Cabaret Collective, or, Yes, The Police Did Come And Take All Our Beer

Let’s address the elephant in the room first. Halfway through Kelley Sweeney’s rendition of an old Joni Mitchell tune, the Stony Brook University police came, knocked on the door, took all our beer and checked IDs. The Cabaret Collective has always had a spoken policy that it’s okay to discretely bring your own beverages. From what I understand, some people were coming to the Collective with open bottles in hand and mistakenly went into another performance in the same building, who thereupon called the police. I don’t know how disruptive these individuals were being, if at all. So the police came, stopped the show, and did their police thing. What I’ve heard is that Stony Brook has a wet campus, so our understanding was that there shouldn’t have been a problem. We were, obviously, wrong. According to the “State University of New York at Stony Brook Alcoholic Beverages on State Property Policies and Procedures,” (http://studentaffairs.stonybrook.edu/jud/docs/Alcohol_Policy.pdf):

“Unless a permit has been obtained from the State Liquor Authority, Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control (“SLA Permit”) by the sponsoring individual or organization, the consumption of alcohol or possession of an open container of alcohol anywhere on campus is prohibited. This includes, by way of example only, classrooms, grounds, parking lots, student lounges and bathrooms.”

So the cops were in the right, unfortunately, to take all our booze. However, I’m not convinced they had any right to ask for people’s phone numbers:

“Standard identification procedures are required at all campus functions and at establishments where alcoholic beverages are available. Acceptable forms of identification include:

U.S. or international passport

Valid driver’s license

NYS non-driver’s ID

Selective service registration card

Resident Alien identification card

An individual must be proofed each time s/he requests an alcoholic beverage or enters the alcohol service area. Alpha lists will be used to verify student dates of birth. University staff may spot check the legal age of any persons in the area of consumption. The use of false ID is prohibited. All false IDs will be confiscated and a disciplinary referral will be made.”

That aside, let’s talk about the art!

In spite of Becky Goldberg’s clarification of my last response to a Cabaret Collective (http://waylonlenk.blogspot.com/2011/12/inter-arts-collaboration-at-sbu-cabaret.html), I’m still seeing a substantial lack of interarts collaboration. I’m not saying there isn’t any. Lukas Kürten and Karl Hinze both foray outside of their own departments (Physics and Music, respectively) to participate in theatrical endeavors. In Kürten’s case, he was the originating artist of a bilingual reading of Goethe’s Zauberlehrling with Theatre’s Nancee Moes.

But those are only individuals. To all extents and purposes, this Cabaret Collective was a concert by the Music Department, with a couple theatrical acts and some art in the hallway. And the format of the Collective seems most conducive to music. Nearly all of the acts (this includes both of the theatre acts) read their pieces off music stands. The ten minute spots are perfect for musicians whose songs range on average from three to four minutes, and a dominate venue for singer-songwriters are bars anyway. As for us in theatre, especially dramaturgs, I think we’re a little used to having a little bit more time in our individual events to hold forth on some theoretical theatrical concept. Not to say we can’t get the audience up a tree and back down in ten minutes – both of the acts I saw last night, as have many others that I’ve seen at previous Collectives. All I’m saying is that it seems like a musician’s natural habitat, not necessarily a dramaturg’s.

And a performance-based venue is the opposite of a plastic artist’s natural habitat! Especially if you’re going to get sequestered to the hallway. Maybe a better idea, if the Cabaret Collective is really about fostering interarts collaboration, is to put the art in the room with the performances, and perhaps even have the artists there to say a few words about their work to associate their face more strongly with it.

I’m still very dubious about the overall effectiveness of the Cabaret Collectives. Yes, they have inspired a few individuals to cross over out of their departments, but I’m not seeing anything that brings the arts together in a way that blurs the boundaries between disciplines. If anything, it’s become a fun way for a bunch of Theatre and Music grad students (and I’m purposely excluding Art here, because they seem excluded by the very structure of the event), have a few beers, maybe get busted up by the cops, and play music and do skits for each other. Which is all very nice, if that’s what the Cabaret Collective wants to be.

Staller [Off] Center

Last night was the inaugural Staller [Off] Center – a joint endeavor by the Staller Center and Stony Brook’s Theatre Department to bring new work to Stony Brook. While the double-bill of Jake Hooker and lumberob was a miss and a hit in terms of performance, Staller [Off] Center as a whole successfully brought one-man shows that you’d expect to find Downtown or in Brooklyn to the beautiful North Shore of Long Island.

Jake Hooker

Hooker’s show, thisisitisthisit (Shit Shit Shit): A Map of the Known World or thatwasitwasthatit (Shit Shat Shot): A Rememberance, was indeed a rememberance of another show that looked to be visually and theoretically rich and compelling. I would have loved to have seen it. Instead, I saw its shadow. Derivative of the original, thisisitisthisit left me feeling cheated that I all I got was a telling of what seemed to be a very good show.

lumberob

Rob Erickson (lumberob)’s method of playwrighting/storytelling fascinates me, and so for my little review for his piece Rocky Point, I’m going to try something like it. When I got home last night, I wrote a bit about Staller [Off] Center in my journal. Today I’m going to do an audio recording of me critiquing Rocky Point. You’ll never get to hear it. I will though – I’m going to listen to it and let it prompt me in saying it again to the video camera. You will have access to this recording: I’m going to put it on my YouTube channel and link it to this post. Then I’m going to write a review to post below that video off of what I say in it. It probably won’t be word-for-word, though, because I’m not going to pause the video while I write. Here we go…

So while I wasn’t as big a fan of Jake’s piece, I was of lumberob’s. So I’m doing a review like he did his piece. He’s manically impressive. He’s just sweating and sweating halfway through the performance. He records his stories, then listens to them while he does the performance. He swiftly and sweatily leapt between beatboxing and storytelling. He tells stories like this in comedy clubs, but he started to loose me in the middle. He did a mashup of disparate elements from different texts and he started to loose me. It can really work and keep you on your toes but you have to be able to follow the narratives. They can leap between manically but it can’t be a mash-up between “I Am a Woman” and a sailor story. Each unit has to be complete in itself. If you do that you can get away with what he does. And he does in the beginning and end. It was manically impressive, but he started to lose me in the middle.

Workshop with lumberob

“I really like broken things.” ~lumberob

This afternoon, Rob Erickson (aka lumberob) gave a workshop of sorts in the Staller Center Cabaret about his unique storytelling aesthetic in preparation for his show this evening at Staller [Off] Center. More than a workshop, he monologued about his varied influence and how he likes to create tension by challenging himself and the audience. He eschews the well-made play as “predictable” and “tedious” and opts instead for a style that switches between genres, creates confusion in terms of who’s in charge of the show, and uses exhaustion as an element, among other things.

What all that means, I’m not sure.

I got the most from watching and listening to how he told his stories. You know how sometimes you tell a story to a friend, and it’s unrehearsed so you’re thinking about it as you tell it? Sometimes you repeat yourself, sometimes you backtrack, sometimes you may even contradict yourself. lumberob tells his story like that, except it’s clear that it’s deliberate. To add an extra layer of tension, he listens to himself tell the story on his smartphone while he tells it. It’ll be interesting to see him go for a longer set tonight.

Of particular interest to me is the way he writes. He, like me, works between audio recording and text. But, for him, the audio is the (semi) final script. For me, at this point in my artistic development, it can be either/or depending on the show.

hereandnow theatre at Stony Brook University

hereandnow theatre company is an Asian-American group based in L.A. that tours the country telling stories of Asian-America. Their purpose seems to be to promote the autonomy of Asian-American storytelling (especially Asian-Americans whose families come from the Pacific Rim). Most of the stories they told are sourced from their company members, who are younger, so they deal with very modern issues. The Japanese-American internment camps and the brutality of Japanese colonialism in the Far East did make brief appearances, as did exodus from Laos and a Native Hawaiian myth, but the stories generally seemed geared towards a college age demographic. Sex was a major theme (including one encounter that went on long past the audience getting the point – I was surprised they didn’t end up taking their clothes off), as was identifying themselves in their own words.

It’s interesting to note the degree to which these two things go together – autonomy of body and autonomy of narrative. The dominant culture constructs narratives regarding Asian bodies, particularly Asian woman bodies – the geisha girl, the Japanese school-girl. Some American men have an “Asian fetish”, which presupposes a severely limited view of Asian sexuality. By pushing for a broader range of narratives regarding what it means to be Asian, hereandnow theatre actively promotes a level of autonomy in the Asian-American community from stereotypes that the mainstream (read “white”) community would impose upon them, especially in the Hollywood film industry.

thingNY's Three Experimental Operas

This weekend, thingNY put on three experimental operas in three nights in Moe’s Taxi Garage in Long Island City, Queens. They played on a rotating double bill, so I got to see all three operas in just two nights! But after seeing one of them twice, I wished I’d gone to all three nights and seen them all twice. But hindsight’s twenty-twenty, and I’m glad I saw the shows I did. One of the great perks of living in New York is that I’ve got the opportunity to see things like operas in abandoned taxi garages, and I’d be a fool not to take advantage.

Jeff Young and Paul Pinto, Patriots, Run for Public Office on a Platform of Swift and Righteous Immigration Reform, Lots of Jobs, and a Healthy Environment: an Opera by Paul Pinto and Jeffrey Young

This is the opera I saw both nights that, and it made me wish that I’d gone all three nights! An intersection of music and political oratory, this copiously titled little gem created an aural collage of violin (played by Young) and xylophone (played by Pinto) tones, lyrical song, and the hyperbolically shallow speeches that we’re used to politicians defecating from their mouths. The first night I walked away with the sense that, while what they were saying was nothing new, the way they said it was fresh and engaging. The second night I got to see just how fresh! It turns out that, in addition to glad-handing and working the audience, they were improvising with each other, creating some of the answers to their opponent’s questions on the spot. In this context of this vibrant fluidity, I got to see a deeper level of their politico personas – while coated in copious layers of slime, and totally ignorant or indifferent to some issues, in regards to others they were really quite sincere. I’m sure it’s an ambivalently complimentary look at real-life politicians – while they may be dirtbags, they initially got into public office to make their communities better places. No matter how much they degrade their integrity to win the next election, a bit of that altruism still exists.

ADDDDDDDDD

It’s pronounced like the psychological condition, not the mathematical process. This piece was hit and miss: where Young and Pinto’s piece was engaging in its extroversion, ADDDDDDDDD was alienating in its introversion. Ostensibly to show the way an ADD mind works, it began with the discontinuous ramblings of four performers, later to be joined by a fifth. It seems intent was to frustrate the audience with the jarring lack of continuity, but my personal reaction was to check out. They were more successful, in my case, later in the show when they incorporated music into their monologing: then it felt as though they were pushing this frustration right into my lap. It made me sit up; snap out of my daydream. When they were demonstrating something that takes place exclusively in another’s head, my reaction was to go into my own. It took a rhythm to bridge the gap between minds. As long as the rhythm was there, but the melody discordant, I was uncomfortable – I felt the frustration I was only shown in the beginning. When the melody and rhythm slipped into the rollicking familiarity of a drinking song, I became comfortable. By nature or nurture, my brain is wired to respond favorably to that kind of traditional composition. How it aligned with the disjointed parts of the play, I’m not entirely sure. But if “disjointed” is to be the operative word, then that’s probably it. It fit by not fitting.

Un Jour Comme Un Autre

This one’s a classic. A 1975 composition by Vinko Globokar, this tells the story of a young female dissident’s arrest and torture. I knew that going into the opera, but for maybe the first half I couldn’t tell very clearly from the context of the performance that that was what was happening. At fault, I believe, was a weak use of visuals. Besides dramatic lighting, and a close-up feed of the soprano’s (Gelsey Bell) face played on a small screen in front of her, I felt like I was at a recital. A very good recital, perhaps, but certainly not a theatrical event like an opera. It started to become more alive when Pinto (who was the music director and percussionist for this) rolled the cellist (Isabel Castellvi) up under a tarp, and she began to play with one hand. Bell fell to the floor and sang into the floor, the feed still on her face. Pinto thrashed the ground with heavy chains. The abandoned taxi garage, with its cavernous white cinderblocks, took on the austere immobility of a torture chamber. It was all a move in the right direction, but I couldn’t help feeling that there could have been more. I don’t mean anything graphic – the representative nature of the performance really augmented the harrowing aesthetic of the piece. The more you show, the less the audience has to imagine, and imagining torture is so much more horrifying than having it drawn out for you in gory detail. But any kind of movement, even to the extent of hiring on a dancer, would have made Un Jour Comme Un Autre so much more alive.