Fabulous Beast's "Rian" and Donka: A Letter to Chekhov

Rian and Donka: a Letter to Chekhov

(previously posted on keestone.livejournal.com)

This evening, I got a standby ticket to see Fabulous Beast Dance Company's Rian. I'm glad I didn't drag anyone with me. 

Now don't get me wrong, Fabulous Beast is a very good ensemble of dancers.  I have no gripes with their technique or artistry.  And there were some excellent pieces within the concert as a whole.  But I think the concept behind Rian was fundamentally flawed, it lacked anything other than the concept to unify it, it was static, disconnected, and at least 45 minutes too long.  I got bored.  And if I of all people get bored watching dance, that's a bad sign.

I suspect I'm a bit synaesthetic in my physical response to the shape of music. It's probably why I'm so passionate about dance.  When I listen to music I love, I love to close my eyes and watch it take shape, watch it dance.  (I nearly had a fit when I saw the Fantasia 2000 "Rhapsody in Blue" set-piece. Can't they hear that's a curved line?!?)  It's also probably why I so vehemently hate some music. I mean, I can't listen to distorted electric guitar because it makes me physically ill, and I don't feel like I'm exaggerating when I talk about certain repetitive heavy beats being the equivalent of hitting me in the head with a baseball bat over and over.  So when it comes to dance, I get pissy when the the movement doesn't fit with the sound.  I got pissy this evening -- not at every piece, but enough to make me less appreciative of the very good dancing.  The concept of the piece was generally flawed in this.  Rian  mixed Modern dance with Irish Trad. music.  Occasionally it worked --  when the music wasn't actually Trad. music for instance, or in some slower, Sean-nos style songs (one of which was beautifully choreographed with three women mostly moving very little except for their arms, while one woman moved more) -- but mostly it didn't.  There's a very good visual equivalent of the "diddly-idly" jigs and reels, and that's the stiff, percussive movement of traditional Irish step dancing.  Not that I want a repeat of Riverdance for a concert performance of dance to Irish music, but the curved, smooth, breath-movements paired with the jigs and reels made me feel like they got the wrong place and the dancers should have been at a Jefferson Airplane concert at the Fillmore, but they somehow got plunked down in a trad. session while still hearing the psychedelic rock.   Except for that one point when I really really wanted the couple dancing to just break into a Lindy Hop, because they had the perfect swing and partnership for that even if the music had nothing to do with it.

So, I got pissy.  And then I got bored.  The choreography lacked dynamism. It was very much one level. The evening overall didn't have any structuring movement; it was just a concert, a bunch of songs thrown together.  For two hours.  Without intermission.  I started checking my watch about an hour in, but I had no idea when it was ever going to end because there was no build, no climax, just another song starting.  Some things might have worked better if they'd been before or after other things, but in any case there was entirely too much of the "music starts, one person starts a repetitive series of movement, another person runs up and joins in, wash, repeat.  As in, like half of the choreography was that.  Yawn!  And then there were a few absolutely beautiful moments, and I got pissy because the rest of it could have been of that caliber but it wasn't.

That's enough of that.

Last Saturday, was Donka: A Letter to Chekhov, which really only had tenuous connections to Chekhov but was beautiful, spectacular, and really enjoyable.  It basically mixed the kind of acrobatic performances you'd see in something like Cirque du Soleil with clowning (of the more traditional commedia-inspired action, not of the painted faces . . . although there were big shoes at one point), with some absolutely stunning set-pieces and shadow play.  Its only real flaw in my opinion, was that there was a bit too much talking, part of which was trying to a more clear connection to Chekhov. Just give me the pretties!

But here!  a video!




And that's it for now.

16 Possible Glimpses -- Marina Carr

(previously posted on keestone.livejournal.com)

So.  16 Possible Glimpses.  The first night of actual performances.  Not opening night, but the first preview performance of the world premiere, so there will probably be some changes still.  What do I think? As often happens with Marina Carr's plays, I come out thinking I really need to contemplate it more and wanting to see it another time before I can really say something meaningful.  There's always so much in them.  They're dense, in a good way.  Richly layered and highly symbolic, leaving me with a feeling of depth and power.  It's "a series of dialogues and domestic scenes" rather than a more traditionally written play with a linear plot and unified narrative, so it takes up until nearly the end for the shape of the play to reveal itself.  The first scenes and last scenes link and you come full circle.

16 Possible Glimpses has been 10 years in the works.  Beloved thinks it's the best Marina Carr play he's seen yet.  (I'd probably lean more towards Woman and Scarecrow for its sheer power and poetry. But, I think 16 Possible Glimpses would probably balance very well with Woman and Scarecrow as two sides of facing death.) It's definitely more accessible than some of her other work.  I mean, it's a Marina Carr play without incest and/or suicide.  It's gentler than most of her other plays.  It's beautiful, tender, and full of humour. and it's more clear than ever that she sees death as very much a part of life, not as an ending.  There is a soul-guide character in this play, like the Ghost Fancier in By the Bog of Cats or Scarecrow in Woman and Scarecrow, but Chekhov's Black Monk is even more clearly a friend.    It's very clear that she loves Chekhov, and that she sees him as a great soul.  That would have been obvious even if we hadn't attended a talk before the play in which she totally geeked out about Chekhov in interview.

Technically, it's very interesting.  In the pre-show talk, Carr made it very clear that the title is non-literal.  "Why 16 Possible Glimpses?  I like the number 16, I like the word possible, I like the word glimpses."   There aren't sixteen scenes, there aren't sixteen cast members, it was just a number she liked for the title. She focused a lot on the word "possible" as a reminder that she wasn't writing a literal biography either, but a response to "her" Anton Pavlovich Chekhov  (I like "her" Chekhov").  But the "16" and "Glimpses", I think, come into the technical side of things.  16 is a nice, large number for plurality, and what Carr and director Wayne Jordan have done is give you multiple visual perspectives using cameras projecting different angles of what is happening on stage on the backdrop and occasionally on a scrim in front of the action.  16 may not be literal, but we were definitely literally given multiple possible glimpses.  Sometimes it worked better than others, and some of the cut scenes were a bit distracting, but some of those will probably have been ironed out by the time previews ended.  Sometimes it was stunningly effective dramatically speaking.   On a bit of a tangent, there seem to be two emerging trends at the festival this year: site-specific theatre, and the use video projectors (blah blah blah multimedia experience).  I'm a little resistant to both, not because I think they're a bad thing, but currently they seem to be way too faddish. And like many things that are faddish or overused, they're often used to use them and not because they are the best technique for the desired effect.  And often, the logistics are just not thought out well enough and it distracts from the effect.  Here, though, the use of projected video really did seem integral, and it I think it added layers and depth to the overall experience.