I saw a great show last night, Saturday, January 19, consisting of three acts - a dance, a clown, and a play. The Lighthouse Group presented the 2008 Lights Up! Series at the Illusion Theater on Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. Go buy tickets then come back to this essay after you see it.
I went because of a great show I saw last fall at Lakewood Cemetery called Cityceased which was directed by and starred Kris Lencowski. He directed the play, Cipher, which was the last act of this show. I had never really seen a dance show or a clown show before and never really thought about such things existing in my reality.
The dance performance, Public Exercise, was first. Two women wearing bulky, stylized business suits came out and started moving to some very modern string music. For the first few moments they were onstage I thought they might be twins. One was in purple and one was in green, my two favorite colors. The music was mostly minimalist and atonal but would occasionally find a sweet chord or two in a definite tonal center. This was consistent with the dance.
I had never thought about what attending a dance performance might be like. In the back of my mind I guess I imagined Baryshnikov in a tight fitting leotard making graceful leaps and spins across a stage for two hours. Understandably, I had avoided this. But what I saw last night shattered any expectations I might have had.
While there was grace and beauty to the show, many of the movements looked uncomfortable and difficult, repetitive and abstract. Sometimes the dancers moved together, sometimes apart. From my seat in the front row I could clearly hear the dancers breathing, synchronized with their movements. I was engaged immediately and found myself moving more deeply into the performance, caught up and finding meanings I would be interested to know whether the choreographer and dancers intended. Here's what I saw.
The dance included every aspect of modern life. A certain recurring, jerky movement of the same-side hand and foot represented a difficult, awkward, perhaps embarassing task that one must perform at work - something that leaves a little hurt inside you and never quite goes away again. At one point, both dancers came to the front of the stage and, in a long period of silence, did some extended rhythmic thrusting that I saw as their characters trying sex. At another point they held their palms up and moved their arms back and forth, which I saw as caring for a child.
They rarely touched each other, but when they did it gave the movement even more of a narrative. At one point the dancer in purple was doing a repetitive movement over and over, looking trapped toward the back of the stage. The dancer in green approached her with great tenderness, but Purple's movement pushed Green away. Green appeared to give up on rescuing Purple, moving away, but then Purple followed, breaking out by imitating Green's motion sequence. That said something powerful and realistic about addiction and how it affects people in relationships.
There was a moment in the show when the dancers made small, defeated jumps, gradually moving from the front of the stage to the back, seeming over and over to lose a battle and grow tired. I really felt that.
At another point the lights went down and when they came back up the dancers were looking to the front and the back of the stage over and over while their foreheads touched. In the course of the fairly lonely, hard, (realistic!) life depicted throughout they were now trying love. I remember really wanting them to leave the stage together at the end, but I can not now remember whether they did! Isn't that strange?
While these projections of mine added meaning, they were not necessary to enjoy the show. The recurring motifs gave it a form, structure, and beauty rather like great music. I guess this is an obvious connection - dance and music, duh - but it was not one I had ever made in terms of composition. When Tim Cameron, the taciturn choreographer, composer, and cellist, told me after the show that he had studied "dance composition" it all clicked into place. I'd never imagined such a thing. I had just thought, if I thought about it at all, of "choreography" as I learned it for my high school prodution of West Side Story - do this, do that.
I never thought this sentence would come from me, but here it is: I truly loved this dance performance.
The clown show, Untitled Duet with Houseplant, did all the same things to me and my preconceptions as the dance show. I thought of big shoes, balloon animals, and frightened children. Wrong again.
A man's long legs fell onto the stage from my right, followed by the rest of the man comically struggling to sit up, get his feet under him, and stand. He promised to bring out a bird, a rabbit, and a fish, but only brought out an empty cage, hat, and bowl, leaving defeated. His "cousin Pepe" (same guy, no wig) came out and did an elaborate story, working to put on a show with a nagging, critical houseplant, going to therapy, getting stuck in and getting out of a "box" - a square of tape on the floor, and leaving in triumph, reunited with the plant after their successful performance.
However, a simple description of the "plot" is inadequate. The mood was one of awkwardness taken to an extreme, a mood I often attempt to generate at my musical performances with searching pauses, bizarre lyrics, and senseless between song patter. Untitled was definitely clowning, but what I might call "high clowning" - telling a story, inhabiting real characters, and creating something magical, in this case by giving life to a houseplant on a stool, rather like Tom Hanks and Wilson the volleyball in the movie Cast Away. The mood of awkwardness was gradually replaced by triumph and joy as the clown and the plant rediscovered their love for one another.
Bremer's obvious love of this type of performance (and his perfect body type for it) gave me the strange idea that if he had never been on stage in his life he might very well be doing something like this performance all alone at his home simply to amuse himself. We are lucky that he has worked to present it to the public. Like the dance show, I can honestly say a new sentence here: I truly loved this clown performance.
Cipher, the reason we were there in the first place, was the final act and began after an intermission. Two identically dressed Clerks - A and B - worked for a woman, Masha, who controlled them completely, assigning them a sector of the border to scan using a keypad and a lightbulb that sent their minds into those of people planning acts against the state. Again, that description is horribly inadequate.
Flourescent lights made the office scenes extremely harsh. I was reminded of the horrible, misguided provision in the recently passed U.S. energy bill that is intended to phase out incadescent light. This makes me furious, but that is another matter. When the clerks tapped their keypad and touched a flourescent bulb they were transported to the border and interacted with a free, rebellious young woman who smoked pot with them, sang, and talked about her disappeared brother.
Memories, music, dreams, and ultimately one's own identity (for what is one's identity if not those things?) were all forbidden fruit and occupied a special, secret place in Cipher's dystopian nightmare of a future. Both clerks furtively mentioned memories of their (common?) mother as wearing a blue dress, suggesting to me that they were brothers in their previous lives. (Their memories are constantly wiped, albeit maddeningly incompletely, as they complete their work on a given sector of the border.)
I had a dream last night after the show that I saw Kurt Kwan, the actor who played Clerk A, walking on the street and approached him. (He was not at the post-show dialogue between the audience and the artists.) I wanted to ask him if he played the show as if the clerks had been brothers before they joined the corporation and I started to say "Hey, can I ask you..." and he cut me off with a curt "no" and kept walking. "That's cool, I understand," I spread my hands wide in a concilliatory gesture. "Just loved the show. Great job."
The mood of Cipher was one of technology and fear in opposition to the natural human state of being in meaningful, honest contact with one another. The harsh lighting, disorienting, mechanical video effects, and distrubing, atonal musical numbers all contributed to this. The mood was highly reminiscient of the terrific 2004 movie Primer, in which two guys actually create a time machine and suffer the disorienting physiological and mental fallout from their subsequent travels.
I realized I tend to evaluate theater on a pass/fail basis. Was I engaged? Was I surprised? Did I think? Did I feel? Were my prejudices shattered? Was the work beautiful, thoughtful, careful, fun, meaningful? Did the work keep my interest throughout? If all these things are true, the work passes. If any of them fail, all of them fail, rather like a bridge built without redundacies. For each of these three acts, and especially for the three acts taken as a whole, the answers were yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. My highest praise for everyone - pass.
I was reminded of the magical sweetness and sadness of great live theater - there will never be another night quite like last night. A great night at the theater is literally a once in a lifetime experience shared by everyone involved. I'm glad I went. It was absolutely the best thing I could have done with my time.
After the show most of the people involved came out and sat on stage in chairs to discuss the work with the audience. I am shy and did not say anything during this session, but I talked afterward with a few of the people. One of the questions to the audience from Nathan Christopher, the actor who played Clerk B, was something like "how can new, exciting, experimental works reach a wider audience?"
I thought of the previous night when my rock band played a show in an Oakdale bar and grill. We did not play new, exciting, experimental works. We would not have gotten the paying gig if we did. We played classic rock that you would hear on KQRS, the dullest, most popular radio station in the Twin Cities. Still, I thought of a possibility to help theater reach even the average Oakdalean.
Look at the reason that my wife and I were there - we read about Kris' previous show in the paper and Kris' aunt was a co-worker of my wife. I went to his website (which is excellent - an obvious must for anyone involved in the arts) and signed up to receive e-mails about his future projects. Cipher seemed like the best one. That's why we were there.
Now I will look at City Pages and The Onion A.V. Club (both of which I read every week) with fresh eyes, checking for dance and clown performances. I also want to come back to the Illusion, which is a wonderful space, so I'll be checking for anything that goes up there. In other words, ya got me. I'm in. All ultimately because of Kris and the wonderful, special night my wife and I had at Cityceased.
So my suggestion is this. Hollywood markets stars. People go to see what they think of as "Tom Hanks movies" or "Jim Carrey movies". Likewise, I was motivated to go see a "Kris Lencowski play". I don't know that Twin Cities theater, or any theater community, markets individuals. Maybe it's antithetical to the collaborative nature of theater. I went to "The Deception" a few months ago because I like Stephen Epp, but I don't think I saw his name above the title in the print ad.
I'm not an arts administration major but I know why I came to this show and I know that I'll want to see Noah Bremer, Ellen Fenster, Katie Guentzel, Nathan Christopher, Kurt Kwan, and Lindsay Hinman in future shows. What if actors got a little more emphasis in ads for theater? I humbly submit that that might put butts in the seats.
Finally, here are some questions I had for the talent but, as a publicly shy person (which I'm at peace with), did not ask:
Nathan, Ellen, and Lindsay (and Cory, Kurt, and Kris, who were not at the discussion I saw): Do you think Clerks A and B were brothers in their lives prior to working for the corporation? Did they live in sector 624? What was their relationship to Jen? I thought maybe she was their sister.
Director Kris Lencowski responds:
I wanted to respond to a couple of your questions. I think it's really
interesting to think that A and B were brothers at one point. This
never
came up in rehearsals, but actually makes total sense. We had tried to
figure out what the meaning of the last dream was. There was a time
that I
even thought Clerk A was supposed to spy on Clerk B, so his memories
were
residual from the times when he was spying on him. I don't think that
we
ever came up with a conclusion together, but ultimately, Kurt might
have an
answer in terms of his own motivations. As a director, I just took
them for
what was said in the script, that he was making them up, and from
there, I
think there are a lot of interpretations.
We discussed Jen and her world as the world of the terrorists that B (and later, A) were tracking. There were obvious correlations between B's past and Mike (the guy with the black jacket who smoked pot in the house), but we always considered Mike to be a suspected terrorist that B was tracking.
Tim, Ellen, and Katie: Were my interpretations above anything like your intentions in composing and performing the dance piece? (Also Tim, do you ever do recording sessions on cello? I have a song or two that it would sound good on.)
If you have read this far and you feel like answering those questions, send an e-mail to me at [email protected] and I'll post the answers here. What a great night!
Memphis Evans had the extraordinary self-discipline and overweening ego necessary to write this essay, even when the AFC Championship game was on and he had a big bag of popcorn in the pantry.
