Reviews
2005 HIGH PERFORMANCE RODEO
Presented by One Yellow Rabbit
January 25 to 30
There are times when Calgary can actually be a really cool city. For me, that revelation usually comes at some point during One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo. This year it hit me late in the Rodeo’s final week, thanks partly to the concurrent International Festival of Animated Objects (IFAO). Wending my way through the Plus-15 system, en route from one experimental Rodeo show – Living Cinema’s high-tech, on-the-spot creation of abstract animation – to another – Nicole Mion’s new narrative dance work – I came across the IFAO’s Tunnel Vision event, which was turning those bland, functional corridors into a venue for some amusing performance art. A row of bowler-hatted clowns, mischievously satirizing the city’s oil-soaked business community, were flipping through their Calgary Heralds and joyfully exclaiming, "Stocks are up!"
"Wow," I thought to myself. "This is crazy! If it doesn’t watch out, Calgary is going to turn into Montreal."
Of course, there are other, sobering times when you switch on the news to hear Ralph Klein or Stephen Harper waging their asinine war against same-sex marriage and you suddenly feel as if Alberta has been catapulted back to the Victorian era. "By Jove! Homosexuals marrying?! What’s next – votes for women?" That depressing stupidity helps explain why an Alberta theatre artist like Nathan Cuckow finds it necessary to write and perform a show about accepting your sexual orientation – one that even employs that tired and odious symbol, the closet. You had hoped that, by now, gays and lesbians hadn’t just come out of the closet, they’d also burned the fucker down to the ground – but no, not in the dinosaur province they haven’t.
STANDupHOMO finds Cuckow playing an outrageously non-PC stand-up comic with limp wrists and a lisp who makes bitchy mincemeat of everyone and everything but refuses to admit he’s gay. His routine includes impersonations of his Mormon bishop dad, his redneck, John Wayne-worshipping brother, a tart-tongued transsexual in transition and a German-accented therapist who may be his mother. Are these real folks, or facets of his conflicted psyche? Whatever the case, his eventual mental meltdown onstage is confusing and contrived, as if Cuckow were trying to add dramatic ballast to what is essentially a wickedly funny stand-up act. You come away forgetting his character’s angst but savouring his morsels of nastiness – a dig at Alzheimer’s societies that ask you to remember them, a shot at Muslim extremists ("I have two words for you: suicide hotline"), even a below-the-belt jab at bulimics ("Have you ever been to a bulimic girl’s birthday party? That’s the only party where the cake jumps out of the girl."). In the words of Family Guy’s Cleveland: Oh, Nathan, you’re what the Spanish call "el terrible!"
I also had mixed feelings about Between Science and Garbage, the show by Living Cinema, a.k.a. Montreal animator Pierre Hébert and San Francisco record producer Bob Ostertag. Using the latest in technology, plus a lot of odds and ends, the duo build "live" animated videos and soundtracks. Hébert takes basic video images as his drawing board and piles them up with layers of scribbling, cartooning and objects in motion, such as a pocket watch or a toy plane – all of which are instantly animated and become part of a frenetic film. Ostertag records random noises, including those of some ridiculous wind-up toys, and transforms them by a similar audio accretion into a cacophonous soundscape. The process is fun to watch, but a little tedious once you’ve figured it out; the highlight came in the second half, when Hébert’s frantic black-and-white collage of images evoking 9-11 and the bombing of Iraq began to suggest a kind of animated Guernica.
On the other hand, the festival’s increased musical component this year was consistently enjoyable. The QuADIOPHILIAc listening party of tapes that Frank Zappa remastered for the short-lived quadraphonic (four-channel) sound systems of the 1970s promised to be a blast from the past, but the music proved as fresh and freaky as ever, leaning heavily towards those Zappa jam sessions in which his incomparably dark ’n’ dirty guitar-playing stirred a rich, strange gumbo of rock, jazz and R and B. As an added treat, there was also a screening of a rare German television film of the Yellow Shark concert in Frankfurt in 1992 – a stunning performance of Zappa’s intricate, Varèse- and Webern-influenced symphonic works by the Ensemble Modern, topped off with a breathtaking breakneck dance by La La La Human Steps to his "G-Spot Tornado."
Then there were The Hidden Cameras, who kicked off their Mississauga Goddam tour by giving the Rodeo an upbeat grand finale. This Toronto band’s subversive bonding of gay sex and religion, whipped to a frothy dance beat, is just what Alberta needs. For their show, I threw away my critic’s pad and pen and simply hung out in the mosh pit, grooving with the fans. I even managed to forget about Harper and Klein for a while. Yeah, sometimes Calgary can be really cool. |
Copyright ©2005 FFWD. All rights reserved.