Allison Orr shares her favorite moments from Big Dance Theater’s Comme Toujours Here I Stand-

Just a few of my favorite moments from tonight’s performance of Big Dance Theater’s Comme Toujours Here I Stand

- Just how well done it all was. Meaning nothing was not thought about. Well rehearsed- of course well performed (which I have to say I expected). But my choreographer’s eye was so pleased by how it all was just tied up so right. No loose hanging bits that didn’t fit or seemed extraneous. Just really really thought about and edited. Thank you Big Dance folks. Thank you again.

- One of the last moment’s when the main character, played by Molly Hickock, and Ryutaro Mishima sat on stage in that beautiful light up against the back wall. Seeing the space big and clear and really appreciating the simplicity of that almost ending moment. I noticed how everything that came before made that moment so enjoyable, and I liked that.

- Every time Chris Giarmo sang. Especially the moment up against the red/pink light. I could listen to him sing all night

- Seeing props and costumes and screens get used over and over again in entirely different ways. Being surprised by those moments of seeing some object I had just seen as one thing transform into something else. The costumes were luscious!

- Seeing the video operator, stage manager, and stage hand incorporated into the story telling. Watch them get every cue perfect so that the video or props or costumes or lights lined up just like they were supposed to.

- The light on Kourtney (I think this was played by Kourtney) when she was modeling for the live drawing class that was recreated on stage. She sat there just right.

- The way it all started. Or didn’t start. How the woman if front of me was talking through the entrance of the performers. How she didn’t notice it had started when it had. How then later the titles came and it really started. How the start snuck up on me and how I felt like I was really in a movie. The opening title scene was flawless- the lighting was breathtaking.

- The use of the microphone and all of the sound design. Again- just all of that being right on.

- How all of the performers seemed to know exactly what they were doing every moment. Never doubting and completely clear. I imagined stories about how they figured it all out in rehearsal. How they came up with each clever moment. I can’t imagine how many hours it all took. But I bet they had a lot of fun- a whole lot of fun. I sure did watching it all. Merci beaucoup Big Dance!

Adam Sultan suggests you see Under Polaris from Cloud Eye Control

Only 2 Performances LEFT!

Robyn Ross channels her inner sorority girl while visiting Maison Erectheum by Michael Smith & Jay Sanders

Omigod you guys, I just came from Maison Erectheum and it was like the lamest party ever. So I get there and it’s like 2:30 pm, they say their hours are from 2-5 but I don’t want to get there right when the party starts. I’m wearing my “Rush ’97” T-shirt which I never wear but I’m totally exxcited with two x’s about wearing it today!! Because I’m all thematic for Fuseboxx!! So I go up to the house and it has this awesome sign out front with the house’s letters and I walk right in the door, thinking some guy will see me and explain the installation or offer me a beer. And there is like no one there. No. One. There. But there is this big sign about the concept of Maison Erectheum and how the neighbors shouldn’t freak out because it’s part of Fusebox, and there’s this like guest book and diplomas for sale, and I’m totally confused. And it’s like the cleanest frat house I’ve ever been in, and all sleek and modern like a furniture store on 2^nd Street, and I walk through the hallway and the kitchen and the dining room and then I realize I’ve totally been in this house before, when my friends were house-sitting here and they had us over for dinner. So I’m like, oh, that’s odd, and then I see these two people working in an office and they totally ignore me and I’m like, what, do I look like I don’t belong in here? But they are totally ignoring me. So I’m like, whatever, I guess I’ll just leave, I’m totally confused, so I go outside and there is this guy with an ice chest walking up to the house. I’m like, Hey, and he’s like Hey. I’m like, that is the lamest party ever, with a straight face. He looks at me and he’s like, Um, are you here for Fusebox? And I’m like yes, but I wanted to party, is that the beer? He’s like, Oh, I’m just returning this cooler, I think their big thing was last Sunday night, they had this big party here and I think that was the main show. And I’m like, the website says that I can visit between 2 and 5 Wednesday through Friday, but there’s nothing happening in there. And he’s like Yeah, I know. So I’m like It is only 2:45 and I guess I’m going to go home and work. And he’s like Bye. So I’m like Bye. And I totally didn’t even get his number!!

Tim Braun caught Big Dance Theater’s performance of Comme Toujours and shares his thoughts-

Don’t miss the final performance TONIGHT!

one hundred black women, one hundred actions from Salvador Castillo-

Steve Moore shares his thoughts on Daniel Barrow’s Winnipeg Babysitter-

Last night I saw Daniel Barrow’s very winning Winnipeg Babysitter, a film composed of footage of 18 different Winnipeg public-access television shows that aired between 1981 and 1999. Because the original archive of the programs was cavalierly destroyed after a giant cable company purchased the small cable company (whose channels included the public access channel), Barrow was compelled to find each show’s original producers and make copies of personal collections of show tapes. Having grown up in Winnipeg and seen so many of the shows when they first aired, the effort to salvage this footage (not only for this film but as part of a now-enormous archive) is clearly a labor of love for Barrow.

And a very worthy labor it is. The love is manifest not only in the choices of shows and footage, but in the text commentary that Barrow projects on a separate screen to one side of the show footage. That’s where we learn more about, for example, Louise Wynberg and Marion Clemens. Wynberg and Clemens played keyboards and drums on a show that ran daily for decades and whose simple and lovely premise was that they would play familiar popular tunes and take requests via phone or mail. Barrow’s text tells us that they were dearly loved in Winnipeg and it’s so easy to see why. Neither is a great musician, but kindness and enjoyment shine out of them. We see them play in the studio and also in a retirement home where Marion takes the mic into the audience of seniors offering whoever wants it a chance to sing along to “You are my Sunshine.”

Like so many of the shows that Barrow features — and like hundreds of shows airing every day on cable-access across America — “The Cosmopolitan Time” as Wynberg and Clemens called their show is absurd and deeply endearing and slightly painful to watch. For content or form or intention the 18 shows share little in common, but each delivers this kind of freebase dose of human nature: ambition, big-heartedness, self-delusion, and awkwardness sit together in a single spoon with discretion and the fear of failure boiled off by the studio lights.

Barrow tells us that with the purchase of the small cable company by the larger one, not only were the archives destroyed but the public-access channel was shut down altogether — despite howls of protest from the community (including Barrow himself). Barrow’s film makes you feel the loss keenly. Defenders of cable-access television typically frame it as a great and necessary bastion of free speech. And it is; you can watch Barrow’s film and feel the pleasure and release of those on screen as they seize that chance to put their ideas into the world. But so rarely are those ideas free-speechy; they’re not political or polemical — at least in this footage and among the other cable-access programming I’ve seen. Much more often the ideas are artistic or just informational, much less about asserting a point of view than about answering the call of enthusiasm. And the loss of a home for that enthusiasm – as much as the loss of what that enthusiasm creates – is the real drag about losing a cable-access channel (or,for that matter, a pirate radio station or a city mural program or a hundred other programs that encourage freak speech).

Because, let’s be clear, Winnipeg Babysitter is not generally about old ladies singing to seniors. Mostly it’s freaks unfurling giant flags of freakdom. A favorite segment was “Boron Skull Chameleons” which aired on the show “Midnight Movie Factorium” and in which trans-dimensional steel-headed aliens come through mirrors all over the earth, slaughter and burn humans, and make tea out of the charred remains — but of course, that’s all just backstory. The segment itself is several minutes of a boron skull chameleon blandly sipping his tea while he extols its virtues to whomever happens to be watching — including those few humans that the chameleons maintain in zoos. Another favorite was the segment “Kangaroo Birth Cycle Coat” (from the show “Stadium Trash”) which is an advertisement for a fur coat with a built-in kangaroo joey incubation system that offers wearers the pleasure of frequently watching a new-born joey claw its way through thick fur toward the coat’s gestational pouch. Oh, sweet nectar of nonsense.

For now, cable-access is kiboshed in Winnipeg, but it is alive and well in Austin on three separate channels (10, 11, and 16). Barrow’s film convinces me that we should each have a show and do nothing but watch and be guests on each other’s shows forever. I’m serious and here’s the link to channelAustin, which manages 10, 11, and 16 to help us get started: http://www.channelaustin.org/. And here’s another link, this one to the city’s public-access TV info page: http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/telecom/pubaccess.htm.

Use it or lose it.

Robyn Ross & Adam Sultan both had the opportunity to catch GravelWorks and share their thoughts-

Robyn Ross-

It’s been two days since I saw GravelWorks, and the image that endures is that of a woman jumping, legs first, into the arms of a standing man. Not hoping he’ll catch her, but expecting it. Demanding it.

It would be easy for this moment to be lost amid GravelWorks’ wit and mocking humor, though. Like many Fusebox performers, the company’s art exists in two dimensions: the work itself, and the work about the work. In the same show the company performed both dance and commentaries on dance, offerings its own art and then deconstructing the world in which that art was created.

On the first level—the work itself—GravelWorks specializes in conflicted relationships. And in falling. GW’s dancers raise one another up, then hurl themselves to the floor. The first piece, the “Epic Duet,” features the desperate but trusting leap described above, fall after intentional fall, and embraces both angry and longing. The last long piece in the show returns to these themes, pairing first male-female couples and then same-gender partners in a series of brief duets. They push and pull each other, one dancer’s hands grabbing the other’s throat, then transforming the gesture into a caress.

The second level, the work about the work, is GW’s ironic commentary on contemporary dance. For one composition, the company performs a series of “dramatic poses” – only the endings to imagined dances that preceded them. It’s a joke, an act that by amplifying the seriousness of the poses makes us aware of how dance can take itself too seriously. The dramatic endings, the piece that begins with the entire company just drinking a beer, the “politically engaged dance” that consists of a man jogging furiously in place while eating fries, are all great—funny—challenges to convention. But the show also includes a piece with full nudity that seems contrived, and one where the accompaniment is some of the men singing Nirvana’s “Rape Me.”  In these moments the company’s efforts to poke fun at the pretensions of contemporary dance border on becoming pretentious themselves.

Where is the line between pushing boundaries and simply going for shock? How much facility must one demonstrate with tradition before having the credibility to defy it? In introducing the piece called “The Post-Climactic Moment,” Gravel explains that, “It takes a lot of work to get to the post-climactic moment, but we’ll skip it and just do the moment.” This is the potential risk for GravelWorks—skipping the work it takes to get to the moment, and just making the moment.

When Gravel’s company really dances, it is captivating. A particularly provocative piece in the latter half of the show features a duet between an expressionless woman and a man who lifts her in the air, often by a bent arm hooked in her crotch. When the initial discomfort passed, I had to look closer to find what was really happening. Was he manipulating her? After all, she was demanding to be set down at a specific place on the stage, and he was complying. Maybe the relationship was more complicated than it initially appeared.

I come back to Ron’s description of Fusebox as showcasing work “about what it means to be alive today.” To be alive today is to be part of complicated relationships, ones simultaneously full of intimacy and loneliness. It is to have the choice between following tradition and thumbing our nose at it, or doing some of both. It is to take some things very seriously, and others not at all.

I hope that GravelWorks, as amusing as its parodies of contemporary dance are, continues to make actual contemporary dance. Because I want to see that woman leaping at that man again, and hold my breath to find out what happens next.

Adam Sultan-

Living in Austin–or perhaps my life in Austin–is weird. Not weird in a “Keep Austin Weird” way, but weird in how things bump in the night and how they tend to their bruises or smile at their fortune.

Weird how things fly at each other with serious, or drunken, or serious drunken intent, and then completely miss each other, only to be found face-planted in a corner, deep in dialogue, or if lucky, speechless (and luckier still if not alone).

Weird how the same tired beer in the same ridiculous can you’ve been drinking over and over again suddenly tastes different. Or perhaps you’re just discovering it for the first time: that sour, hoppy, sweet mess as, past your friend’s shoulder, you notice things flying at each other and missing and sometimes not.

Why do they play jukeboxes so loud that we have to rely on subtitles on the TV screen? Why can’t I distinguish nude from naked, and do I even have to?  Why are the boys better musicians and the girls better dancers? Why is this move getting us in trouble…or is this the move that gets us out of it?

Gravelworks, the Montreal rock and roll messengers of tongue-in-cheek pub brawls and maladroit mating calls, didn’t display the answers, but they raised the questions- and the bar- higher. Now how am I supposed to reach for a can? Oh, they left them down here for us, in a cooler by the door. Hope I don’t bump into anyone. But I’m sure I will.

Robyn Ross discusses Gregory Brooker’s poem Texan

Gregory Brooker’s reading of Texan and other poems Sunday night has been the best Fusebox experience so far. Texan is part of Brooker’s project to interweave geographical expanses with poetry, a quest that began as a response to a (possibly) misinterpreted line from Walt Whitman. How could the entire United States be fit into a poem? Brooker wondered. How could the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, where Brooker lived for a time? How could Texas?

The answer involves literally fitting the poem into the geography (Brooker read from a poem about another, now demolished, Las Vegas hotel: “I wedged into the window frame/the last two lines of this poem.”) He has published lines in newspapers, all of which eventually return to the earth through recycling or decomposition. He has hidden lines in commercial planes flying international routes, thereby spreading his writing across the world. He has placed excerpts in the top of the St. Louis Gateway Arch. For Texan, he published lines from the poem in four Texas newspapers, printed them on the side of a crop duster to fly thousands of miles in Texan air space and (as you’ll see) imbedded them in the bodies of twin brothers.

This endeavor to contain vast geography in a poem is not Brooker’s only peculiar pursuit. He also endows his poetry with its own agency—and not the stubbornness or antagonism we think of when we have writer’s block. Instead Brooker the writer acts as a docent for his writing, pointing out the poem’s choices and intentions. Each poem is a living entity, one that he as writer and narrator guides the reader through.

This is one of the “Fusebox moments” of Brooker’s work – rather than being content to describe a subject, Brooker’s poems narrate their own actions. They announce that one stanza is standing in for another. They point out the properties of individual lines. They state that “at this point… the writing has had too much to drink.” Like much of the art in Fusebox, the poetry is aware of its own conventions and shrugs at them.

Texan and Brooker’s other selections are in clear contrast to another well-known poem that itself personifies poetry. Donald Justice’s “Poem” (1973) begins:

“This poem is not addressed to you.

You may come into it briefly,

But no one will find you here, no one.

You will have changed before the poem will.”

Rather than adopting the impenetrable, indifferent countenance of Justice’s “Poem,” Brooker’s personified poems welcome us in. They explain their intentions (“The writing wants to be about flowers”). They approve our double-take: “Impossible yes? That the writing could become sentient?”  But always they interact with us. One concludes, “Reader… into it you are writ.”

Texan is described as a site-specific poem. But as much as space, Brooker’s work is concerned with time. Each poem he read treated time as a collapsible entity, the descriptions of past, present and future interwoven and aware of one another. The future is buried in the present; the seed of what we will become is tucked into the bud of now. Texan is a poem that planned ahead, down to the very minute when it would be read before an audience at Fusebox, at 7 pm on April 25 in Austin.

The manipulation of time in Brooker’s poems reminded me of the best moment of LA Party, wherein the three performers (merged into a single narrator) took a break from the describing the titular party and talked about coming to Austin for the show. Wait, we listeners thought. This seems off the cuff, but clearly it’s rehearsed since all three of them know the lines. This must also be part of the show, even though it feels unscripted. Similarly, Brooker’s poem has written the moment of its public presentation into its closing lines, jarring the audience with this nonlinear approach to time.

One explanation of the description in the Fusebox booklet is in order: “The poem’s ending will reside in the twin brothers’ bodies for 7 years and then disappear.” It’s true, sort of. The last two lines of the poem were written on paper that twin brothers who assisted in the reading folded and ate. On the presumptions that some part of that poetry-laden paper will be assimilated into the brothers… and that every cell in the body is replaced after seven years… the poem’s ending is the most site-specific piece of art one can imagine.

Justice’s “Poem” ends: “And it does not matter what you think/ This poem is not addressed to you.”

In contrast, those of us at Brooker’s reading were invited, welcomed, and personally addressed by a poem that knew – long before we did – that it would meet us in Austin last night.

Katherine Catmull shares her experience and photos joining Sodalitas on the Walks Project

Guest Blogger Steve Moore had a whirlwind evening of performance and catches us up on A Western from our volcano escaping artists, Action Hero

(Be sure to catch their final performance TONIGHT at 7PM!)

And swings past the Off Center for a little Blender Love

(Final shows TONIGHT so don’t miss it!)

Had the perfect pleasure of seeing the group Action Hero from Bristol, England do their show A Western at the Victory Grill last night. There’s just one more performance, tonight at 7pm, and anyone who likes things that are great should go. Also go if you like enjoying yourself and being treated generously and — if it was your idea to go — receiving grateful plaudits from your friends.

What can I tell you about it that you’d want to know in advance? Kind of nothing. Or maybe you’re not like me. I don’t want to know anything. Let’s assume you’re not like me and maybe you’d want to know that it’s built out of iconic scenes from Westerns and that the scenes are performed in and among and including (very gently) the audience. Maybe you’d want to know that, unlike so much theater, the show needs you in a way you want to be needed. It asks you for things you’re happy to give. Moment to moment, you want what the show wants, what James and Gemma and the guy you’re sitting next to all want: It’s a group effort to be back in the Old West of westerns, to remember how hammy and cliche those movies were and still to give over to them, not nostalgically but still wistfully, and in the present tense.

From the Action Hero show, we rushed over to the Off Center to see Blender Love which is kind of a terrible and sideways title for a show that is delightful and delightfully head on. The show was put together by Mary Magsamen, Stephan Hillerbrand, & Kirk Lynn, and it won’t ruin anything to tell you it works like this: You show up any time between 8pm and 11pm. (Tonight’s the last night, by the way) and you kind of go down the street to the east from the main Off Center entrance and every 10 minutes or so a group of five to seven people gets to come into the space for the performance. And the performance is this: You’re greeted by a woman who asks one of your group to volunteer and that person’s cell phone is made better. Also that person is made better, as are the other people in the room. Or if not made better, at least made more attentive. You’ll see for yourselves how that happens. It’s very moving and, like the Action Hero show, it’s very gentle and generous and funny.

Unlike the Action Hero show – but like LA Party which we saw afterward – Blender Love features some beautiful video and visual work. If I were exposed to more of it, I might be less surprised at how intimate video and projection can be in artwork. But there you go. I’m surprised, and especially so by what Mary Magsamen and Stephan Hillerbrand did with their projections and light pen and little white tent for housing the volunteer. I know it takes a lot of work and discipline to find the right way to marry a mechanism with a theme. This was a happy marriage: close-up loving with room to breathe, responsive in the moment, able to be curious.

Here’s one of the question I was asking myself as I left the show: Why don’t we expect more love from the tools and technology around us? At one point, the woman asked the volunteer: “Do you hate your cell phone?” “Yes, sometimes.” “Why?” And the why had a tone of hurt, as if the phone only wants what we want after all — or more precisely as if the phone can only do what we want if we let it know what that is. Maybe we want to love and be loved better or to remember something from the past or future or to rein in fear and miscommunication. With the right blessings and exhortations, the phone can help. We should let it.

On from Blender Love to Ballet Austin for LA Party by Phil Soltanoff and David Barlow. Alas, that was the last performance of it so I can’t encourage you to go, which is too bad because I wish I could hear what you thought of it.

It was amazing in many, many ways: it was virtuosic and clever and complicated and subtle and surprising. Maybe you read something about it and you know that the story is about a raw food adherent who runs off the rails on a drug binge at a party. While that story is getting told, some really cool stuff is happening where the face and other parts of one performer are projected onto the face and other parts of a different performer. The effect is simple and creepy and you’ll wish you’d thought of it. Meanwhile the person whose face is being projected perfectly lip-synchs with the performer speaking out the story (a first-person narration).

The only thing that’s weak here is the story. Not the writing, which is fantastic, actually, sentence to sentence, but the story, which tries too hard to breathe life into a cliche. Actually that’s not quite right: It tries really hard to breathe detail and richness into a cliche, but (one man’s opinion here) the only way to breathe life into a cliche is to crack off a part of it and replace that part with a human being whose intelligence and desires aren’t on the surface, but somewhere else, like in the corner of your eye.

I know it’s damned annoying to people who make art when strangers try to get fancy with how they would have done things differently, but there’s something about this show that provoked that – not just for me but for a bunch of folks I talked to afterwards. Ideas ranged from playing round with the notion of self and mask to focusing more on the gender oddities that arose. (The projectee is a woman and the projected is a man, so you get all kinds of nice dissonance around things like a big mustache and thick chest hair projected onto a woman’s body.)

I don’t know. If you’d seen it, I bet you’d have wished you could have been in the room with Phil, David, and their team while they were making the show because they are all so clearly fun and smart and cool and because the process of making the show must have been a blast and also because you’d have had some ideas that would have stitched the story to the presentation better.

Anyway, an amazing evening of theater thanks to Fusebox. Lots of overlapping and interweaving themes and structures, lots of great conversation about it all afterward, and deep satisfaction at being able to see such amazing work back to back right here in town.