Considering the Canon: Blithe Spirit

Classics are supposed to be cultural markers that tell us something timelessly and universally human about ourselves. By such a litmus test, Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit ought not to be counted with the canon.

Blithe Spirit tells us something about ourselves, but it's not timeless, and it's not universal. Coward's farce plays towards audiences' (especially American audiences') desire to feel superior. The tools it uses are often dated, and never admirable.

An English comedy of manners, Blithe Spirit saw its London debut in 1941 and hopped the pond the same year. Charles and Ruth Condomine invite eccentric medium Madame Arcati over for a little séance so that Charles can mine her for details for his upcoming novel. Arcati accidently conjures Charles' dead wife, and hilarity ensues. The jokes include references to lazy Indians, wife-beating and sexual assault, but primarily the humor comes from the characters always being one step behind the audience.

Coward flatters the audience by giving them an easy metaphor and a sense of superiority to the British characters. For American audiences, this is particularly apt. In the States, audiences are fascinated by all things British and aristocratic: look at the popularity of Downton Abbey and Jane Austen's novels. By staying one step ahead of them in Blithe Spirit, Americans are elevated from middle class mediocrity to a place above the fantastically aristocratic Brits. In addition to taking shots at his neighbors, Coward takes cheap shots at Indians ("Well, for one thing [Indians are] frightfully lazy and also, when faced with any sort of difficulty, they're rather apt to go off into their own tribal language which is naturally unintelligible"), and Cockney laborers with the clownish Edith. In addition, the jokes about domestic violence ("ELVIRA: Not at all - you were an absolute pig that time we went to Cornwall and stayed in that awful hotel - you hit me with a billiard cue. CHARLES: Only very, very gently...") and sexual assault ("CHARLES: You let him kiss you though, didn't you? ELVIRA: How could I stop him? He was bigger than I was.") aren't terribly funny.

If Blithe Spirit accesses anything universally human about us, it's our desire to feel superior to our fellow human beings. The tools it uses to make us feel superior are dated 73 years since they were written, and so can hardly be called "timeless."

What Is Portland's Artistic Future?

Theater is Portland's artistic future.

Amanda Hunt and Disjecta's "Portland2014," partially exhibited at Southern Oregon University's Schneider Museum of Art through December 6, respectfully nods to studio art's 2D past while drawing focus to its interactive and performative future.

The body of Portland2014 is 2D: Modou Dieng and Devon VanHouton's Tranquilo references public mural. Travis Fitzgerald represents tapestry with Objects of Permanence I & II. Blair Saxon-Hill's double-sided quilt Shifting Ground and Occupation hangs in the center of the gallery, and D. E. May's geometric musings hang towards the far end. Abra Ancliffe's interactive Personal Libraries Library nestles in a corner near the entry. The its membership card reads,

"The Personal Libraries Library is a lending & subscription library located in Portland, Oregon. The Library is dedicated to recreating the personal libraries of artists, philosophers, scientists, writers and other thinkers & makers. It, and the books, function as a locus for research, connections, convergences, discoveries, curiosity & happenstance.

"The PLL Press produces and disperses printed matter that investigates the material, conceptual, textual and social presence of the Library."

Enhanced white noise emanates from Kelly Rauer's Locate, a triptych of video loops meditating on human movement with its locus in the spine, in the back antechamber. Studio art, dance and video converge in this geographically isolated yet aurally pervasive piece.

PLL and Locate stand out by their difference. In a space dominated by satisfying but ultimately predictable work, these two pose questions: what is a lending library doing in a museum? what is that noise coming from the back? Without ignoring the pedigreed place that 2D art holds in such a venue, Portland2014 guides museum art towards the interactive and performative. Hunt and Disjecta are telling their artists and venues to think theatrically.

We're used to the two dimensional in art museums. There's not a lot of ground left to cover. If artists want to grow, they need to encourage their audience to engage with their work, like Ancliffe. They need to pull divergent media together like Rauer. They need to think like theater makers. 

A Perfect Pairing: "Los Olvidados" and "Marmato, Colombia"

Ramiro Gomez's art, however important, is impermanent. That makes David Feldman's documentary Los Olvidados a crucial supplement to Gomez's practice.

Gomez creates cardboard cut-out pop-up art meant to draw attention the humanity of immigrant laborers in the Southwest. The film documents the creation of an installation that Gomez erected in the Sonora desert of Arizona depicting a family of immigrants gathered around a white cross.

 

Feldman's documentary begins with a description of Gomez's art: he creates cardboard cut-outs of immigrant labors doing the kind of labor that immigrants often do. He then places them in found locations where someone might do the kind of work depicted by the cut-out. For example, he might put a cut-out gardener in a Beverly Hills lawn. Cardboard is an important ingredient in his art: it represents how immigrant laborers are often treated as disposable. This lays the groundwork for his installation titled Los Olvidados, or The Forgotten. Instead of an urban environment, Los Olvidados was placed in the Sonora desert, a high traffic area for illegal immigration up from Mexico and infamous as a deadly crossing. The piece depicts a Latino family standing around a small white cross.

By depicting immigrants in a compassionate light that calls attention to their vulnerability, Gomez puts a human face on a highly politicized and de-humanized event. His installations presumably exist until a property owner has their help clean it off their lawn, or in the case of the Sonora installation, until natural forces deteriorate the cardboard. Their impermanence is one of their strengths, but also one of their weaknesses. Feldman's film quite successfully addresses the problems of the installations' impermanence while not detracting from the story that their disposability tells.

 

David Feldman's Los Olvidados shouldn't be taken as a stand-alone film, but rather as an interpretive supplement to Ramiro Gomez's installation art. Gomez's installations are important in their humanization of a group that often takes second place to people's political beliefs about them. Feldman's film partakes of that importance.

 

Marmato, Colombia perfectly compliments Los Olvidados by placing responsibility for the root causes of Latino immigration to the States in the hands of North American capitalists and their Latino government partners.

Featured second in SIFF's "Ripped from the Headlines" package after Los Olvidados, Santiago Ramirez's Marmato is a series of interviews with the denizens of a Colombian mining community who are allegedly being displaced by an unholy alliance between a Canadian multinational and the Colombian government.

Marmato, Colombia consists of interviews with Marmato's residents, who practice traditional mining that ekes just enough mineral from the earth to make a living without depleting their primary source of income any time in the near future. According to the interviewees, their national government struck a deal with an unnamed Canadian multinational mining operation that is quickly depleting their mines and not paying the Marmatans for their labor. The government allegedly took it one step further and illegalized traditional hand-mining. As one of the interviewees puts it, by taking away their primary source of income, the Colombian government and the multinational are turning "good people bad, and bad ones rich."

Ramirez has struck a vein with his interviews with the locals affected by their conflict with the national government and the government's capitalist partners. It's worth noting, however, that he doesn't reach anything close to journalistic objectivity by including interviews with the leading figures in the multinational or government. By doing so he could flesh out the situation that is displacing the people of Marmato. Still, the interviews with Marmato's residents suffices in creating a companion piece to Los Olvidados by describing how actions taken by North American capitalists can create the conditions that displace Latin Americans from their homes, setting them, perhaps, on the road for America.

SIFF's curation is exquisite in placing Marmato, Colombia after Los Olvidados. It expands upon the story that Ramiro Gomez tells with his cardboard cut-outs by providing a platform for Colombians still in Colombia to say why they need to leave their homes. SIFF ought to be commended for their dramaturgical approach to telling one story with two films.

Free Syrian Army Propaganda

Propaganda's hard to spot when you agree with it. Let's say, for example, that you're into democracy and everyone having an equal say in affairs of state. Well, that doesn't mean that films that give exclusive voice to the democratic side of a conflict aren't propaganda, it just means that they're propaganda that you agree with.

Matthew Van Dyke's Not Anymore is interviews Mowya, a Free Syrian Army commander, and Nour Kelze, a journalist embedded with Mowya's battalion (and who's sympathies clearly lie with Free Syrian Army.) It's safe to say that Not Anymore accurately reflects Mowya and Kelze's experiences in the Syrian Civil War. It would be disingenuous to claim that it paints an accurate picture of said war.

Trigger warning: Not Anymore contains footage of a slain soldiers getting shot and killed, and a bomb or mortar blast in a crowded square.

 

Van Dyke and co-producer Kelze have created a propaganda piece to appeal to American's sentiment that democracy as a universal good. It feels disingenuous for Van Dyke and Kelze to call themselves journalists in context of this film. In other productions, perhaps they are able to interview more than one commander of one battalion of one side of the chaotic Syrian Civil War and a reporter embedded with said battalion. Not Anymore, while well meaning, feels coercive in its one-sidedness.

However much the American audience may agree with the sentiments expressed in Not Anymore, it is misguided to think that this film educates one about the multifaceted civil war that is spilling across Syria's borders. Even as propaganda it's incomplete: it doesn't tell its intended audience what it would like them to do. Should we write to our congress people demanding immediate military intervention in Syria[1]? Should we donate to this, that or the other charity? In the context of Not Anymore, Van Dyke and Kelze oughtn't be considered journalists. "Activist filmmakers" is a more apt moniker, although even as such their work is incomplete.

---

[1] Not Anymore was completed in 2013, before America's involvement in Syria in opposition to ISIL.

A Quitely Powerful Truth

One can almost hear silent and off-camera documentarian Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee asking his interviewees, "How is climate change affecting you?"

His appropriately titled Isle de Jean Charles, featured in SIFF's "Ripped from the Headlines" package, asks just that question of the denizens of the titular island, deep in the Louisiana bayou.

http://goprojectfilms.com/#isle-de-jean-charles

His interviewees describe what it's like to live in a changing climate without ever saying the words "climate change." Instead, the phenomenon is implied and only its adverse effect is made explicit. Even better, Isle de Jean Charles is a platform for the people who know the island best tell its story themselves in their own words. In a way that places blame nowhere and retains focus on the islanders, we learn how they will soon be displaced by climate change.

Vaughan-Lee's silent question is important for its silence. Instead of creating an expose like An Inconvenient Truth, Vaughan-Lee is able to simultaneously side-step a hot-button political issue and address it dead on. By humanizing a politicized event, he is able to appeal to our senses of empathy and compassion, rather than to our senses of rage and righteous indignation. Isle de Jean Charles is quietly powerful.

Being Black "After Trayvon"

Do young African-American men feel persecuted? Do you really need to ask?

Alex Mallis' short film After Trayvon, featured in SIFF's "Ripped from the Headlines" package, sure feels the need to answer. (The answer, by the way, is "yes.")

 

Unfortunately, a video that lays it out as bluntly as After Trayvon is needed, because too many white Americans are blinded by the safety lent them by their skin color to the reality that not everyone has it so good. While Mallis' format may be prosaic, it's to be commended for it's simplicity: it's hard (or at least asinine) to answer "I feel persecuted" with "no you don't."

It ought to be a no-brainer, but apparently it isn't, that young men with brown or black skin feel persecuted in America because they are persecuted in America. It's important, therefore, for material like After Trayvon to exist. Mallis may not be a sophisticated filmmaker, but he gets the job done.

A Refreshing Realism

Realism is an actor's genre.

Ellar Coltrane

Richard Linklater's Boyhood pushes realism past it's persistent 19th century parameters by filming a plotless movie over the course of twelve years so that we can watch the characters age. The lack of a plot paints a realistic picture of what growing up is like: boyhood doesn't have an inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action and neat resolution followed by a denouement. At the same time, a three hour film that doesn't give us the orgasmically structured rush we're used to could be a real drag. It takes good actors schooled in psychological realism to make it come off, and Linklater proves that he knows how to pick them.

Boyhood follows Mason (Ellar Coltrane) and Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) as they grow up in suburban Texas. Their dad (Ethan Hawke) is trying to involve himself in their lives, and their mom (Patricia Arquette) wants to find them a good step-dad. The kids get and break up with girlfriends and boyfriends. They experiment with booze and pot, and put up Obama signs with their dad. Mason discovers his passion for photography, and both kids grow up and leave for college.

That sounds about as interesting as watching grass grow, right? That's because the story isn't that interesting. What's interesting is how the actors, principally the core four (Coltrane, Linklater, Hawke and Arquette) inhabit their roles. The Realism with which they approach their roles isn't the American Method. The Method calls for a strong focus on objectives and tactics. Think of it this way, if you're acting using the American Method, you want to figure out what your character wants from your scene partner. It's got to be something concrete, something you'll recognize and celebrate if you get. You start with one tactic to get what you want from them, and if that doesn't pay off, you move on to another. In real life, we might act this way in a job interview or during a break-up, but we generally aren't so Machiavellian. The Boyhood cast acts in a way that reflects the way we really are. When Sheena (Zoe Graham) breaks up with Mason, he is clearly trying to get her to take him back. The mom has a clear goal when she needs to get her kids out of a dangerous situation. Arquette, however, doesn't have a clear objective with its test in Coltrane when he leaves for college. Sometimes you're just sad without ulterior motives, and Arquette reflects that with a refreshing honesty. Linklater set out to make a film that portrays an honest boyhood, and so he needs a cast whose acting could take Realism past it's unfortunate conflation with the American Method. Fortunately, he put together a stellar cast who can move past the American Method towards real Realism. By doing so, Boyhood presents intrinsically relatable characters, an accomplishment that allows the audience to emphasize with them on a deeply human level.

A Familiar Flamingo

La Vida Boheme's Flamingo tells a classic story of death and rebirth using animation reminiscent of 1930s Disney.

La Vida Boheme (Henry D'Arthenay, Daniel de Sousa, Sebastián Ayala and Rafael Pérez Medina) complement their rock ballad with a cartoon drawn in the old-school Steamboat Willie that tells a familiar story. By doing the classics, and doing them well, La Vida Boheme creates an enduring film soundtracked by their Flamingo.

 

The band chooses to tell an uplifting story about death and rebirth. The use of childlike, familiar imagery and contrasts between light and dark, color and monochrome emphasize the narrative content. It goes to show that sometimes the old ways are the best ways.

By using highly accessible techniques to tell a story intimately familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of Christian mythology, La Vida Boheme have created a modern classic.

Storytelling with Wolf & Crow

Nothing beats a strong story.

Folk band Wolf & Crow (Mathieu Stemmelen and Zachary Vieira) tell a compelling love story in their "Love in the Time of Advertising." Their simultaneously dry and imaginative sense of humor adds warmth to the story that's beautifully animated by Matt Berenty.

 

It's an endearing little love story about how nothing beats human interaction. The earnestness with which Wolf & Crow tell it and Berenty animates it sell it, but none of that would matter if the story itself wasn't strong.

When it comes right down to it, music videos are about telling a song's story. It doesn't hurt that "Love in the Time of Advertising" is a narrative poem set to old-timey country pickin'. The video doesn't give much evidence of whether or not Wolf & Crow have much going for them as musicians, but as storytellers they can't be beat.

Jenny Schweitzer's Simple Success

A successful documentary is a simple film that provides a platform for the interviewees to tell their own stories.

Jenny Schweitzer's Flor de Toloache does just that for an all-female mariachi band, casting light upon their response to the machismo that characterizes the genre.

Flor de Toloache is part of Schweitzer's Rhythm in Motion, a ten part series of short documentaries about the musicians who busk in New York City's subway system. Traditionally, mariachi bands are dominated by men. Flor de Toloache, the band featured in the eponymous film, runs against that macho grain by featuring an all-women line-up.

Flor de Toloache exists within the broader context of international patriarchy and the ways in which such social structures limit women's opportunities. By simply allowing the interviewees to describe the problem and their solution for it, Schweitzer creates a compelling and positive movie.

Rather than focus on herself as a filmmaker, or even upon the individuals interviewed, Schweitzer's Flor de Toloache allows the expert interviewees to interpret a cultural event for us. The event is not isolated: it exists within a social structure that we all participate in. Flor de Toloache is an educational documentary that is well-made because it is made simply.

Philip Knowlton and Narrative Over Planting

Giving story precedence over style goes a long way. In fact, a sloppy approach to story can ruin an otherwise promising movie.

Take Philip Knowlton's Flower Shop and included in SIFF's "Face the Music" package. It's a short documentary that squeezes in two related but separate stories, and tries to cover the bad dramaturgy with cloying editing.

The film spends about the first half describing the history of Carolina Florist, the "oldest African-American flower shop in NYC." References to Phil Young's halting drum career punctuate that history. Through use of titles, we're guided through that history and into Young's resurrected devotion to music-making, illustrated by slow motion shots of Young relishing in his art. He describes how kids in Harlem are denied music and art in school, and how he and his band realized that they had "something to give to the kids."

Knowlton has a lot things going on in his film that, if he focused upon them instead of upon his fetish for slow motion, would make for a compelling movie. He could have focused on the flower shop's rise and fall, or he could have told the story of bringing jazz to the kids. Instead, he crams both into a short documentary. As if that weren't bad enough, he wastes precious time with his cloying slow motion shots of Phil Young drumming. His videography gets in the way of his storytelling.

Documentaries are meant to tell a story, not to exhibit the editor's filmic flourishes. In the end, Flower Shop is a messy example of style taking primacy over story. Knowlton may know his way around editing software, but he knows next to nothing about making a movie.

Will Farrar Move Out of Mediocrity?

If you're going to be a twee musician, you've got to find a way to set yourself apart from all the other twee musicians. Cassandra Farrar, judging by her music video Moving Out, is just another Zooey Deschanel wannabe with bangs and a guitar.

The song is a dime-a-dozen heart-ache ballad. The corresponding video is a nonsensical series of references to pop culture (like The Ring) and classic art (like Starry Night) that vaguely reference the lyrics.

 

 

If music videos are promotional tools for new singles, then Farrar makes an unconvincing case for why we ought to care about her music. The contents of her song and of her music video are almost obtrusive in their lack of originality: the video, in fact, seems to revel in it. At the same time, they are both competently done. The mediocrity of it ultimately makes Farrar's music forgettable.

Cassandra Farrar is an unremarkable addition to the ranks of twee musicians. She's not bad, but nor is she good. She is competent, and, judging by the long list of credits at the end of her video, she has a healthy basis of professional support. If she can add some originality to her act, she can work her way out of the mire of mediocrity that she's starting her musical career in.

Focus on the Work, Owerko

The Boombox Project is a bad commercial for Lyle Owerko's exhibition book of the same name.

The Boombox Project, directed by Paul Stone and featured in SIFF's "Face the Music" package, tells a flimsy story that focuses more upon an apparently self-involved artist than upon the product it seeks to sell.

The film begins with an expository focus on Owerko and how he began taking pictures while vacationing in Holland, and how he fancies himself a "creative anthropologist." He alludes to the boombox's position as a cultural icon for youth of the '80s and '90s, before briefly describing how he photographed and exhibited them and lets us know there's a book we can buy.

The film's intent is to sell us on his product, but the execution doesn't deliver. The focus seems to be on Owerko as opposed to his exhibition book, and he is a less than compelling protagonist. A Dutch vacation and professionally identifying by a self-invented term make Owerko seem overly privileged and unrelatable. The effect is not only alienation from the artist, but from the art that he's selling.

If the intent of The Boombox Project is to sell the audience on Owerko's exhibition book, it does a poor job. By focusing on uninteresting aspects of Owerko instead of upon the exhibition itself, the film makes us wonder why we should even care.

Considering the Canon: The Message

Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five's "The Message" is an enduring expression of suppression by a social hierarchy wherein race and class are inextricably intertwined.

The recent murders of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Mike Brown have pushed into public light the ongoing oppression of Black men. The final scene in "The Message" is as familiar today as it was in 1982. It's only by dent of the poet being Black that "The Message" is about Black men: it is equally the story of Indian and Latino men. It's a story that happens in cities and on reservations nationwide.

"The Message" is in fact a collection of stories, culminating in Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five's wrongful arrest. All are set in an environment of social decay wrought by abject poverty. All are punctuated by the desperate chorus:

"Don't push me because I'm close to the edge,

I'm trying not to loose my head.

It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder

How I keep from going under."

After setting the scene, Flash describes a second-person protagonist who responds to the emotional degradation by "walkin' round like you're Pretty Boy Floyd" only to wind up incarcerated. You, the protagonist, spend the time between your arrest and suicide or murder getting raped. After a final chorus, Flash and the Furious Five are wrongfully arrested in a segment that plays like found audio.

"The Message" is considered a classic because of its unfortunate timeless depiction of class in America defined by race and enforced officially by the police or pseudo-officially by the repo man and debt collectors in Flash's song, or the neighborhood watch in recent news. The song itself is class-specific. If you haven't been hassled by the police purely on the basis of your skin color, how can you relate? If you can walk down the street and not have a reasonable concern about being shot or choked to death, then this song will be alien to you.

Even if it doesn't achieve real universality, "The Message" retains relevancy and an unfortunate timelessness. Everyone, Black, Indian, White and so forth ought to give it a listen.

Americana Passé

How can we open galleries up to people of color to make them more than simply white man's land? Not by focusing on Caucasian nostalgia, like Royal Nebeker does at his ongoing exhibit at the Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University.

America's demographics are changing. We are increasingly becoming a brown nation, but we wouldn't know that by going to look at the art at Schneider. If we want our cultural resources to represent our whole community, then we need to exhibit work that doesn't present such a narrow view of American culture.

Nebeker is a neo-Expressionist who utilizes collage in nearly all of his work by juxtaposing text with his images. His painting is rich in texture, and vibrant in color from the sylvan blues of The Blue Bike to the oppressive shadow of Hands of Healing to the lonely maroon of Til Østbon. Twilight, in fact, is a favorite theme. It infuses everything in The Blue Bike and Til Østbon, and it approaches just off frame in Marbles at Twilight. Americana also weaves throughout his oeuvre. It's passive in his 1971 piece Mrs. Senior and Fern, but dances with twilight and violence in The Blue Bike, Marbles at Twilight and War Cry. The latter juxtaposes silhouettes of Indians and Arabs with a placard for Gene Autry's The Cowboy and the Indians which reads "war whoops ring.. war paths flame."

His Americana demonstrate exhibits nostalgia for a time of innocence, untouched by the brutality of racism and xenophobia. It negates the American-ness of experiences that have always been fraught by one race's ongoing oppression of the others. It's a comfortable fit for a venue as rooted in white privilege as an art gallery. It's a great fit for the America of the 1950s, but not for the America of 2014.

Cultural resources ought to be for everybody in the community, not just the white and/or privileged. To exist for the whole community, they need to exhibit work by and about more than just the white and/or privileged.

Considering the Canon: The Lion King

For the past 77 years, American kids have grown up watching Disney movies, having their worldviews shaped by the cartoon narratives. This is why the old "damsel in distress" trope has received its fair share of deserved criticism. The Lion King demonstrates this chauvinistic weakness, although perhaps less ostentatiously than Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or Sleeping Beauty.

Like those traditional princess movies, though, Lion King devalues female agency. Every change, besides one, that occurs in this story is the result of male action. The one exception is when Nala encourages Simba to return home. This barely counts, though, since what she's doing is getting a man to come fix things.

Irene Mecchi, Jonathan Roberts and Linda Woolverton's iconic story paints a picture of a simple moral dichotomy in which good is represented by responsibility to one's community and connection to one's ancestors, and evil by greed and familial estrangement. Directors Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff emphasize the point by drawing the Cain figure Scar as the leader of a Nazi rally in a hellish elephant graveyard, and the Abel figure Mufasa as a divine presence at the edge of the savannah. These two males in relationship to protagonist Simba, constitute the core of the plot.

For American boys and girls who became cognizant of stories in the early 90s, The Lion King was universal fare. Why shouldn't it have been? It taught us to value our families and communities, and to respect our ancestors. By phrasing the narrative so entirely in masculine terms, however, The Lion King also taught us that only males had the agency to change things for good or ill in the world. The movie's central crisis is created by one male, and solved by another male, while females are relegated to the role of dependent deuteragonists. The Lion King teaches us family values that disempower an entire gender.

It is unfortunate that such a beloved classic reflects such chauvinism on the part of American society. Moving forward, we need to work to create a canon that empowers all members of our society equally.

Five Best Friends

Friendship is the most powerful force in the galaxy.

That's the raison d'être of Disney's Guardians of the Galaxy. Sure, it's a movie about space pirates and gun-toting raccoons, and it has an obligatory supervillain, but the real story is about alienation and friendship.

After a bleak and all-to-everyday prologue, young Peter Quill (Wyatt Oleff) is abducted by aliens. Flash-forward 20 odd years, and grown Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is an intrepid space thief stealing an Orb that contains one of the Marvel's all-powerful substances that can destroy the universe. Little does he know that Kree terrorist/revolutionary Ronan (Lee Pace) and creepily eccentric Collector (Benicio Del Toro) have both sent orphan assassin Gamora (Zoe Saldana) after the Orb. After Quill eludes Ronan's henchmen, the brutal warlord puts an astronomical price on his head. Rocket (Bradley Cooper), a genetic experiment gone awry, and his side-kick ent Groot (Vin Diesel) get into a fight with Gamora over Quill in a crowded city center, and the four of them find themselves in a maximum security prison where they meet Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista), a muscle-bound ward of the Xandarian state who has a vendetta against Ronan for the death of his family. After a relatively easy jail break, the ragtag quintet find themselves the only ones able to protect the galaxy from Ronan and the Orb.

Guardians of the Galaxy succeeds by telling an uplifting, universal story about the power of friendship. Director James Gunn accomplishes this by establishing that the real obstacle is not the run-of-the-mill supervillain Ronan, but instead the protagonists' social alienation. Quill is the only "Terran" in this galaxy. Gamora is an orphan raised in a loveless and exploitive family like an extraterrestrial Oliver Twist. Rocket "didn't ask to get made," and masks his misery with a vicious sense of humor. His only real tenderness is reserved for Groot. The look in the raccoon's eyes when he realizes that he might lose his best friend is an coup of animation. The look in Drax's eyes when Ronan laughs him off is a coup of acting. Since his family's death, Drax's only purpose has been to fight and kill the man he holds responsible. Instead of taking the macho route, Bautista and Gunn let us see Drax's vulnerability. It's the quintet's shared social alienation that brings them together, as Quill makes explicit: "We're all losers. We've all lost something." Only by establishing bonds of friendship can the Guardians overcome either the intangible or tangible antagonists. The final showdown on Xandar is weak by action movie standards, but that doesn't matter. It's not a story about action and violence. It's a story about friendship. It's the kind of story that withstands the test of time. This critic expects audiences to return to over and over again.

Disney trades in uplifting, accessible stories, and Guardians is no exception. Sure, good Disney movies have brilliant animation and wacky characters, but so do many others that have not become cultural landmarks. Disney movies, by and large, succeed so well because they have heart. Guardians of the Galaxy, from story to acting to design, has as much heart as the best of them.

 

 

Terpening-Romeo's Vanity Project

The proliferation of small theater companies in Portland is creating fertile ground for vanity projects like Anon It Moves and String House's current production of Hamlet.

Driving this production is early career director and Anon It Moves co-founder Erica Terpening-Romeo's desire to play Hamlet and not a lot else. This might be excusable if Terpening-Romeo had the chops for Shakespeare's iconic character, but, more's the woe, she hasn't.

This Hamlet opens with a dumb-show presentation of a loving family, until the King disappears leaving his crown floating mid-air. The cast continues to explore the relationships established in this scene through the duration of the play: Hamlet and Ophelia's (Crystal Ann Muñoz) decaying love, Hamlet's sacrificial relationship with her dead father (played by a masked chorus), and her fraught relationship with her mother (Ethelyn Friend) and uncle/step-father (Jamie Peck). Director Elizabeth Watt elevates Ophelia's importance by staging a relationship between her and her spectral father (Chris Porter), and of course her importance to Laertes (Heath Hyun Houghton) is given in the text.

These relationships constitute the framework for Watt's directorial premises: "before the murderous act that began an irreversible unraveling, this was a love-filled world." Watt's program note continues, "The project was seeded with Erica [Terpening-Romeo]'s image of a strong female Hamlet." This could be a great idea to call attention to the patriarchal world out of which Shakespeare's canon springs, or about the gender neutrality of emotional malaise, or any number of intriguing things. It might even work as a platform for a great actor, although we just saw that formula crash and burn with Portland Shakespeare Project's Tempest. Unfortunately, Terpening-Romeo's not a strong enough actor to carry this particularly challenging play in that even more challenging role. She seems to be out of her depth and played a superficial Hamlet, breathy and fast. She got lost in the pedigree of the role, and, except for one brilliantly genuine moment in the fifth act, bombed. Since her desire for the role dominated everything and everybody else, there was hardly an opportunity for any one else's contributions to redeem the play.

It's to be expected, however, that we will be getting uninteresting vanity projects like this one in Portland's ballooning fringe theater scene. Small groups of friends banding together and performing for their friends create the perfect condition for work done for the artists not the audience or community. Why would anybody else be interested in seeing an early-career director play Hamlet just because she can?

Music for a Thinking Public

When was the last time you listened to challenging, thought-provoking music in a public space? On the radio dial, only classical and jazz stations elevate the art form above mesmerizing lyricism. On the street you might meet the occasional virtuoso busker, but that's if you're lucky.

Or, you might go to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Green Show, where Ghosts & Strings are playing a few gigs this season. "Ghosts & Strings" is the nome de musique of David Molina, joined for the Green Show by Idris Ackamoor. Molina is a sound designer whose music is informed by his interdisciplinary work in theater, film and installation art. Ackamoor is a jazz man. The complicated interaction of their two musical practices forces the public to listen, and to think about what we're listening to. 

The Green Show happens on a small stage between OSF's three theaters, and acts play to an audience seated on the lawn, or standing on the brick walkways to the Elizabethan and Bowmer theaters. At least, they usually do. Ghosts & Strings use the whole space - entering and exiting through the middle of the lawn, Ackamoor walking between audience members blowing his sax. The pair play an eclectic mix of instruments: Molina creates digital beats, plays a banjo with a bow, strums rock and classical riffs on the guitar, and picks the bow back up to play the cello. Ackamoor wails on his sax, and on his Native flute, and plucks a harp, and tap dances with a washboard on his chest and a harmonica on his lips.

The core of the music, though is the jazz: Molina's digital beats, and Ackamoor improvising melodies over the top. The rest of Ghosts & Strings' show distracted from that core. That sounds like a bad thing, but it isn't necessarily. Jazz is a cerebral music: unlike genres that lull the audience into a viscerally thoughtless haze with their lyrical narratives, audiences have to really pay attention to jazz to enjoy it. That goes doubly for Ghosts & Strings' jazz, where we have to listen to the whole spectrum of what they're playing, identify the core of their music, and then listen through everything else to that core. And "we", in this case, means "we the public." The Green Show is free, easily accessible and open to everyone.

As a non-narrative art form, instrumental jazz engages us in a more thought provoking way than the narrative, lyrical music that we are usually exposed to in public spaces. In Oregon, we have very few organizations that promote that deeper appreciate for music by providing instrumental jazz for free to the public. One of those is the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Of course, it's up to the public to take advantage of the resources that are freely available to us, whether that means tuning into the jazz station on 89.1FM if you're in Portland, or coming to see and listen to Ghosts and Strings next time they play at the Green Show on October 12th if you're in the Rogue Valley.

Humor of "Horrors"

Ashman and Menken created their iteration of Little Shop of Horrors during a moment of cultural pessimism. It's current popularity belies a certain amount of anxiety in our modern society.

Howard Ashman and Alan Menken created their musical adaptation of the 1960 horror comedy during the beginning of the Reagan administration, when the former Hollywood B movie actor was ramping up the arms race with his "Star Wars" program and cutting funding to public goods like art and education. This poppy musical about the extinction of the human race is currently playing in two TCG member theaters (the Bristol Riverside Theatre in Pennsylvania and A.C.T. in Seattle), and at least one university theater (Southern Oregon).

Loveable loser Seymour Krelbourn (played by Andrew McNath at Bristol, Joshua Carter at A.C.T. and Ethan Niven at Southern Oregon) works at a flower shop whose cash flow is drying up. He's in love with the beautiful Audrey (Laura Giknis at Bristol, Jessica Skerritt at A.C.T. and Alyssa Birrer at Southern Oregon), who's in an abusive relationship with a sadistic dentist (Danna Vaccaro - Bristol, David Anthony Lewis - A.C.T., Cameron Gray - SOU). Seymour's luck turns around when he discovers a mysterious flytrap (voiced by Carl Clemons Drake and puppeteered by Nate Golden at Bristol, by Ekello Harrid, Jr. and Eric Estebb at A.C.T., and Karen Fox and Michael Hays at SOU). People flock into the flower shop to see the curiosity, unaware that Seymour is keeping it alive by feeding it his own blood. As the flytrap Seymour realizes he doesn't have enough blood to keep her alive. And thus he sets out on a path of serial killing in exchange for fame, fortune and the girl of his dreams.

 

When Little Shop of Horrors premiered off-Broadway in 1982, our country was facing the possibility of another World War, except this time with more nuclear weapons. Reagan's emphasis on military build-up only exacerbated anxieties. Between the two of them, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had enough fire power, anecdotally, to obliterate human life several times over. Little Shop's humor comes from a place of powerlessness: if we can't stop human extinction, we might as well make a joke about it. While he was moving money into defense, Reagan was taking money from the arts. If arts were to succeed, they would have to adapt to the capitalist model that the nation was pushing them into. Hence, Little Shop of Horrors needed to be a poppy musical with a laugh a minute and songs the audience would hum in the lobby. Its continued popularity is a statement on our national mood. All the defense and public safety infrastructure we've accumulated couldn't stop the 9-11 attacks, or the Boston Marathon bombing. We can't even stop non-political violence like the Isla Vista killings. And even if we don't die in some awful instance of mass violence that all our defense spending apparently can't protect us from, how's our quality of life? The students at and in SOU's Little Shop of Horrors will earn their bachelors hopelessly in debt, and then they'll have thin opportunities to get the kind of employment that will dig them out of that debt. For all it's frolicking, Little Shop of Horrors opines that, if the earth is going to hell with all of us on it anyways, then we might as well just sing.

The Little Shop of Horror's perennial popularity tells us something about our relationship with the 80s, specifically, that we're not a whole lot happier or more secure than we were then. As such, it's an enduring indictment of Reagan's presidency. Sure, he thought he was helping the country by building up our defense infrastructure and pushing his brand of capitalist ideology on us, but look where we are now. If all theater's political, and every artistic choice is a social statement, then surely Little Shop of Horrors is one of the most nihilistically leftist plays there is. Bristol, A.C.T. and SOU's choice of Little Shop belies an unhappy acquiescence to unpredictable violence and the economic blight of neo-liberalism.

The Miracle of Theater

www.milagro.org

If you want ethnic authenticity, turn off the radio. Instead, go to the theater and you'll see in-depth yet entertaining discussions of the complicated American ethnic landscape in plays like Enrique Urueta's Learn to Be Latina.

Currently playing at Milagro Teatro under the direction of Antonio Sonera and starring Olga Sanchez and Nicole Accuardi, Learn to Be Latina is a satirical take on the pop music industry's treatment of ethnicity as part and parcel of their corporate package. It's a good example of how, in the family of entertainment genres, theater's the only place you can get this kind of authenticity.

Hanan (Accuardi) is a Lebanese-American singer with dreams of stardom interviewing for a trio of robotic auditors (Orion Bradshaw, Kelly Godell and Matthew Kerrigan). They love her voice, and they love her body, but she's just a little too ethnic in a - how do they put it? - "shawarma-eating, suicide-bomber kind of way." Hanan's about to walk out the door in righteous indignation when the auditors' boss, the Irish-accented Mary O'Malley (Sanchez) makes her an offer she can't refuse: learn to be "Latiner" and you can be a star. Hanan's Faustian bargain just gets worse and worse as her sense of identity becomes fragmented by the parts she has to play. She's Lebanese-American, but she's pretending to be from Buenos Aires. She's discovering that she's gay, but she "needs to be impaled on star cock by Saturday" if she's going to retain her credibility as a Latina pop star. After all, "Good Latinas don't eat cunt."

Those lines are meant to be rude and unappealing. Urueta alienates us from the characters representing the recording industry by putting abhorrent language in their mouths. Sonera accentuates this effect by giving them cartoonish physicality, most notably the auditors' mechanical movement in the opening scene. The satire demonstrates the ways in which popular music harms us by oversimplifying our ethnic identities. The truth is more nuanced than you hear about on the radio.

Learn to Be Latina is not alone in discussing the complicated reality of ethnicity in America, but theater might be. Playwrights today are writing about their ethnicity in ways that defy stereotypes. And they're getting noticed: Quiara Alegría Hudes won a Pulitzer for Water by the Spoonful. Eliza Bent published a five-page interview with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins in the latest issue of American Theatre about his plays like N(E)IG(H)G(BO)ERS. Stories with recognition in the theater community like these are not being told by theater's rich siblings, cinema/TV and pop music. Those media are notorious for their heavy-handed use of stereotypes. Hipster headdresses at Coachella and George Lucas' anti-Semitic aliens make theater a refreshing venue where we can talk honestly and within a supportive environment about race and ethnicity in America.

So if you struggle with issues of ethnicity, or are simply curious about them, turn off the radio and get to the theater. In spite of the Urueta's auditor's quip that "Whites aren't anything, except for Italians, because Italians are wops and wops aren't white," we're all of us something. And all of those somethings are living in closer proximity than perhaps any other time in America's history. If we want to have any kind of chance living well together, then we need stories like Learn to Be Latina.

Responding to Ulf Schmidt's "Agile Theater"

This January, dramaturg Ulf Schmidt presented a paper titled "Auf dem Weg zum agilen Theater" ("On the Way to Agile Theater") at the Jahreskonferenz der Dramaturgischen Gesellschaft in Mannheim. In it he explores ways in which contemporary theater is failing, and how it can regain social relevancy. His interest in using digital technology on stage has merit but is not new, while his assertion that we appropriate production models from other industries constitutes a categorical error.

 

He begins by drawing a bleak scenario of contemporary German theater. By his report, it' doesn't appear that much different from American theater. Still, his writing features un-cited charts and hyperbole (e.g. "das Ende des Stadttheater-Schauspiels [ist] in den nächsten zehn Jahren denkbar." - "the end of publicly funded theater could occur in the next ten years.") Bob Abelman and Cheryl Kushner's diagnosis in A Theater Criticism/Arts Journalism Reader is more trustworthy. What Schmidt dramatically refers to as "die digitale Naissance" is more prosaically defined by Abelman and Kushner as modern audiences' "access to a wide variety of entertainment options through an increasing array of personal and social media." (2) Not covered by Schmidt with any kind of thoroughness is theater's "relegation to high culture status." (4) Abelman and Kushner attribute theater's seeming elitism to the "digitale Naissance," but ongoing experiments in ticket pricing seem to tell a different story, or at least a parallel story. According to Portland Center Stage Artistic Director Chris Coleman, Signature Theater's $20 price cap has promoted a younger and more diverse audience. Mixed Blood Theater in Minneapolis has seen similar results by not charging for tickets. Finally, Abelman and Kushner distinguish between screen and stage by noting that the former promotes audience passivity and the later audience activity. (8)

 

Schmidt proposes two primary solutions: incorporating digital content on stage, and following a corporate production model. The first has merit, proved by the experiments of 3-Legged Dog Media + Theater Group (3LD) and their associated companies. In January's issue of American Theatre, 3LD's artistic director Kevin Cunningham noted that "Many of our more recent projects surround and immerse the audience in moving image and sound." The connection to immersive theater is notable in light of Punchdrunk's long-running Sleep No More, and Alex Timbers' use thereof in his current Broadway project, Rocky. In 3LD's specific case, immersive theater addresses the omnipresence of digital technology in our modern lives. Generally, immersive theater embraces theater's capacity for audience activity.

Schmidt's second proposal, following a corporate production model inspired by the work of Hollywood and Silicon Valley makes a categorical error: TV and technology companies create products for mass consumption. Such is the nature of broadcast supplemented by archival platforms like Netflix and Hulu, and the creation of iPads to be sold worldwide to enable access to Netflix and Hulu. Theater, by its nature, is a limited time event. As such, it suffers the same market weakness as any handmade craft: limited production leads to higher cost.

While hyperbolic and un-cited, Schmidt is correct that one of the challenges faced by modern theater (in both Germany and the United States) is the ubiquity of digital technology and entertainment platforms. His assessment that appropriating these technologies for use in the theaters offers one viable solution to this challenge is being born out by American theater companies, and has been since at least the 90s when 3LD emerged from the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. His rather involved fascination with Hollywood and Silicon Valley production models, however, misses the point. Those industries have developed their processes to match the products they create, which are mass producible. By its nature as a live, site-specific crucible of human interaction, theater needs its own production models. Schmidt might do better to look at theaters who have been addressing his digitale Naissance.

 

Aristotelian Tragedy for the Boomer Generation

Linda Alper

Western theater has used stories of death and dying to bring communities together since its Athenian origins. A.R.T. continues that tradition in its current production of Quality of Life.

Jane Anderson's drama tells the story of two sides of one family - one, conservative Christians from Ohio; the other, liberal Californians - both dealing with death. In framing our 21st century political polarization in classic Aristotelian terms, Anderson and A.R.T.'s message is clear - however divided we may feel, we all have death and suffering in common.

Jeannette (Linda Alper) and Neil (Michael Mendelson) have recently survived a devastating California wild-fire. Tim Stapleton's realist set depicts the front of their yurt, surrounded by burnt snags decorated with their fire-destroyed possessions. They are making a temporary life surrounded by an ostentatious display of death to cope with Neil's late-stage terminal cancer. Cousins Dinah (Susannah Mars) and Bill (Michael Fisher-Welsh) come to visit. They have recently experienced a loss of their own - their only daughter was savagely killed in an act of random violence.

Variations of the phrase "I understand" litter the first act. Of course, nobody really does. Neil is the only one whose mortality is really imminent. Bill can't understand, or doesn't want to understand, Neil's marijuana use. Jeanette and Neil don't understand Dinah and Bill's faith in Christ, and it's not clear if Dinah and Bill really understand their faith either. If God exists, why would he take their daughter in such a hellish way? Dinah relates the tales of Abraham and Isaac and of Christ's crucifixion, and admits, "I love the Son, but I cannot stand the Father." Their understanding evaporates with the big reveal at the end of the first act, and their suffering threatens to tear their already strained family apart in the second.

The Quality of Life is a Learish attempt at creating a communal bond out of our shared mortality and propensity to pain. The two sides of this family are representatives of the left and right wing of the polarity that has defined the American political climate of the first decade of the 21st century. Jeannette and Neil represent American liberals, and Dinah and Bill American conservatives. But where they, like our nation, are divided in politics, they are united in suffering and death. An exercise in Aristotelian catharsis, Quality is meant to reinforce some responses to suffering and death while purging us of others. Struggling with Biblical morality and death with dignity are permissible, but suicide born of grief is not.

Death isn't the only thing that unites this family, though. Both American conservatism and liberalism are represented solely by upper-middle class white Boomers. Just as Athenian tragedy was meant to reinforce the supremacy of the power-holding class, Anderson's America is middle-class, middle-aged and white. Not coincidentally, so is A.R.T.'s audience at this play. The Quality of Life is as much a medieval morality play as it is an Aristotelian tragedy. If the Boomer generation doesn't accept death and a (modified) Christian ban on suicide, how will they retain power?

Re-telling "A Wrinkle in Time"

Tracy Young's adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, playing at OSF through November 1st, is a beautiful re-telling of a beautiful story about learning to live and let live and love.

Alejandra Escalante

Young, who also directs, is credited in the Playbill as an adaptor, but this play is really a staging of L'Engle's original text, abridged. This devotion to text, already a hallmark of OSF's work, brings L'Engle's classic tale of embracing your flaws and allowing yourself to love directly from the private pages of a book to the public space of the Angus Bowmer theater.

Meg Murry (Alejandra Escalante) is swept away from her suburban home with her genius little brother Charles Wallace (Sara Bruner) and friend Calvin O'Keefe (Joe Wegner) by the three Mrs. Ws (Judith-Marie Bergan, K.T. Vogt on opening night, and an unaccredited actress as Mrs. Which) to save her father (Dan Donohue). The children learn from the Happy Medium (Kate Mulligan) that all good things in the universe are at war with the Black Thing, a heavy evil presence. Some of the best fighters in this war have come from our insignificant planet - Jesus, Crazy Horse, etc. The Mrs. Ws tesser the children through space-time to the planet Camazotz where Mr. Murry is being held captive by IT, a malevolent intelligence through whose influence the entire planet has succumbed to the Black Thing. In order to defeat IT and save her family, Meg has to embrace her flaws - particularly difficult for an awkward adolescent girl - and to discover the thing that "she's got that IT hasn't got."

At its core, that's just what L'Engle's story is - an adolescent girl learning to accept herself for who she is. L'Engle and, by staging her text, OSF invest us in Meg's journey by establishing a binary moral code. This isn't hard for the audience to accept - we're brought up on binary moralities, whether they be God versus Satan or American freedom versus foreign oppression. In L'Engle's story, the Mrs. Ws are the standard bearers for Good, and teach Meg to accept herself as an individual. IT, whose modus operandi is to subvert the wills of others to ITs own, bears the standard for Evil. This simple devise is the key to A Wrinkle in Time's longevity and continued appeal - it encourages us, especially the young adults among us who need it the most, to simply be ourselves and to encourage those we care for to be themselves.

A Wrinkle in Time is a joy to read and a joy to see on the Angus Bowmer stage. People of all ages need stories that encourage them to love themselves. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is deeply invested in English and American theater classics, and A Wrinkle in Time is a welcome addition to the OSF canon.

A Boalian Viewing of "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" (Spoilers)

comicbook.com

In Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, the first chapter analyzes The Poetics as descriptive of theater as an instrument of social homogenization. Boal treats all narratives with an Aristotelian structure as propaganda. Captain America: The Winter Soldier has such a structure, and promotes a libertarian view of government surveillance justified by fear tactics as un-American.

In short, Aristotle's "coercive system of tragedy," according to Boal  presents an individual who, due to his or her hamartia, or fatal flaw, stands outside the social norm. The tragedian uses empathy to help us identify with the protagonist. Through the recognition of his or her error and the ensuing catastrophe, the protagonist's hamartia is purged from society. Our empathy leads to fear that the same could happen to us, and we are supposed to experience catharsis, or rejection of the anticonstitutional flaw we share with the protagonist.

Boal divides this process into four stages:

First Stage ~ Stimulation of the hamartia; the character follows an ascending path toward happiness accompanied empathetically by the spectator. Then comes the moment of reversal: the character, with the spectator, starts to move from happiness to misfortune; fall of the hero. (37)

Captain America's (Chris Evans) hamartia falls under Boal's fifth type of Aristotelian conflict: "Anachronistic Individual Ethos Versos Contemporary Social Ethos." (45) His world view is defined by 1940s patriotism, and the belief that America stands for honesty, loyalty and freedom. His world view stands in contrast to that of Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) who is leading the development of weapons of mass destruction for S.H.I.E.L.D. As Cap observes, "This isn't freedom; this is fear." Our empathy for him is facilitated through a pair of audience surrogates: Sam Wilson/Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). Sam offers a human alternative to Cap's superhuman invulnerability. As a veteran of our current wars and the leader of a PTSD support group, Sam represents an identifiably human reaction to war. Black Widow is a female alternative to the male-centric world of superhero movies. As Rob Keyes notes on Screen Rant, Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow has emerged as the leading superheroine in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has yet to produce a film with a woman in the title role. Anthony Mackie's Sam Wilson is meant to connect the audience to the humanity of our service-people in a film about a superhuman soldier, and Johansson's Black Widow is a major connection point for Marvel's female audience. The trio's moment of reversal comes with Nick Fury's apparent assassination, and their fall when Cap and Black Widow are bombed out of the bunker. They become fully rejected by the contemporary social ethos of militarization justified by terror.

Second Stage ~ The character recognizes his error - agnagorisis. Through the empathetic relationship dianoia-reason, the spectator recognizes his own error, his own hamartia, his own anticonstitutional flaw.

The protagonist and audience surrogates realize that they've been serving HYDRA under the guise of S.H.I.E.L.D. By situating the audience in sympathy with Cap, Falcon and Black Widow, screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely imply that we share their interest in anachronistic values of righteous battle for freedom against the modern culture of fear and government surveillance.

Third Stage ~ Catastrophe; the character suffers the consequences of his error, in a violent form, with his own death or with the death of loved ones.

Neither Captain America nor any of the deuteragonists die. The Winter Soldier (the antagonist situated as an anti-Captain America), however, represents a death of Cap's best friend. As Falcon observes before the showdown, "Whoever he used to be, the guy he is now, he's not the kind you save - he's the kind you stop." In other words, the Winter Soldier is not Bucky. Widow's exposition earlier in the movie is more explicit: she talks about the Winter Soldier as a "ghost".  Cap's loss of Bucky Barnes to HYDRA crystallizes his alienation from the contemporary social ethos.

Fourth Stage ~ The spectator, terrified of the spectacle of the catastrophe is cured of his hamartia.

Captain America's hamartia, at its root, was mistaking S.H.I.E.L.D. for HYDRA. More universally, he mistakenly ascribed his own anachronistic prioritization of freedom to the culture of fear promoted within the government. Since he and his collaborators are the ones with whom Marvel wants us to identify, Captain America: The Winter Soldier serves to comment upon the current culture of government surveillance justified by fear of terrorism within a science fiction fantasy narrative.

Maintaining "Midsummer's" Frothy Foundation

Isaac Lamb and Cristi Miles

David Greig and Gordon McIntyre's Midsummer (a play with songs) is a good example of theater that manipulates our emotions through empathy with the protagonists, but it's not a great example. If it was a great example, Greig wouldn't have complicated the characters' direct addresses with screenplay jargon.

Midsummer relies heavily on the characters Bob (Isaac Lamb in this production at Third Rail) and Helena (Cristi Miles) telling the story of their amorous adventures directly to the audience. It feels like a pair of charming acquaintances telling you how they met. You're predisposed to relate to the story partly because you want to like your acquaintances and partly because you are thinking about how you met your loved one (or would like to meet your future loved one) while you listen to their story. But the brilliancy of applying this conversational approach to theater is complicated by Bob's frequent use of cinematic idiom that removes the spectators from the immediacy of the story.

Bob and Helena meet in a bar. Bob is there because he's a criminal and he's meeting one of his criminal contacts. Helena is there because she has a troubling secret she needs to forget about. She asks Bob to share her wine with her. He does, and the pair have an inebriated one-night stand. They agree not to see each other again, but fate intervenes and they meet just as Bob has acquired a plastic grocery bag full of pounds. It's not technically his, but with the bank shutting just as he arrives and it being his 35th birthday, why not just spend it? He invites Helena to run around Edinburgh with him, spending the bag of money that technically doesn't belong to him.

It's a very specific story about a specific couple in a specific city. And yet it accesses something universal. It's a happy story about a happy feeling that most of us have had and would like to continue having. The audience's identification with the characters is facilitated by Greig's use of direct address. It's really as if you asked a pair of people you've just made friends with, "How did you two meet?" and they answer with this awesome story about running around Edinburgh with a plastic bag full of money. We live vicariously through them. Who doesn't want a "how did you two meet" story like that? That strength is diluted by the screenplay jargon that serves to alienate the audience rather than inspire empathy.

This is a "dramatic" play (after Brecht), not an "epic" play. It would do Greig well to remember that. That's not to say this play is bad: it's a fantastic date play. Greig is a star playwright in Scotland, and has made a name for himself with socially conscious plays like The Events. Midsummer, however, is not socially conscious and shouldn't be. Attempting Verfremdungseffekt with it only weakens its frothy foundations. It's theater for date night, not theater for social change. If Greig wants to federalize the U.K., then this is not the play. If he wants to placate the bourgeoisie, then this is a nice little play to do it with.

 

 

Living Stories Development Log, 16. April 2014

"Can you imagine a world without electricity?"

Phil Albers' discussion topic at the end of his cultural movie night for Karuk TANF was particularly resonant for me. He was trying to make a point about how narratives existed for us on the Klamath River pre-contact, but for me the evening was one of looking at the usefulness of delicate technology.

Phil curated a selection of movies by Karuk videographers for movie night, including Living Stories (in which he appears as an interviewee). I went to the event planning on having a talk-back after Living Stories where I could suss out what was particularly engaging and where the video lost them to help me figure out the next stage in developing this project. The talk-back didn't happen, but what happened instead was probably just as informative.

The biggest problem with the current iteration of Living Stories is its visual stasis - it's all people talking to a point just off camera for an hour. As a theater artist, I've been brainstorming spatial ways to improve the viscerality of the experience. The video before Living Stories had the same visual stasis, so when the sound went out a few minutes into my movie and the audience perked up, I found a possible answer.

Video offers a lot of paradoxical possibilities as a medium. For example, as a recorded medium, it ought to have a stable longevity. Without constantly converting formats, however, that's not the case. It's also surprisingly brittle: the wrong combination of technologies can result in the video not playing, or not playing correctly. Third, and probably most alarmingly, video and film promote audience passivity. When we watch a movie, we sit back and consume the information, assuming that we're in good hands. It's only when something goes wrong, the instability and brittleness of the medium creeps in, do we sit up. This medium, that promotes passivity, has an equal potential to promote activity.

So what's next? First, I need to take a cue from the length of the other videos. I want to re-edit Living Stories into a series of discussions-by-juxtaposition on the central topics addressed in the interviews: books versus oral transmission, problems of translation, the role of traditional stories in mental health, etc. These smaller videos ought to play equally well separately as together. More importantly, I want to use the weaknesses of the medium to engage viewers as active participants in the issues under discussion. How can I present these problems using video in a way that the audience is not satisfied by the recorded material and needs to seek their own answers? And how can I structure that exploration? Ought I use curricula or game-play? Or a combination of the two?

And I need to figure out why the sound went out.