>>REVIEWS
2007 HIGH PERFORMANCE RODEO
Three weeks and enough laboured cowboy metaphors to choke a bull later, One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo has drawn to a close.
After two disappointments in its first week and an unmitigated catastrophe in the second, the Rodeo’s third week brought a solid lineup with crowd-pleasing offerings, the arresting presence of ATSA and its smoldering SUV installation piece and two standout examples of the festival’s ability to attract performances of unique beauty: The Oak Tree and Brutalis.
In bANGER, the first performance of the Rodeo’s final week, dancer Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg assumed the role of a high school headbanger, clunking around in army boots and loose-fitting fatigues. With a masculine physicality that transformed Friedenberg from agile dancer to awkward teenager, bANGER explored the teenage battleground with a desperation so authentic that it can’t help but coax a laugh when compared to our own uneasy adolescences.
The Rodeo’s guide bills Lee Papa as "the funniest and sharpest voice on the leftward side of the blogosphere," but there’s nothing sharp about The Rude Pundit’s humour. Drawn in the broadest possible strokes, none of Papa’s unconnected scenes actually provide an argument, opting instead to select a fresh metaphor for the current administration’s ineptitude. At its best, these metaphors are poetic (the image of George Bush as a ranting drunk in a bar corner, easily ignored in the open air) or driven by enough raw energy to make them riveting (Papa, it turns out, would not fuck Anne Coulter with Dick Cheney’s withered dick). At their worst, they are scattered and infantile, either lazy ("he makes Nixon look like Gandhi") or simply drawn out. What the image of George Bush raping a spider monkey in front of the Washington press gallery gains in shock, it more than loses in an exhaustive five-minute repetition of the same point.
Where pandering to liberal rage with hyperbolic shock tactics brought ironically safe laughs, Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree provided an experience of unexpected depth and enchantment, turning an explicit exercise in audience alienation into hypnotic communion.
Based on the story of a hypnotist confronted by the father of a girl he has killed, the device of an actor stepping into a role he or she has not studied seems like a simple gimmick, with Crouch delivering directions to the actor and addressing the audience. But as the layers of narrative build on each other, the play approaches a perfect moment of synthesis where the characters of Crouch himself, the night’s pre-selected actor, the Hypnotist, the father and even the audience all suddenly become part of play’s profound magic trick. Suddenly, the commands to engage emotionally that are implicit in all performances are being spoken aloud and yet, impossibly, are just as compelling.
From an emotional transformation to the physical, Karine Ponties’s Brutalis turned the Belgian choregrapher’s body into a gallery of the monstrous. Scarcely lit, Ponties transformed her already lean form into a series of unforgettable horrors, using the set’s minimal lighting to shrink limbs to the size of writhing snakes or disembody them altogether. Grotesquely beautiful, Ponties’s performance was a haunting experience, surely one of the Rodeo’s most arresting images.
Closing with a listening party featuring the Flaming Lips’s experimental Zaireeka (a four-CD album intended to be played simultaneously on four CD players), the Rodeo’s final event offered a unique audio experience. With its four CD players dropping in and out of synch, the experience of being able to alter the composition of the album’s sound simply by moving around in the space of the Big Secret Theatre was an interesting one, a surreal experience heightened by the jumpsuit-clad "play" pushers positioned at each player.
And so it ends, not with a bang, but with the sound of four Flaming Lips albums being played simultaneously. After 19 productions reviewed and 15 days attended, I leave the Rodeo still wanting more, with a handful of productions like Pan Pan Theatre’s Oedipus Loves You standing out as examples of truly enriching theatre, but more still as either banally pleasing or complete losses. From a festival whose work has always stood as a cultural vanguard in Calgary, this year felt like a small retreat. |
Copyright ©2007 FFWD. All rights reserved.