatre” require a script? (Then what is improv?) Does it require actors? (Then what is Spalding Gray?) Does it require a moral? (Then what is Ubu Roi?) Perhaps, like obscenity, it is immediately known when seen, but otherwise elusively indefinable. What does seem to be certain, particularly in light of the latest wave of productions set in non-traditional venues, is that performing in an actual theatre space is definitely not a requirement for creating an actual theatre piece.

Probably the best example of space self-sufficiency is the current upswing in salon-style performances. From participatory readings to full-blown plays performed for invited attendees, the trend has become so pervasive that Berkeley-based performance artist Philip Huang even coined a name for it: Home Theater, naturally. In May 2010, Huang launched the “Home Theater Festival”, with events on both sides of the bridge. This year, beginning March 3, the festival will include performances from all around the world, staged in the homes of the artists performing in it.

One participant in last year’s festival, performance-poet Baruch Porras-Hernandez, had such a positive experience he’s signed up for another slot this year on March 18, even though he doesn’t think he’ll be able to use the space he currently lives in on the grounds that it is too small. “It is one of the things I am most proud of, out of all my 2010 projects,” he tells me via email, “[I] have not seen so much joy in an audience.”

 Other pioneers of the living-room performance circuit include No Nude Men, who have been hosting theatre salons since 2009, though their interpretation of salon is more traditionally-slanted towards play-reading and subsequent discourse. In 2008, Boxcar Theatre staged Edward Albee’s “The American Dream” in four different living rooms across the Bay Area, and EmSpace Dance premiered their “Keyhole Dances” in a Victorian flat. And every couple of months in the upper Haight, The Living Room Reading Series brings together a diverse crowd of writers and readers together for an evening of wordsmithery on display.

Seduced by the potential of living rooms used for living art, two weekends ago I also hosted a performance salon in my home. And though I feel I must refrain from gushing about the specifics in this column (fabulous as they were!) I can say I highly recommend the experience on either side of the “stage.” Not only was a palpable intimacy created by just being packed in a smaller space, but more importantly by being in a *living* space, which quite literally made the event seem more alive. Though the atmosphere was casual, it was charged with an excitement I rarely, if ever, feel seated in the tidy rows of a conventional “theatre.”

Best of all, from my perspective, at least four attendees left vowing to host salons of their own, and one had attended a similar event in the Berkeley Hills the night before. This makes me hopeful to think that we’re standing at the brink of a bona-fide movement, not just a momentary fad.

The Performant: Stalking the voice of young America

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Listening in at SF Sketchfest and Live Evil

Is it just me, or do you also catch yourself wondering on occasion, “I wonder what the sound of young America is today?” Where is it lurking, and how will I recognize it when I find it? Well one pretty obvious solution is to just Google “the sound of young America” — the first hit will be Bay Area native Jesse Thorn’s podcast/radio show webpage on Maximum Fun. Delightful, irreverent, not unintelligible, and better yet, not unintelligent, “The Sound of Young America” is both talk show and time capsule. I mean, podcasts? How 2007!

But with comedy, it still works. A good joke is timeless, and a good comedian, whose primary tool is language, can generally carry off being funny, with or without additional visuals. And at the special SF Sketchfest edition of TSOYA, recorded at the Eureka Theatre  to a small but spirited afternoon crowd, funny people were in plentiful supply. LA stand-up comic Baron Vaughn, SF’s finest absurdist sketch troupe Kasper Hauser, creator of animated series “The Life and Times of Tim” Steve Dildarian. But as for the sound of “young” America, it was actually the comfortingly middle-aged “Bobcat” Goldthwait, no longer the mercurial situationist he was in his twenties, who stole the show with his affable demeanor and his relatively grounded philosophy of artistic fulfillment over monetary reward or “the usual trappings”.

Walking into Noh Space Saturday night was a little like walking into a high school Drama Club party, or Heavy Metal Karaoke in the Lower East Side, with everyone dressed up in their very best rock concert t-shirts, mullet wigs, and fingerless gloves: and that was just the oddience!

Onstage was Laurent Martini in a nerdy cardigan and his “younger self—‘Little Evil’” (Max Hartman), eagerly reenacting every past embarrassment of Laurent’s coming-of-age as an upper middle class fat kid from the Marina, with a desperate yearning to get laid, write rock songs, and be Nikki Sixx. These scenes were interspersed with “Don’t make me look too psychotic” vignettes from Martini’s now-defunct married life with desperate housewife Missy (Sara Faith Alterman) who spent a good portion of the show either bitching about Laurent’s uncool passion for hair metal, or getting frisky with “extra-curricular” construction workers, surfer dudes, and drug dealers.

Humiliation is central to the plot of “Live Evil”: it debuted appropriately enough as a share-and-tell at the Mortified story-telling series before it was written down in play form, and five years later still feels, in many ways, like a perpetually adolescent work. But actually, that’s the over-arching secret to its success. Because back when the sound of young America was “Pour Some Sugar on Me” every day was awkward embarrassment, and every desire over-wrought. And we’ve all been there—maybe not penning lyrics like “I’m gonna fuck my way across this great big land” — but certainly harboring impossible dreams of our own. And watching even a small slice of an impossible dream come true for a fellow romanticist, whether still the voice of “young” America or not-so-much, totally rocks.

The Performant: A dance named desire

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Exploring personal myth with EmSpace Dance and Porchlight

Descending the wooden staircase into the basement performance space at Viracocha, one leaves the surface world behind and enters a parallel underworld of theatricality and allusion. Warm hardwood panels and golden lights, a distinct contrast to the concrete and glass-filled streets above, soothe the spirit — and unintentionally convey the crux of one Blanche DuBois’ obsession with creating a more beautiful reality from the one she’s been sentenced to. Prone to artifice and artfulness, Ms. DuBois is the central catalyst of the action in Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire and its ultimate sacrifice. In EmSpace Dance’s adaptation (A Hand in Desire) however, the focus is spread more evenly among the five-person cast, both their stage personae and their “real” selves.


The likable cast, which includes a very present manifestation of Blanche’s (Rowena Richie) deceased husband Allan (Kegan Marling), jump from scene to scene guided by the chance provided in a custom deck of cards and an ongoing game of hearts. Some jumps make better sense than others and some scenes, especially the dance sequences, flow more smoothly, but the sheer gutsiness of the production makes it a compelling ride. Scenes in which the cast inhabited their everyday selves included a pair of interviews between Peter Griggs and Kegan Marling on the topic of repressed homosexuality, both Allan Grey’s and Williams’ own, and a pair of scenes in which one actor stood on a chair surrounded by the others and attempted to tell a great lie. Scenes straight out of the original play, set to dance, include Mitch’s (Christopher White) awkward courtship of Blanche, and Stella and Stanley’s (Natalie Greene and Peter Griggs) blowout fight and passionate reconciliation.

Any work, no matter how experimental, usually has at least one thread to bind the piece together, and the moody improvisational soundscape provided by musicians Josh Pollock and Chris Broderick did just that. With a few subtle effects, Pollock made his ukelele throb like a serious double bass and other instruments, while Broderick provided the flute, woodwinds, and the eerie tingle of a jaw harp.

Meanwhile at the special SF Sketchfest edition of the Porchlight story-telling series, local comics and writers also explored the themes of artifice vs. reality, and desire vs., well, reality, to a full house at the Purple Onion. Ali Liebegott told the story of a sequence of on-the-job lies she has told to keep sane (at a crappy waitressing gig: “Why aren’t you smiling?” “Because my mother has cancer”.) Matt Besser waxed un-nostalgic for his college obsession with losing his virginity. W. Kamau Bell dissected the myth/reality of “the big black dick”. Suzanne Kleid told a Snopes-worthy anecdote about her grandfather, a torn lottery ticket, and a tragically misapplied do-gooder’s instinct. Bucky Sinister examined his youthful naïveté and ambition to move to LA to be a screenwriter. At the heart of each story lay the wistfully human desire to believe in (or create) an artful truth, no matter how far removed from actual reality it might prove. Blanche DuBois, you are not alone.

The Performant: Do you SQUART?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Let it be resolved, improv-based speed-playwriting competitions involving queer performance artists, cake, fabulous spandex, atrocious wigs, adult diapers, bare bums, wind-up hamsters, and flasks of whiskey should always be bestowed a title which sounds like an uncouth bodily function. Because at the very least it leads to the humorous speculation of what particular bodily function that might be. Though hopefully your attention will mostly be on the crazed mish-mash unfolding onstage, because queer performance artists armed with cake, fabulous spandex, and all the rest, put on quite a show.

Or at any rate, they did at the one-year anniversary SQUART, which graced the SOMARTS stage on Sun/9. Conceptualized by Laura Arrington and co-produced by The Offcenter and SOMArts, Spontaneous Queer Art invites participants to create ensemble pieces in two hours abiding by specific criteria, and present the finished piece to a panel of local “celebrity judges”. This season’s theme was New Queer Baby, so the criteria included counting down, making resolutions, and giving birth. Pregnant themes, if you will, and ripe for interpretation.
 
After an awkwardly-timed round of oddience participation, the first of four groups took the stage, dressed to dazzle in glittering tops, tiaras, and a sparkling, assless jumpsuit. After a series of sketches: the birth of a hamster, a needy girl at a party, an impassioned singalong to “If I Could Turn Back Time,” they regrouped to devise a list of non-traditional New Year’s resolutions such as “I need more excessive celebration in my life,” and “I need to find a way to make more money.” Fun stuff, but group number two quickly eclipsed their joie de avenir with a strikingly confrontational piece that traded in “fear, loathing, and ecstasy”. Dressed in diapers and trailer-park drag, the group spent a good portion of the show compulsively adding to the layers of garbage strewn about the stage — condoms, salt, champagne, crumpled paper, shopping bags, a tank of helium — while from the oddience a belligerent “heckler” (Philip Huang) kept interrupting their banal patter with a volley of insults, and deliberately annoying behaviors such as pacing around the room, and throwing his chips at the judges. A climactic moment involving another singalong and a half-naked performer (Michael Velez) being pushed around the stage on the back of a
dumpster screaming “I’m God” to the apathetic masses was the most visually interesting tableau of the whole evening.
 
The exceptional cohesion of the winning group doubtlessly pushed them to the top, points-wise. A woman (Loren Robertson) with a microphone sat on the edge of the stage singing “100 Bottles of Beer” as the rest of the group enacted a fully-clothed orgy which resulted in the birth of one very naked man. Brought to Loren, his head in her lap, he began to nurse at her breast while she continued to sing. This scenario repeated itself variously, while the rest of the cast danced the Hora, and attended a “dance class” in spandex, until there were four wriggling, naked bodies attached to Loren and no more bottles of beer on the wall. Her world-weary acceptance combined with the boundless enthusiasm of her “babies” and the dancers was strikingly nuanced.

A great example of how “spontaneous” doesn’t have to mean “sloppy”, and makes me think SQUARTing more in the New Year could be a resolution worth sticking to.

The Performant: Fresh Starts

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Renewing ourselves with Right Brian Performancelab and Ween cover band Golden Eel
 
I spent my New Year’s Eve basically riding around in circles from shut-down party to shut-down party. (Let’s hear it for that War on Fun!) But I’m a big believer in the symbolic do-over that the first week of the year offers up as a recompense for the things left undone over the last one. Looking back and yet forward, Right Brian Performancelab’s one night reprise of September’s “The Elephant in the Room” served as a good example of how to straddle the line between past accomplishments and future ambitions. After a four-year parenting hiatus, Performancelab’s John Baumann and Jennifer Gwirtz’ reentry into the hybrid arts scene combined movement, text, shadow, and song into a piece both playful and poignant.

An invisible elephant, “ignored by the crowned heads of Europe,” graced the center of a low-rent circus ring. An elephant of course is a convenient metaphor for an unwieldy truth, hinted at obliquely throughout the piece. At times very large, at times very small, and at times created by the very bodies of the performers attempting to come up with its ultimate definition, the elephant inhabited its mutable space with the silent aplomb of a consummate pro. Meanwhile, the Performancelab cast — Baumann, Gwirtz, Laura Marsh, and Lisa Claybaugh — pinwheeled around it dressed like ragamuffin circus clowns, exploring the forces of gravity, fear, and dream. From a study in the anarchy of goofing off to a lone woman’s struggle against a headwind of unseen adversity, a comical interlude with Dr Suess’s legal team to a slow-motio Alice in Wonderland eat me/drink me sequence, a faceoff at the water cooler between “the counter-culture” and “ the establishment” to an ode to willful obliviousness, each small piece sparkled with sly intelligence, humor, and heart. It could have been just a tentative toe dip into the performance pool, but it felt more like an attempt to test the high dive.
 
It also seemed appropriate to the spirit of New Year’s to welcome the appearance of a new band to the barroom circuit on January 1st. Admittedly, it was a cover band. But sometimes all you want on a Saturday night is to drop five bucks at Benders and bliss out to a few favorite tunes, and for that, Ween cover band Golden Eel totally fit the bill. Playing a mix mainly from Chocolate and Cheese and The Mollusk, Cree Rider, Misisipi Mike, John Diaz, and Tony Sales demonstrated the enviable musical flexibility of their heroes while avoiding the temptation to attempt emulating studio recordings note for note. Their interpretations of “Baby Bitch,” “Push th’ Little Daisies,” “Piss up a Rope,” and “Buenas Tardes Amigo,” were particularly tight and full of fun. True they kept their instrumental jamming time way below the Ween standard, but 30-minute versions of “Poop Ship Destroyer” are probably best left to the pros anyhow.

The Performant: Deck this!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Aggro Yuletide fun with Will Franken and Satan’s finest

It’s a common misperception that the sensory-overload of the holiday season is an even greater irritant to the committed misanthrope than the ennui of the everyday, but I beg to differ. Actually the holidays are when misanthropes tend to shine: while everybody else is getting their longjohns in a bunch because of the line at the post office, the ever-increasing price of java logs, or Christmas carol earworms, misanthropes, accustomed to weathering the seas of perpetual annoyance, seem comparatively serene. Also, because everyone around them is suddenly on edge, their caustic observations and one-liners are more relevant to and therefore more appreciated by their usually more-sanguine acquaintances.


But like it or not, the holidays are still a time when even misanthropes yearn to come togetherin some fashion, and that’s what makes a show like Will Franken’s “Texas Chainsaw Yuletide” ideal for the Christmas curmudgeon. A refuge, if you will, for the defiantly unsentimental. A dazzling mirror-ball of sharp-edged vignettes, Franken’s show began with the unlikely appearance of a rat killer educated at the Sorbonne then morphed into familiar bits involving a pair of long-winded television commentators, that perennial favorite “The Condom Lady,” a pompous priest at Westminster Abbey presiding over the end of Christianity, a champagne-swilling fire chief, and a couple of gangland thugs, Sammy Salt and Petey Pepper.

A typically Frankenian evening of non-sequitur and contrarian observation, “TCY” nonetheless managed to sneak in a couple of twisted takes on home and hearth with a shaggy dog story about impersonating Michael Caine visiting his parents in “Talia Shire” (name that pop culture reference, kids!), and a surrealist homily about his own father taking twenty years to finish falling out a window. “I refuse to set foot on this earth,” is a quote he attributes to his old man, but taken out of context, beautifully encapsulates the essence of Will’s own approach to performance and to the status quo.
 
Pushing the surrealistic envelope even further, Karla LaVey’s 13th annual Black XMass at the Elbo Room featured a whole lineup of alternate-reality-makers, including the hard-to-categorize Los Murderachis and the even-harder-to-categorize Fuxedos, who are frankly the main reason I keep coming back to the Xmass every year now that they’ve stopped providing bacon-wrapped latkes (the devil’s food)!

Local boys Los Murderachis dressed in their Dia de los Muertos-inspired finery and played an eclectic mash-up of pseudo-salsa, mock-metal, and rogue rock, while The Fuxedos, clad in bloody tuxedo rags, played jazzy carnival music tinged with rage—a manic hybrid of Frank Zappa, Zippy the Pinhead, and The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. As frontman Danny Shorago churned through a truly staggering number of masks, props, and outfits, (“we’re prop rock” quipped a member of the band) the spandex-tight ensemble laid a solid musical foundation beneath the mayhem. And as a special treat, they even beat the crap out of Santa Claus onstage, which is really about as much holiday sentimentality as any misanthrope, congenital or seasonal, can bear by December’s end.

The Performant: Big ideas, small packages

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Taking size of the One-Minute Play Festival and Monsters of Accordion

I’m a sucker for miniaturization. Sushi erasers, super-strong magnets, marzipan fruit baskets, teeny-weeny screwdrivers; anything you can pack into a matchbox or stuff into a watch-pocket makes my spirits soar. So I was naturally keen to take in the One-Minute Play Festival at Thick House. Sixty-three 60-second plays performed in a quicksilver stream of actors, action, and scene. A good example of where miniature does not automatically equate “cute” or “precious” but rather “succinct” or “direct,” the one-minute play is an exercise in brevity and restraint.


Without time for lengthy exposition or backstory, the plays had to cut straight to the heart of a single moment of impact. Admittedly, many of the moments chosen by playwrights basically amounted to humorous set-ups with stand-up style punchlines — a PTA meeting of horny housewives (“P Trois A,” by Lauren Gunderson), a vengeful lover ordering a swarm of poisonous jellyfish online (“Irukanji,” by Steve Yockey), a pair of odes to male bonding ritual (“Manly Men,” by Qui Nguyen; “Handshake,” by Erin Bregman). But other plays sought to explore loss (“Kosovo,” by Garret Jon Groenveld), revenge (“Last Chance,” by Elizabeth Gjelten), and betrayal (“Later, a Letter,” by Evelyn Jean Pine).

What became swiftly apparent was that while it’s really difficult to tell an individual playwright from another in just one minute, the individual directors who were each given twelve to thirteen minutes worth of stage time apiece were able to really stamp their own personal signatures onto the proceedings. Paul Cello went for stylized movement and uniform basic black outfits for all his actors, Meridith McDonough and Jonathan Spector used plenty of props, Desdemona Chiang used extra actors and paid extra attention to lighting and sound design. It made me interested to see them take the experiment of the one-minute play festival even further. What if you had one one-minute play… and sixty directors? Would it be an exercise in déjà vu—or something possibly much more intriguing?
 
Meanwhile, at Slim’s, the “Monsters of Accordion” (aka “Jason Webley and friends”) were exploring humor and tragedy in their own way with that most bizarrely beloved all-purpose instrument of all time—the piano accordion. Talk about the wonders of miniaturization! An accordion may not be a small instrument, but the number of instruments it can take the place of can turn a single master wielder into an orchestra unto themselves. And when you get an entire pack of them onstage together, well, “monsters” is a good descriptor! Also passionate geeks and secret saboteurs of the mundane. From the sinuous swing of The Petrojvic Blasting Company, the Cajun stomp of local gal, and lone button accordionist, Renee de la Prade, or the gleefully demented Bacteria song first written by Webley for a roomful of scientists studying fruit-bat fellatio, the stylistic range spanned continents, eras, possibilities. And much like acollection of short-attention-span-style plays, included humor, collaboration, applause.

The Performant: Child’s play

Andrew Lam
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The Mission gets a lot of ink these days for being a nexus of youthful, responsibility-free hipsterdom — but despite the skinny jeans and thick mustaches, the neighborhood still retains a surprisingly family-friendly vibe. For one, it’s still rife with community arts spaces, so it’s a good place for kids to get involved creatively: from Loco Bloco percussion classes, to brass band and capoeira courses at the Mission Cultural Center and Precita Eyes‘ lessons in mural installation.

Thanks in large part to the winter holidays, December is a great time to explore the youth arts scene as next wave performers strengthen their stage chops and strut their stuff and this last weekend played host to some of the best and brightest of these stage openings.

First up: the Community Music Center held their annual La Posarela at the Victoria Theatre. The production was a combination of Mexico’s traditional December plays, the posadas and pastorelas, which are both Catholic theatrical rites meant to re-enact the story of the birth of the baby Jesus. CMC’s starred members of its various classes and groups, including its children’s chorus, Latin vocal workshop, Coro del Pueblo, and Mission District young musicians programs.

In the flower of their youthitude: Revolutionary Nutcracker Sweetie plays Brava

Other youth openings included the Marsh Youth Theatre‘s relaunch of its now-perennial Siddhartha: The Bright Path and Krissy Keefer’s revamped Revolutionary Nutcracker Sweetie, which took the stage at the Brava Theater Center and was adapted for Dance Brigade’s various youth dance programs: beginning ballet was represented, as was hip-hop, belly dance, and taiko drumming.

A note on this last show: there’s something strangely inspiring about watching a group of determined girls wallop the heck out of a sturdy row of giant drums, fight off the annoying machinations of a pack of devious rats, overcome racial innuendo and classism, and dress up as jellyfish all in one production — and though pop culture references abounded throughout the production (party guests included Lady Gaga and the Jersey Shore kids), the delicate snowflake core of The Nutcracker did not melt under their onslaught. 

Like Waters for (hot) chocolate: the infamous film knave plays a holiday show at the Roxie. Photo by David Magnusson

But of course the Mission would not be the Mission if there weren’t holiday treats for big kids too, and John Waters’ appearance at the Roxie Theatre‘s 101st anniversary fundraiser was definitely one of those. After waxing rhapsodic about the possibility of receiving sticks and stones curated by artists such as Richard Serra, pulp fiction bookstore KAYO Books, and Alvin and the Chipmunks, he moved on to sharing his holiday wishlist of big ideas. This included opening a movie theater with gay and straight water fountains just to watch the fur fly, hosting an abortion film festival, going on a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” USO Tour with Beth Ditto, Pee Wee Herman, and Iggy Pop, and having a nervous breakdown onstage.

As it was, no-one had a nervous breakdown at all — but here’s hoping at the very least Waters’ less comedic desire to see the Roxie thrive for another 101 years will be fulfilled.

The Performant: Jingle Balls

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Decking the halls with “The Oddman Family Christwanzaakah Spectacular” and “Balls to Balzac”

How many more ways are there to teach the true meaning of Christmas-Solstice-Chanukah-Kwanzaa now that Jim Carrey has been both the Grinch and Scrooge, dreidels come in rainbow colors, and Kwanzaa candles are available in soy wax? Well, you could start by teaching your children that everyday is like a holiday, and that the spirit of giving can permeate the entire year. That’s what the Oddmans do. And look at how multi-talented their precious little tykes are turning out. They sing, they dance, they play music, they translate the songs in ASL — some without the average number of limbs usually sported by working musicians (besides Rick Allen, that is). All the Oddman family wants is to spread a little multi-cultural holiday cheer around. In Hollywood. Right now. SHOW ME THE MONEY.


Of course the Oddmans aren’t the first family in the history of show business to hit upon the idea that perseverance in the face of physical adversity makes for good television. The forcibly-mutilated beggar children of the Middle Ages were assembled with a similar desire to tug the heartstrings and pursestrings of the general public. Gathering a group of discarded orphans together in a rock-solid backup band for star duo Johnny (Ryan Marchand) and La’ree (Whitney Thomas), who do in fact retain possession all their limbs and most of their mental faculties, is downright philanthropic in comparison. Or is it?

I definitely went into “The Oddman Family Christwanzaakah Spectacular” at the Exit Theatre with the more-or-less on the mark notion that it would be a weird evening. But I certainly didn’t anticipate the gleeful depths of depravity to which the characters stooped. In particular, Mother and Father (Sheena McIntyre and Matt Gunnison) whose creepily literal interpretation of the motto “give ‘til it hurts” and entrenched cultural myopia took what could have been just another attempt at holiday fruitcake to turn it into the most debauched food-for-thought of the season. Above all, teaching the valuable lesson of how when the ghouls of Christmas Present are coming for your kidneys, sometimes it’s better to give a little than a lot. 

Meanwhile, a neighborhood away, choreographer Amy Lewis presented a lecture at Cellspace entitled “Balls to Balzac: A Journey from Testicles to Women in the Bourbon Restoration” to a hardy breed braving the rain. She began by exploring the true true meaning of the word “balls” and why there were not as many other euphemisms used in its place as with other major players in the nether regions, then worked her way up to discussing the literary treatment that Balzac, the prolific author of The Human Comedy, gave to his female protagonists. What was most fascinating to me though was the topic she touched upon only briefly — the use of mapping techniques in choreography, a tool I admit I’d been hitherto ignorant of. Now that my interest is piqued, I only hope that Ms. Lewis will incorporate more examples and explanation of this very topic into her next public presentation.
 
The Oddman Family Christwanzaakah Spectacular
Through Dec 18
Exit Theatre
156 Eddy, SF
$20
(415) 673-3847
www.sffringe.org
www.guerillarep.org

The Performant: Beats and Beuys – is anything sacred?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Melting the masters with Oddball Films and Keith Hennessey

In a scene from the hilariously boffo short film Pull My Daisy an unruly gang of beatniks (Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso) grill their pal’s invited guest, “The Bishop” (Richard Bellamy) about the relative holiness of the world around them, from baseball to cockroaches to the male organ. Is this-and-that holy, is such-and-such holy? they slur via Jack Kerouac’s partially-improvised narration. Their good-natured interrogation is doubtlessly modeled on Ginsberg’s “Footnote to Howl”—that affirmative litany asserting the holiness of cocks, typewriters, and “the bop apocalypse”. Throughout, their commitment to proving the divine in the human gives their tactless party-crashing a metaphysical justification and an almost wide-eyed innocence.

 The tiny screening room of Oddball Films, might seem at a casual glance to lack a direct conduit to heaven, but scouring the stacks one does find all manner of human concerns. Animated shorts, trailers, features, industrial, educational and other “ephemeral” flicks fill the warehouse-like space in leaning towers of film cans. During last Friday’s screening of beat and beat-themed films (Bongo Beatin’ Beatniks), metaphysics, innocence, and the meaning of art collided with the carnal, the craven, and the brazen, especially through a series of clips from “beat-sploitation” classics such as Beat Girl and the Bloody Brood. A touch of dada surfaced in the wonderfully bizarre Help, my Snowman’s Burning Down, and the earthly pleasure of music-making was encapsulated by jazz short Jammin’ the Blues. Tucked away on the second floor of a furniture warehouse on Capp Street, Oddball Films screens its collection of weird gems on a regular basis, and seems as good a place as any to spend time considering the archived intersection between flesh and spirit.  

Meanwhile, at a performance of Keith Hennessey’s “Crotch: all the Joseph Beuys references in the world cannot heal the pain…” the intersection between art and philosophy was humorously relayed via a quick lecture which began with Plato, Hegel, and Judith Butler, and ended somewhere around Arendt, Focault, and Wagner. Fortunately, you don’t win prestigious dance awards by spending all your stage time talking about Rudolf Steiner, so eventually Hennessey relented, took off his pants, and donned a “Scream” mask.

His body—squatting, hopping, attempting to stand on its head—asked that question which the mind has a hard time answering. Is this-and-that holy, is such-and-such holy? All joking aside, he removed the mask, helped his stage manager strike a part of his set, and nailed two boards together—a cross to bear—and balanced it on his head, slowly moving across the stage in tears. In a final act of acceptance, he barricaded his genitals behind a wall of lard, invited us onstage with him, and with needle and thread, sewed the visible scars on his body to the clothing of the three nearest audience members, covered himself in a rain of glitter, and inserted a set of misshapen Halloween teeth for good measure. In unison, we sang along to the Nirvana tune hypnotically playing in the background (“Something in the Way”), until almost without warning, the performer was gone—but the audience was still connected. Flesh and spirit.

The Performant: We want the airwaves

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Aeriel Art Soars at Theatre Artaud and Teatro Zinzanni

Do you dream of the day when you finally learn how to fly? For aerielists, that future is now, and that dream an everyday reality. It’s a career choice not for the faint of heart — right up there, I’d say, with driving a fire truck or sailing around the world on a catamaran made of plastic bottles. But I imagine the psychic rewards to be tremendous. Life on the edge. Teasing gravity, tempting fate. To soar—perchance to jetstream.

During “Burning Libraries: Stories from the New Ellis Island” at Theatre Artaud, the oral histories of children take flight with the help of four dancers, two of whom (Susan M. Voyticky and Kerri Kresinski) spend considerable time in the air—elevating the simple text to reverent heights. Swooping from moonbeams made of aerial silks, Voyticky escapes from the segregated south, and later in the production, Voyticky and Kresinski dance in the sky, side by side, as fireworks (projection provided by Ian Winters) explode around them.

They collect eggs from the “tops of trees” and, in a wrenching history about the Port Chicago disaster, they go up in flames, and then form, with their earthbound companions, a monument to their own memories, shrouded behind the silks, frozen in time. The entire performance reminds somewhat of Blixa Bargeld’s “The Execution of Precious Memories” enacted on the same stage two years ago, right down to some of the same flaws (nagging paucity of cohesion and character depth) but the sheer pleasure of watching the unencumbered flights of the aerialists cannot be understated.

There’s something about watching an aerial performance unfolding genteelly on a stage, and quite another thing again about watching it swooping right over the dinner table (“Oh waiter! There’s a ‘flyer’ in my soup!”). You probably won’t regret it for the rest of your life if you happen to miss attending the latest Teatro Zinzanni  production “License to Kiss II, a Sweet Conspiracy” but if you’ve got some well-heeled relatives hanging around for the holidays, then what the heck.

Get them to take you and hang on to your soup spoon when sensuous Seattlite Kari Podgorski eats some magic love cherries and takes to the air in racy red lace lingerie. Beautifully framed by the antique swoop of the one-hundred year-old Speigeltent, her aphrodisiac acrobatics are a sweet treat. Twice as nice, the dynamic husband-and-wife Vertical Tango team (Sam Payne and Sandra Feusi), play out a passionate courtship in the air, spinning sinuously along the length of an impressively girthed stripper pole.

And just for the nervously giggling patrons inevitably seated in the font rows of tables, an interlude with a giant teddy bear on a tightrope will make the familiar pull of gravity seem curiously comforting—once he’s well out of pointblank crashdive range, that is.

The Performant: Cheers for fears

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Scoping out “After Dark” at the Exploratorium and a Mark Growden singalong

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.” –H.P. Lovecraft

Bolshephobia is the fear of Bolsheviks. Sesquipedalophobia is the fear of long words, which does rather beg the question, how do people with that particular fear express it without using the eight-syllable word that defines it? At this month’s After Dark event at the Exploratorium, fear was the theme explored, and confronting one’s fears directly, in the spirit of scientific inquiry, strongly encouraged.


We’ve learned to accept fear as an instinct of self-preservation, yet on the surface, so many fears seem downright petty, even ridiculous. Take, for example, the “phobia trading cards” we were urged to grab on our way in. Mine: fear of vomiting (emetophobia). Theresa’s: fear of men (androphobia). Once inside, we made a beeline for the joint San Francisco Bay Area Tarantula Society/East Bay Vivarium,. What is it about creepy-crawlies that make the skin crawl? All around us, giant cockroaches, scorpions, and spiders were adorning outstretched palms, and snakes were slithering up forearms and around the necks of museum patrons.

I opted to handle a relatively user-friendly duo, a Chilean Rose Tarantula and a sleepy Pacific Gopher Snake. Theresa would not hold a snake, but she got to watch me flinch soon enough at the Pendulum of Truth. Placed behind safety shields, facing each other, we were urged to swing a bowling ball on a chain at each other’s faces. Being bashed by a flying bowling ball is not something I expect to happen to me regularly, but when confronted with one, I can attest, yes, it’s a very real fear. Less frightening was being locked in the Utica Crib, a reproduction of a nineteenth-century restraining device used primarily at the New York State Lunatic Asylum, though I suspect I’d weary of it soon enough after a few hours—or days.

There were people practicing tightrope-walking, watching dentistry demonstrations, and confronting the pitch black interior of the Tactile Dome as we headed over to the McBean Theatre for a presentation on Nightmares by dream expert Dr. Alan Siegel. Ever had that one dream where all your teeth crumble and fall out at once? Dr. Siegel can tell you why.

One fear shared by entirely too many people is the fear of singing in public. At least that’s a fear that has a cure—practice practice practice. Happily, it didn’t seem like fear was the driving force behind people’s decisions to attend the Mark Growden Sing-along at a.Muse Gallery Saturday night.
Part grade-school music class, part hootenanny, we warmed up our vocal chords with some scales and some tongue-twisting folk tunes before tackling the Mark Growden repertoire, mostly songs from Saint Judas (Porto Franco Records, 2009). Unlike the forced make-or-break centerstage experience of a karaoke bar, a sing-along’s success lies in its collaborative nature, from each according to their abilities. The informal, free-for-all atmosphere of the evening brought the old adage “if you can talk, you can sing,” to convivial life, and whatever fear was up to that evening, it most certainly wasn’t hanging out with us.

The Performant: Rite of autumn

Andrew Lam
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It might have been unannounced, but there’s a ritual aspect to all this the Giants-Halloween-Dia de los Muertos mayhem all the same. And like any great autumnal rite, the cathartic frenzy implies a greater narrative — one last big harvest before the little death of winter, the rebirth of spring. How appropriate to the season then, was the Ragged Wing production “Persephone’s Roots” a site-specific re-imagining of the Persephone myth at Berkeley’s Cordornices Park. 

Persephone — as you might remember — is the daughter of Demeter, and traditionally the story told is that she was kidnapped into the underworld by Hades, which caused Demeter to neglect the Earth while she searched for her, bringing barren winter to the land. Ragged Wing’s Persephone was a far more willful curator of her own destiny. 

As an oddience, we followed her self-propelled journey into the underworld past a three-headed Hecate at the crossroads, around a despairing Sisyphus and Tantalus, through a spiral maze (Hecate’s Temple) where we wrote down our shadow thoughts and cast them into a basket to be burned later on during the climactic reunion scene. Then to the Fates picnic, where Persephone defiantly ate of an onion, and the three weird sisters snipped her thread. 

No victim, this Persephone was a willing Queen of the Underworld, and when Demeter found her at last, beside the bonfires of the “hearth of the triple goddess” (Hecate again) their agreement that Persephone would spend the spring months above ground was hard won. The wooded paths, trickling waterways, and rapidly descending nightfall made the journey feel very otherworldly and the park seem downright mysterious. 

Speaking of mysterious, I will never look at the Shakespeare Garden in Golden Gate Park in quite the same way now that I’ve seen it in the neon of glowsticks at midnight, the end station of the interactive, city-wide Journey to the End of the Night.  

Beginning at Justin Hermann plaza at 8 p.m., the game spread out over much of the city—from Chinatown, to SoMa, to the Mission, to Haight, to Golden Gate Park. The goal was to get through to each checkpoint via public transportation and collect a signature after performing some minor task (most involved was probably the “Change of Face” station in Dore Alley, where we had to exchange parts of our costumes with strangers in the back room of Lennon Studios. 

The challenge was getting to each checkpoint without being caught by a “chaser” since, like zombies, their powers of evil would then corrupt you and you would become one of them. Indeed, by the end of the night, chasers almost outnumbered survivors, and my group of three survivors were congratulated heartily on our triumph at the entrance to the garden. 

The light at the end of the tunnel was a dreamy, participatory performance by nerd arcana swashbucklers Corpus Callosum, who exhorted us to “drink to the ghosts of the night”, a ritual appropriate for any season. 

 

The Performant: Extreme Theatre Sports at “The Great Game” Marathon

Andrew Lam
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This weekend, despite the rain, I attended a marathon. Fortunately for my running shoes, it was a marathon of theatre indoors at the Berkeley Rep — an epic play cycle of 19 vignettes set in Afghanistan, entitled “The Great Game”. Ever been to a theater marathon? Like any test of physical endurance, it’s not for the faint of heart. You have to prepare for it. Hydrate well. Wear comfortable clothing. And above all, pack plenty of snacks.

Zero Hour: Like most marathons, this one starts with a gunshot. But unlike most marathons, the knot of men running onto the stage are wearing long robes and carrying their own guns, and their goal is no trophy, but a mural painter, Mohammad Mashal (Vincent Ebrahim), whom they drag away, presumably to be punished for his artistic endeavors. 

First Lap: A scene of buglers, standing watch over the gates of Jalalabad in 1842. A feisty shepherdess, Malalai (Shereen Martineau) urges on a battalion with a poetic battle cry: “young love, if you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand, someone is saving you as a symbol of shame”. The “birth” of Afghanistan — or rather the birth of a butchered border, “Durand’s Line,” still a contested demarcation to this day. Of the first batch of plays, this vignette penned by Ron Hutchinson, was the most fascinating to me, and the most instructive.

Intermission: time for a nice stretch. Deep knee bends and some arm rotations.

Second Lap: A series of talking heads. A closed-door fishing session for sensitive information in “Campaign”. A king, Amanullah Khan (Daniel Rabin), becomes an unwilling exile in Joy Wilkinson’s “Now is the Time”.

Sprint: A meal break on the run, time for some major carb-packing. Hustle around the corner to the October Feast Bakery for a Bavarian-style soft pretzel. Zum Wohl!

Still going strong, the third and fourth laps pass relatively quickly — a humorous interlude with a Russian mine-sweeper (Rick Warden), a melodramatic moment involving a hungry lion at the Kabul Zoo. Weirdly, my feet begin to hurt. Well, it is a marathon after all! Fortunately it’s nothing a pair of ibuprofen and some chocolate-coved espresso beans can’t cure.

Sprint two: A brisk stroll around the neighborhood, up Allston, back down Bancroft. Here’s to you Mrs. Robinson! On Spaulding I stop to smell the sweetest rose. But there’s no rest for the weary yet. Alas, the show must go on! And it does…

Last laps: The final series of six shorts is set primarily in the nineties and “oughts”, and therefore feels the most familiar in terms of scope and territory. More talking heads, poppy farmers, disgruntled NGO’s, and a shell-shocked soldier who can’t readjust to the civilian life. From a theatre-goer’s point-of-view, you hope the evening won’t end on this anti-climactic note, but it does. From a theatre-marathoner’s point-of-view, almost any ending after seven hours of performance is fine. And from an over-extended reader of the news’ point of view, catching up on Afghanistan now seems more of a priority than ever before.

The Great Game: Afghanistan

Through Nov. 7, $34-$54 per act

Berkeley Repertory Theater

2025 Addison, Berk.

www.berkeleyrep.org

(510) 647-2949

 

The Performant: The accidental tourist

Andrew Lam
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Intrepid travelers always get a bit of a bee in their bonnet when you mistake them for tourists, but tourism doesn’t have to be a dirty word. All it really means is the act of traveling for recreational purposes and as such, can be applied to even the smallest of pleasurable jaunts. Saturday morning, I went on a tour—replete with guides, maps, wristbands, a short jaunt by MUNI train, and a chaos (as opposed to a gaggle or a horde) of dancers. Yes, it was the 7th annual San Francisco Trolley Dances, and this year’s chosen line was the N-Judah.

There’s nothing affected about the workaday N, the busiest line of the Metro system, and you wouldn’t normally find a whole embarrassment (as opposed to a herd or a murder) of art-loving tourists hanging out on it, but there we were. Chatty, consolidated, in motion: heading chummily from Duboce Park to Golden Gate.

At the Harvey Milk Recreational Arts Center, the pink and blue garments of the celestially-clad Sunset Recreation Center Chinese Folk Dance Group, the cotton-candyesque pouffs of pink afro wigs worn by the Joe Goode Performance Group, and the shiny red bullseye of a large round suitcase passed around by the performers of Christine Bonansea’s 2 x 3 project, all caught the eye, while the dexterity of the dancers further held the attention.

After hopping the N-Judah and trundling en masse to 9’th and Irving, our tour guide, Mike, promised us some wildlife—and there she was, behind the display window of Osso and Co, a lady (Phaedra Ana Jones) dressed like a leopard, dancing fluidly with an acrylic “crystal” ball.

Arriving at the Botanical Garden, we trooped through the gate to watch pieces choreographed by Sara Shelton Mann, and Japanese folk dance troupe, Ensohza Minyoshu. But the pièce de résistance was Epiphany Production’s contribution “Sonic Dance Theatre”, whose grand yet playful vision took over an entire meadow with Hank Williams songs and gospel lullabies, taffeta skirts, masked wildlife, a didgeridoo, a bride, a ballerina, and an make-believe picnic.

If you’re traveling for work but your work is a pleasure, does that make you a tourist? I wish I’d thought to ask Lynda Barry that when I chatted her up at APE after her spirited presentation of her brand-new Drawn and Quarterly book: Picture This, The Near-sighted Monkey Book. Comics scribes are often fairly introverted individuals (go figure) and their presentations can be rather stilted affairs, but Barry is a natural bon vivant, and her anecdote about trying to pick up cute guys at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence by weeping in front of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus had us in stitches.

The Near-Sighted Monkey Book (sub-subtitle: Learn How to Art) is a guide to creating visual art—a sequel of sorts to What It Is (Drawn and Quarterly, 2008) which was about writing. If all goes well, maybe in the future we can expect a third book on public speaking, because on that particular subject, Barry has plenty to teach.

 

 

 

 

The Performant: The fortress of solitude and “Hamlet” on Alcatraz

Andrew Lam
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I notice them first on the ferry, two young men in suspenders and ties deep in conversation. One wears a beanie and designer sunglasses. Nothing special. The view of the approaching island etched against the uncharacteristically clear sky is more enticing. But when they burst onto the main deck amidst the passengers, and speak loudly of their journey to Elsinore, it’s clear that the play’s the thing. To be precise, the We Players‘ experiential performance-thing of “Hamlet” now being staged on Alcatraz.

Hustled out onto the landing dock after the ferry ride, the oddience is soon surrounded by the unfolding action. There, running along the narrow walkways girding the abandoned barracks of Building 64, is Barnardo (Kevin Singer) with his unsettling news. Here, a group of black-clad musicians heralds the eerie appearance of not just one, but five apparitions of the deceased king, whose masked face materializes ominously from behind bushes and stairwells. The new king, Hamlet’s uncle Claudius (Scott D. Phillips), holds court before a tangle of brush and chainlink fencing, while Hamlet (Andrus Nichols) denounces his deeds in front of same.

Upon being moved upon, we surge forward in hot pursuit of Hamlet as he races in hot pursuit of the ghost, his father. Pursuit is a theme well-examined within Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. Hamlet pursues revenge and Ophelia’s (Misti Boettiger) affections both, while Claudius’ pursuit of power, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s (Kevin Singer and Ross Travis) pursuit of reward, and Laertes’ (Benjamin Stowe) pursuit of ambition abroad drive them to purpose if not to sensibility. Isolation too plays a role: Hamlet gradually isolates himself from the good graces of everyone save his loyal Horatio (Nicholas Trengove) and then there’s Elsinore itself, surrounded by water and the stultified air of provincial familiarity, equally isolated from the rest of Denmark — indeed, Europe.

This melancholy undercurrent of isolation is what makes Alcatraz such an ideal location for the staging of this classic ghost story. A distinctive, craggy presence in a deceptively tame-looking bay, Alcatraz has guarded its shores and mostly unwilling inhabitants for centuries, with icy currents and unfriendly rock. Haunted (at least metaphorically) by the ghosts of incarcerated prisoners of war, assimilation-resisting American Indians, conscientious objectors, and bank robbers, its stony paths and gloomy corridors bear uncanny resemblance to the equally dismal wreckage of any old European fortress gone to seed.

Indeed, the setting is so central to this nimbly-executed, three-hour performance, you could almost list Alcatraz as a cast member rather than a staging ground. Whether supporting a wily troupe of traveling players in the line-crossed palm of what was once a parade ground, or cradling the disintegrating remains of Ophelia’s sanity within its crumbling walls, the fortress, like Hamlet, yields no quarter, though unlike Hamlet, it’s still left standing after the bloodbath of the final act. Gathered once more on the parade ground, ringed with fire, lanterns, and stars, we watch the treacherous killing of Hamlet, and the swift justice inadvertently meted out to his murderers, while the roving eye of the lighthouse above us glances not unsympathetically at such frail human antics. The rest is silence. 

Hamlet

Saturdays and Sundays, times vary, by donation

Alcatraz Island, SF

(415) 547-0189

we-alcatraz.blogspot.com


The Performant: Dies Arses have it

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Local Arts: Arse Elektronika weekend and arses up at Dodgyfest III

Couldn’t make it out to the “Oscars of computer art” at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria? Me neither, but thanks to Viennese techno-prankster collective monochrom, I could stay in San Francisco and experience a slightly more warped version at the 4th annual Arse Elektronika instead. An exploration of sex, tech, and space — inner and outer — Friday evening’s lineup of lectures and presentations turned the Center for Sex and Culture into a grown-up game of show-and-tell.

First up was “Spaceman” Sam Coniglio of the Space Tourism Society presenting on one of his favorite topics: “Sex in Space”. Unfortunately, as Coniglio notes, this is not NASA’s first priority as a research topic and the jury is out on whether or not anyone has ever successfully joined the 217-mile club or not. (If so, “they’re not telling.”) But such lack of information hasn’t stopped the hopeful from designing prototypes of gear that might assist in future feats of space sex. With the help of volunteers, Coniglio showed off his own favorite, a plushy “snuggle tunnel”—like a giant slinky covered in velveteen.

Jason Brown’s extremely entertaining talk, “The Endosymbiotic Cha-Cha” took the concept of sex in space from the outside in, beginning with the premise that humans may fantasize about boinking a reasonably attractive, bipedal extraterrestrial race, but in reality, scale might be the real barrier. Perhaps alien life forms already live among us (or in us!) at a microscopic level. Are multiplying viruses getting it on while we suffer the side effects of their fevered touch? Wrapping up the evening was Heather Kelley, aka moboid, presenting an iPhone app she designed called Body Heat which allows the user to manipulate the speeds of a vibrator using a touchscreen. She showed off its incidental percussive potential along with Jordan Gray, or starPause, who accompanied her with electronic blips and sampled bits.

Such sexoterica was good food for thought, but I was feeling the need to get down and dirty. Luckily, Dodgyfest III was there for me. Ostensibly a birthday celebration for prolific rock photographer Mr Dodgy (Neil Motteram), Dodgyfest featured cake, t-shirts, and hi-octane rocking. Girls with Guns! Meat Sluts! La Plebe! It’s pretty hard to think of a feistier lineup, but just for kicks, Neil threw in a few extra tunes as frontman for the (very) occasional Bloody Hells. Taking a tongue-in-cheek page out of the Ramones’ rock-and-roll high school primer, the pseudononymous Meat Sluts (SFBG-recognized “Sluttiest Rockers”)  bear monikers best suited for the bbq stand (Scarlet Spamchop anyone?) and their set list was equal parts carnivorous and lascivious — man-meat featuring large in the lyrics. Turning up the heat was the ever-smokin’ La Plebe, who rather wholesomely avoid overtly sexual themes in their lyrics, though they always throw in “Dirty Old Town” for the punters. But their overriding message of personal liberty is always an aphrodisiac to the spirit, and their skintight ska-inflected riffs would make Buzz Aldrin wanna mosh. Space-sex fetishists take heed, sometimes the most fun you can have is with your clothes on after all.

The Performant: Singing the Body Eclectic

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Local Arts: “Bodies in Space(s)” and Project Bandaloop float beneath and soar above

Because words so often fail in the realm of the everyday, it’s not surprising that some performers prefer to eschew them altogether, crafting their manifestoes with the indelible inks of pure action. Of course just as the written or spoken word can be misinterpreted, the language of the body can also be misunderstood.

How, for example, to interpret the Mad Maxian figure duct-taped to the pillar in front of Madrone Art Bar with his eyes wrapped shut with cord and a tiny television under his arm (Daniel Blomquist)? Or the spectacle of watching another get wrapped up in strips of calligraphied bandages and papier-mâché (Justin Hoover)? Sure, you could read a florid artist’s statement about the impetus behind such actions, but those often only underscore the inadequacy of words to convey the immediate. Allowing oneself to be simply drawn in should be a surrender more frequently employed when confronted with the emphatically unfamiliar.

At “Bodies in Space(s)” at Madrone, a circle of onlookers watched in silence as Terrance Graven, a pale, drawn figure in a strikingly white suit and tie, opened a series of gold-capped bottles covered with waxy lumps of what looked like melting flesh, drinking from each in turn and dribbling the colorful contents (various medicinal syrups and milk of magnesia) down his shirtfront. The patter of the drops hitting the butcher paper beneath Graven’s feet sounded of rain, and perhaps to chase away the storm he lit a fire in the covered incense burner on the ground.

One by one, labeled containers of urine, perched on a pair of side tables, were poured into a shotglass and downed―the last one heated first in the dancing flames. Now there’re a hundred ways I could interpret that sequence of events, and there are just as many ways for Graven to explain it, but what it made me think of was experimenting with watercolors, missing the gentle inevitability of summer rain (the kind we don’t generally get here in Ess Eff), and how both urine and fire can be used to treat wounds in survivalist-style emergencies. Can I say for certain that these contextual free associations were among Graven’s intended message? Of course not, but allowing myself the freedom to go along with the moment instead of deconstructing it to death did create a very personalized resonance out of the potentially alienating material.

Some performing bodies transcend even the language of free association. Take Project Bandaloop for example. Extreme arielists, the Bandaloops soar literally from mountaintops, skyscrapers, and iconic structures such as the Space Needle, with all the gravity-defying graces of a flock of elegant cranes. Helping to inaugurate the brand-new 24 Days of Central Market Arts festival, a tight-knit trio dangled and swooped over the Mint Plaza to the jaunty gypsy-strains of Caravan Palace. Dancing sideways, parallel to the ground, their feet against the smooth 10-story walls of 4 Mint Plaza or scraping the blue sky as they leapt, seemingly fearless, into thin air. There are no words to adequately describe the rush of vicarious adrenaline such a performance provides. But the body understands the language of it very well.

The Performant: Site (-specificity) for sore hearts

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The Performant: Site (-specificity) for sore hearts

Under the benevolent neon rainbow of Twin Peaks Tavern, a bearded man with a battered trunk strolls up and addresses a group of people seated at café tables in the little plaza tucked beside the F-Market turnaround at Castro and 17’th. It’s the sort of thing that happens a lot in San Francisco, the difference in this case being that the figure is none other than Walt Whitman (robustly channeled by No Nude Men’s Ryan Hayes), and the assembled crowd a diverse group of Fringe Festival patrons,

Castro habitués, and curious bystanders sucked in by the moment. Average of build yet bold of purpose, this is not the “Old Father Graybeard” of Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California”—but rather a younger, lustier Whitman, who perambulates easily about the crowd and speaks desire to the bustle of passerby and impatient streetcars.

This site-specific piece entitled “Boys Together Clinging: the Gay Poetry of Walt Whitman” brings to vibrant life the “Calamus” poem-cluster, contained within Whitman’s definitive tome Leaves of Grass. Written 150 years ago, the “Calamus” poems speak frankly of “manly attachment,” “athletic love,” and a multitude of “comrades”.

Walt speaks! Ryan Hayes channels in the Castro

Insinuating himself into his audience, the present-day incarnation of the poet grasped hands, caressed shoulders, chased after a hottie in a hoodie, a “passing stranger,” calling out after him: “I slept with you”. He is gentle, candid, sweetly-frustrated, threatening to drop allegiance to his poetry for his unnamed love. “I am indifferent to my own songs,” he confesses, but “determined to unbare this broad breast of mine, I have long enough stifled and choked.” His confession come to an end, he hoists his trunk once more, his burden, and prepares to follow the F-Market, and his desires, to the end of the line.

On the opposite side of town, another site-specific piece was also airing out some secrets. Genny Lim’s “Paper Angels” might have been written in 1980, and set in 1915, but the politics of the still-controversial 14th Amendment regarding birthright citizenship which permeate it are uncomfortably close to the present moment.

Set on Angel Island, (though performed more accessibly at Portsmouth Square, on the edge of Chinatown) “Paper Angels” follows the detention of seven Chinese immigrants, awaiting their release, or deportation. Because of the Chinese Exclusion act of 1882, many Chinese immigrants could expect to be turned back before ever setting foot past the Immigration Station, but thanks to a curious loophole—the fact that all of San Francisco’s birth and immigration records had been destroyed in the fires of 1906—a wave of “paper sons” were able to claim birthright citizenship by changing their identities to match those of families who had already been granted citizenship.

It’s a complex and painful history, told by NYC’s Direct Arts through a kaleidoscopic series of short vignettes against a backdrop of projections of the over-crowded barracks and anguished poetry carved into the walls by the incarcerated detainees. Though much more robust in terms of production values than “Boys Together,” both pieces shared a deliberate resonance with their chosen sites, the heartache of secrecy, the resolute power of poetry, and the transcendence of release.

The Performant: What, me Fringe?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Unfortunately for me, I’ll be unable to attend a whole plethora of sure-to-be-intriguing shows this weekend such as Right Brain Performancelab’s “The Elephant in the Room,” The 11th Hour Ensemble’s “Alice,” and The Offcenter’s “Waiting for Godot.” But fortunately for me, it’s because I will be holed-up in the booth of the newest addition to the Exit Theatreplex — The Studio — where I’ve been running lights for a whole plethora of shows ranging from confessional monologues to sketch comedy to a whacked-out whodunit set in Super-Duper Mega-Marine Coaster World. Is that a bowl of free pretzels in my hand? It must be Fringe Festival season again in San Francisco.

SF Fringe is uncurated and uncensored, it’s fair to say that not every show is road-tested and audience-approved. Caveat Emptor, ticket-holders. But fans of local theatre companies past and present such as Art Street Theatre, Black Box Theatre, Lunatique Fantastique, Thrillpeddlers, Killing My Lobster, Thunderbird Theatre, Cutting Ball, Crowded Fire, Mugwumpin’, Banana Bag and Bodice, Foolsfury, Ripe Theatre, Performers Under Stress, Pi  Clowns, SF Buffoons, Dark Porch Theatre, Boxcar Theatre (and many more!) should know that all of the above have been featured at the San Francisco Fringe — and in fact, more than half of these companies debuted at the Fringe. By providing an anything-goes, low-cost production crucible for local, national, and even a few international performers, the San Francisco Fringe Festival makes it possible for previously unknown companies with a clear artistic vision to get a boost up to the next stage (pardon the pun) of their development. Armed with buzz, some of these companies go on to solid artistic success. Some disappear without a whimper. Regardless, everyone gets a fair shake.

True, a 10-year veteran of the SF Fringe, I’d had no idea there were such things as honest-to-god Fringe Festival rock stars until I went to Edinburgh and to Montreal and saw them for myself—performers who tour the Fringe circuit every year, and actually make a living at it, or at least build a solid international reputation. The San Francisco Fringe is a lot more self-contained, but in terms of getting in on the ground floor of the next big thing in Bay Area theatre, the festival will always be your best bet to be able to say “I saw them when.”

One thing our Fringe has been somewhat remiss with in the past has been providing interim entertainment for patrons and performers with down time. The EXIT (Fringe homebase) is addressing that very issue with a rotating roster of three separate showcases in the theatre’s café. An evening of Fringe singer-songwriters (Thu/16 @ 8:30 p.m.), the “Fringe Potpourri” of jugglers, magicians, and their ilk, on Saturday and Sunday afternoons from 3 p.m.-5 p.m., and most exciting of all, a late-night improv talk show “Last Call” hosted by Cora Values (Sean Owens), which features Fringe performers such as Fred Blanco (aka Cesar Chavez) and Megan Liley (“Grafitti Highway”) this past weekend. (See Cora again this weekend: (Fri17, Sat/18 @ 10:30 p.m.) Secrets are revealed, banter exchanged, and juicy fringe gossip is plundered for its levity factor. Cora is both sweet and savvy—like apple pie with an attendant wedge of Wisconsin-sharp, and her show already feels like a festival tradition. Just like the free pretzels, but saltier, and fresher.

The Performant: Weird like me

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Radical self-expression takes a staycation with Zinefest and On Land …

It was another Burning Man, er, Labor Day weekend, and like every year of the past dozen or so, those of us who stayed in the City spent it cracking wise about all the extra elbow room on MUNI and burner-free “Dolores Beach” real estate we get to ourselves through Tuesday morning. It’s becoming an old joke, a chestnut even, but it still manages to elicit a few wry chuckles from those of us committed to radically self-expressing without hauling it to Nevada in the back of a day-glo Winnebago.

Burning Man might have taken the time to write up a manifesto of its intentions (the Ten Principles), but almost any artistically-inclined community is going to find itself aligned with most of the same basic tenets. Take radical inclusion for example. It’s hard to imagine any scene more relentlessly inclusive than Zine Fest, which celebrated its ninth year down at the County Fair building last Saturday. From aging punks to black-lipsticked teenagers, political activists to true crime chroniclers, mini-comic compilers to mail-art aficionados, Zine Fest sets a place at the table for all comers — even novelists and hipster t-shirt vendors.

In addition to inclusion, on prominent display were principles of radical self-reliance (zinesters are notorious for their DIY ethos) and participation (attendees got a chance to attend hands-on workshops in book-binding and screen-printing). And while it’s true that public speaking is not necessarily the forte of those who turn to publishing as a means to communicate, punk tabloid pioneers John Gullak and V Vale (Another Room Magazine and Search and Destroy, respectively) good-naturedly reminisced about the good (and bad) old days while an archival treasure trove of their early work hung on display in the reading room for all to see (you can catch it through October 31 at Goteblud). Inclusion.
 
Meanwhile, the On Land Festival of incredibly strange music took the communal effort principle and ran with it all the way to the stages at the Swedish American Hall and Cafe Du Nord, where a rotating roster of experimental noise musicians backed up each others’ sets, at least on Saturday night when I was there. Trevor Montgomery’s turn on bass with East Bay drone duo Date Palms added a necessary grounding layer to the eastern-tinged instrumental throb, their signature sound.

A looped tanpura riff and Marielle Jakobson’s plaintive strings seemed destined to wind up on the soundtrack of an art film set in the Saharadesert, ala Waiting for Happiness. Montgomery also ended up playing with the Alps (featuring Root Strata’s Jefre Cantu-Ledesma) while a laptop-centric set performed by Xela featured drummer Mike Weis of Zelionople, and the Zelionople set featured Xela’s solo mastermind, John Twells. This collaborative mixing-and-matching gave evidence of a final manifestoed principle—immediacy. Not one person in the oddience seemed to be mourning an opportunity wasted out on the playa, but rather reveling in the unexpected moments as they unfolded onstage: a little bit bizarre, a whole lot communal, and ultimately as much about radical expression as any other kind of collaborative artistic endeavor, with or without a checklist.

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