NOW it begins

The NOW Festival: Program 1. REDCAT. 7/22/06.

The NOW festival of New Works by local LA performance artists is off to a promising start. The first week of the festival featured Kristina Wong doing a piece about the insanity of trying to get mental help, New York transplants The Outsiders doing a dance piece titled "IV," and Michael Sakamoto and Amy Knoles performing a butoh-inspired piece entitled "Sacred Cows." All three works together created a balanced program of adventurous pieces that deserve attention.

Kristina Wong's piece was an excerpt from a full-length performance still in development called "Wong Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest." She'll be performing different excerpts on July 29th at the Ford Ampitheater's Summer Playreading Series. The full length piece will premiere at La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley in December, so it is very much a work in progress. As such, it felt like a segment of a larger work, which it was, but in general it was very funny and totally well done. Wong had some hilarious moments depicting the ridiculous difficulty in getting mental help as an uninsured performance artist (a job that should probably come with psychiatric help). The pace of the piece felt a little off - Wong went too quickly into the serious drama of the piece and could have used a little more comic buildup and milking the hilarity of the situation before she hit the serious moment, but the whole thing was totally fun and funny and I can't wait to see how the full show turns out. Leilani Chan directed the piece and I suspect she did a great job providing a second set of eyes and a good theatrical sense for Wong's work. This was the piece I went to REDCAT to see, and I'm quite glad I did.

The Outsiders, Stacy Dawson Stearns and Tim Cummings, performed a fascinating dance piece that may have been a bit over my head. The people I talked to who know something about dance loved this piece and thought it was hilarious. It began with a very funny vocal performance of "God is Alive, Magic is Afoot" with lyrics by Leonard Cohen and music by Buffy Sainte-Marie. This, along with some of the movements, set the tone of the piece as absurd rather than serious. The vocal section and the section that followed it in which Stearns and Cummings danced in silver bodysuits kind of like space aliens were clearly comic and quite entertaining. It was fascinating to me to think about what made these particular movements so funny, because they totally were and I have no idea why. My complaint is that the group wanted to be "walking a line between the hilarious and the profound," and I don't think the attempt to be profound contributed to the piece at all. The later sections of the piece tried to transition from comic to absurd to serious, and the serious sections didn't seem to fit in at all. They lacked the self-awareness that makes it comfortable to laugh at these pieces. Stearns and Cummings, however, are extremely talented performers whose movement skills complemented their wacky style. The performance included videos by Jonathon Stearns, of which a black and white piece reminiscent of German Expressionism that paralleled the movements of the performers at points was my favorite. The three backup dancers (Adam Haas Hunter, Matthew Bailey, and Leilani Drakeford), CalArts students who seemed to be in the piece mostly to cover the main performers' costume changes, were the most mystifying portion of the perfomance. One of them (or possibly all of them together) seemed to represent a unicorn, so I assume they embodied cliches about fantasy and magic, but they were in the show too much and inconsistently in my opinion. In general, this piece felt much longer than the other segments of the show. I was confused and a little disturbed by the sud

The third new work in the program, "Sacred Cow," was danced and choreographed by Michael Sakamoto with music by Amy Knoles. Knoles was totally cute and fascinating to watch perform, and I'm rarely excited by musicians. Sakamoto moved beautifully and had an amazing combination of facial movements and gestures to communicate moods and ideas subtly. Unfortunately, I had a coughing fit in the middle of this piece and had to step out, so I feel as if I can't talk about the overall structure of the piece, but I did really like what I saw of it. I didn't have much sense of the piece as attacking sacred cows at all. It seemed to me a combination of butoh and Charlie Chaplin, which is fascinating and fun. The LA Times review of the NOW festival gives some sense of the piece, at least to the exclusion of talking about Wong's piece at all.