| San Francisco Chronicle, 03/1999, by Octavio Roca on “Tube 58” Mixed media to the max Kunst-Stoff, an eclectic dance company founded by Tomi Paasonen and Yannis Adoniou, hosted an art forum called “White Time” at the Brady Street Dance Center this weekend. The main fare was Paasonen’s “Tube 58”, an unruly, endearing and often fascinating new dance. What the standing-room-only crowd Friday night first saw, was a vast space draped in white lycra, fast moving dots projected wall to wall from the back of the house and stage left, a very tall white armchair with a big white pillow. Upstage was a video monitor with a flickering screen and the whole space soon became a big TV as the dots traveled faster and faster.The pillow began to move and turned out to be a supine creature padded out like the Michelin Man. “Is this the end? Again and again and again?” he said. What followed was a fascinating jumble of play about gene manipulation, television realities and an elusive Fountain of Youth. At the close, after nearly two intermissionless hours, the Michelin guy asked once more, “Is this the end? Again and again and again?” Did it work? Sometimes. The amateur and avant-garde mingled uncomfortably: Paasonen’s video projection and Matthew De Gumbia’s lighting design were nothing short of brilliant. The taped musical mix – everything from Glazunov to Ligeti and Aphex Twin – worked well. A lot of Tube 58 was impressive. And when the dancers seemed to disappear as if in a snowstorm, becoming part of the flickering video patterns projected on the set, the stage pictures where stunning. |
