| Danceinsider.com, review by Aimee Ts’ao Process of Illumination with Kunst-Stoff For the past half dozen years, under artistic co-directors Yannis Adoniou and Tomi Paasonen, Kunst-Stoff has presented some of the most unusual and innovative dance and multi-media performance/theater in the Bay Area. This season is no exception, but surprisingly, despite very different styles and formats, the essence or intent of all four pieces of the two programs is nearly the same. And oddly, I would not have realized this had I not read the choreographers' statements in the press kit. If they had been successful in putting across their ideas it would have been immediately evident that all the pieces were dealing with the same themes, despite the contrasting means of conveying those thoughts. Just before I arrive at the theater for Program 2 I read a quote from Picasso: "Art is the elimination of the unnecessary." As it turns out, this is a very accurate description of "Super Vision," directed by Paasonen and for which he designed the costumes and sets. Created in 2002, it is reprised here with some minor changes. The piece begins while the audience is still in the lobby. Performers, wearing dark suits covered with large photos of naked body parts, wander among the spectators, telling stories while ignoring us. By the time we are seated, the stage is filled with nine jabbering bodies. In the center is a blue velveteen couch, the seat burned out on its left end, with a ripped lampshade hanging over it. David Jude Thomas's music provides a backdrop of cows mooing and crickets chirping. A man in a white suit, Thomas, enters and the chatter ceases. He gives an annoying sales pitch, the voice of capitalistic single-mindedness. He continues his spiel with animated gesticulating while sitting on the couch. The talking builds to a deafening pitch again and a naked man, Adoniou, walks in, wanders about and disappears into the audience, reappearing in a pair of jockey briefs. The dancers form small groups, then reform them with different people, while the talking rises and falls in intensity or suddenly stops and starts again. A bizarrely-clad woman, in a costume of colorful paper scraps from head to toe, enters from the left and walks at a glacially slow pace. The dancers are still grouping and regrouping. They start walking around the stage forcefully, and Adoniou walks in the opposite direction until some defect and join him. One man is pushed down and when he gets up to run, a woman jumps on his back and they join everyone in running, circling the stage faster and faster. The piggybacking woman falls off and is pushed and kicked as the others run by. The violence and chaos mounts, dancers run from the front of the stage to the back wall. They execute recognizable fragments of movement -- frisking each other with hands on the wall, cheer-leading, hip-hop dancing, aerobics exercising, you name it. Then they start taking off their suits and falling to the floor, all topless, wearing skirts made from men's dress shirts, buttoned around their waists, complete with ties as waistbands. The trash-covered woman has reached the other side of the stage and picks up a video camera. She starts shooting the dancers as they lie calmly, with the resulting video images projected on the back wall. Next,Thomas stands and slowly exits while his video image shadows him. Adoniou begins removing the suits that are lying on the floor, or that are still partially on some of the dancers. He unties shoes and gently removes them from others, then returns to the back left corner and sits at a table, where he fingerprints the dancers one at a time and issues them black boxes. The first man finger-printed draws back a curtain that covers the left wall, revealing a mirror. He talks about his performance training and experience while looking at his own image. One by one the others join him and he pulls back the curtain further as he moves upstage. They each have a story to tell about themselves or comments to make about the piece they are in the midst of performing. These are by turns hilarious and poignant. Thomas, at the microphone downstage right announces, "And the winner is...," then proceeds to video-tape the audience, which is projected onto the back wall. The trash woman crawls out and dances until the other dancers all attack her, pulling off her costume, handfuls at a time, exposing Schickel in a red, tattered dress underneath. Suddenly water showers down from the lampshade. All, except Schickel, fall and writhe on the floor. Thomas sits on the couch, now upstage right, and laughs. The drenched dancers are lined up downstage facing the audience. Adoniou slowly removes their costumes. They stand completely naked and recite the familiar pledge of allegiance to the flag. They turn and walk to the growing puddle of water, slipping and falling, eventually crossing and recrossing the stage as they skim, spin and tumble in a variety of contorted positions to a soundtrack describing the physiological functioning of skin. Schickel stands at the mike with a large envelope and declares, "And the winner is...," pulling out a small envelope. She repeats the process over and over as her voice grows fainter and the envelopes grow smaller till the final fade to blackout. I usually don't describe a performance in such great detail, nor do I refrain from commenting on it in the process. I hope that the strength of the images is sufficient that you can imagine the devastating impact this work has on the audience. The work is deeply affecting, and sends one away nearly shell-shocked. There are so many layers, so many details that it almost demands a second viewing. And yet, our lives are already filled with the same violence, conflict, deceit and vulnerability that are shown here and you only have to open your eyes to what is already there on a daily basis. |
