>>REVIEWS
2007 HIGH PERFORMANCE RODEO
By bull riding’s eight-second count, the High Performance Rodeo is coming into its final three seconds. For better or worse, at the end of the second week at least two shows delivered kicks too jarring to be ignored: one from a show so catastrophically bad that its failure was nothing if not amazing, the other from a dark twist on the Oedipus legend presented with postmodern aplomb. With those two kicks and a week full of humour and pageantry, the Rodeo’s second week has been a wild ride, bucking into the final stretch.
After debuting at least year’s Rodeo, Le Caravan Dance Theatre returned with Contrast, a movement piece featuring eight dancers on the Vertigo Playhouse stage. Wearing strips of turquoise fabric that flowed behind the dancers like water, the beauty of the production and skill of its performers was a welcome if incongruous predecessor to The Dead Elvis Cabaret.
Parole and The Dead Fat Guy Collective’s Dead Elvis Cabaret wasn’t simply bad. In truth, the cabaret’s decade-old material, pressing points like Presley’s penchant for younger women ad nauseam, had all the dignity of the King’s own final repose: bloated and overdosed on his throne.
Overloaded with clearly under-rehearsed musical numbers and one particularly leaden interlude about Lisa-Marie consuming the King’s heart, the show began with Richard Sixto speaking out of his ass and continued downhill from there. Before I left the show at its three-quarter mark, following Rodeo curator Michael Green out the Big Secret Theatre’s doors, I could only stare at fellow spectator Istvan Kantor, a late arrival. In those fevered moments, staving off the boredom of one tuneless original song after another, I could only think that this man, a performance artist who once spattered his own blood on the wall of the Hamburger Bahnhof museum, was the only audience member with the power to end the performance on a rousing note. If ever the time for random spattered blood had come, it was then. Unfortunately, the performance pressed on and Kantor’s outburst had to wait until the following night.
Hosted in the Art Gallery of Calgary, Kantor’s Transmission Machine could be called surreal, but uncanny would be more accurate. As a middle-aged man crushed and smashed furniture before the audience’s eyes, with the sounds of its destruction looped over the gallery’s speakers, there was an eerie familiarity to the entire scene. Though there’s no denying that Kantor can work up a cathartic series of well-edited video clips, smeared condiments and even a self-aware anthem protesting an enforced haircut, the image was an undeniable if intentional caricature of the performance artist.
A few unsteady spates of applause and the odd smile showed a certain comfort with the material, no doubt tied to the fact that many of the audience members were young enough to have grown up with such abrasive material as mainstream commodities. Kantor’s impressive feats of personal risk may have been earnest, but it was impossible not to be reminded of the stream of fresh Internet depravity or mainstream hits like Jackass and The Tom Green Show. Though utterly without artistry, these shows’ success stemmed from audiences demanding a level of shock that even a decade ago could only have been imagined on the fringe. As a result, though it was certainly an engaging performance, Transmission Machine succeeded more as historical artifact than incitement.
From wild performance to the Wild West, Tricklock’s The Glorious & Bloodthirsty Billy The Kid brought a whooping theatricality to the Big Secret Theatre. Exploring the notion of America’s obsession with its murderers using the unabashed showmanship of a Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, Albuquerque-based Tricklock had a thing or two to show any would-be Cowtown cowboys.
But even with the explicit cowboy posturing of Tricklock’s cowboy cabaret and the cacophony of Kantor’s performance, it was the dark esthetic of Pan Pan Theatre’s Oedipus Loves You that brought the week’s most memorable offering. Setting the classical myth as a story of contemporary suburban malaise, the plague caused by Oedipus’s unnatural relationship with his mother was imagined as an abiding sense of frustration building toward the play’s gruesome conclusion. Mixing sharp moments of humour ("You’re blind," Jocasta says to Oedipus; "And you’re dead," he retorts) with commanding musical performances, Pan Pan’s suburban nightmare did postmodern justice to one of the most disturbing tragedies of all time.
Following the darkness of Pan Pan’s Oedipus with a display almost blindingly bright, the week’s final, climactic show was the wedding of Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens in Yellow Wedding #3. The first legal wedding in what will be a series of nine, the pageantry of the event was overwhelming, with Sprinkle herself appearing in a golden wedding gown with a breast-baring bodice. Emceed by poet Sheri-D Wilson, the evening was a gushing display of costume and performance, with an air band, spoken-word artists and Chantal Vitalis singing about "the gayest wedding you’ve ever seen."
A finish to the week as large as Sprinkle’s considerable bust with one week remaining for the Rodeo to ride off, kicking and screaming, into the sunset. |
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