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STAGE REVIEW New Vaudevilles for Old Two Portland productions update the tradition. BY STEFFEN SILVIS |
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Temporary Record Erin Boberg Hollywood Theater Oct. 23-24 Jowl
Movements I-IX "This atmosphere is testimony to the Surrealist insight regarding the power of the ghosts embedded in the commodities created by yesteryear's technology." --Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity Taussig might easily have written this after having seen Erin Boberg's new performance piece, Temporary Record. Boberg, a PICA assistant, has worked with a range of artists from Linda K. Johnson and Bonnie Merrill to Heidi Carlsen and Aixe Djelal, and has created several original works. Temporary Record, which has just finished its run, must be looked upon as a work in progress. It's a sharp, impressive piece that at present suffers from being hurriedly constructed, which occasionally leads to cliché. But on the whole, the work generates a powerful hold on the imagination, producing an intense nostalgia. Temporary Record was a vaudeville of memory, played out in the marred opulence of the Hollywood Theater, which was once a vaudeville house. On the stage were various recording machines and players, from a Victrola to a 1960s reel-to-reel tape deck--mechanical traps of ghosts' voices. These paralleled the echoes of the past and the dead caught in us, the reverberations of scenes and sounds that make up memory. Through a series of acts, Boberg explored the scientific principles of sound and the mechanistic capturing of it by both machine and mind. Each act was introduced, as in vaudeville, by the changing of large title cards on an easel at the side of the stage. An extemporaneous demonstration of a mid-century recording device followed an aria of Gluck's, beautifully sung by Boberg. Here, as she sang, she spooled out a long paper banner that bore her written memory of the first time she sang the aria, the conditions surrounding the singing of it, her personal emotions at the time and her feelings as she was singing it then. Throughout the piece one came in contact with phantoms. Boberg, who possesses a fine, pure singing voice, also performed a haunting ballad of a dead girl's return. But there was another revenant to reckon with--that of the silent ghost of a girl, played by Rinda Chambers, who inhabited the stage with Boberg. Chambers first appeared listening to the Victrola, dressed in white like a schoolgirl. (One remembers that the first words uttered into Edison's talking machine were "Mary had a little lamb.") Chambers was present to guide Boberg, though Boberg was not cognizant of it until the end. Boberg also utilized video to express the power of memory, but this was unsuccessful as both the sentiments expressed and the actual filming were uninspired and obvious. Still, Temporary Record lingers long in memory, and one hopes Boberg's piece will be returned, replayed. "What we are celebrating is both buffoonery and a requiem mass." What's exciting about Liminal's productions is the heuristic approach the company takes where both the players and the audience learn through the troupe's theatrical discoveries. Liminal realizes Tadeusz Kantor's theory that art is the permanent motion and transformation of thoughts and ideas, and the company's current production, Jowl Movements I-IX, is an astonishing stew of Kafka, Spinoza, Peter Handke, Inu Bisiriyu and Michael Taussig. But Liminal's latest piece of synthetic theater depends mostly on the company's study of Meyerhold's theories and the New Vaudeville Movement, both of which were in turn syntheses of commedia dell'arte and kabuki. It's a theater that is recognized for its belief that not everything can be expressed in text, that there are moments when dance, song and mime can best express a texture or a nuance of thought. Mordecai Gorelik declared that Meyerhold's theatricalism provided "an acting platform onto which life is brought only through translation into stage values." Into a clay-colored, post-industrial loft comes a party of stock characters. An artist who's the latest gallery-scene commodity, a paranoid businessman, a corrupt dealer in international finance and a spiritually hungry woman seeking healing through food swirl around their hedonic host. In our own anxious age of self and celebrity, these are the commedia personas whose only conviction is boredom. What follows is a mesmerizing collision of egos that begins with buffoonery and ends in a series of requiems. Director Bryan Markovitz has constructed a highly original work that is realized by the impressive Liminal performers Jeff Marchant, Rich Southwick, Trent Moore (especially good as a depressive ventriloquist), Amanda Boekelheide, Christoph Saxe, Julie Burtis and Georgia Luce. Meyerhold believed that rhythm was the basis of all dramatic expression, and his works were bound by musical schemes. Liminal achieves a similar cohesiveness with original music by John Berendzen that riffs on themes by Karel Velky and Jelly Roll Morton. As commodity theater continues to sink in impersonations of our intellectual impoverishment, companies like Liminal happily refuse to abandon enlightenment. "As Jarry had done fleetingly in Ubu Roi, Meyerhold rejected
the theater that counterfeited reality in favor of the theater as an
event, a here-and-now happening aimed at shattering the audience's composure."
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