I was in Seattle and looking for something to take my nieces, a junior in high school and a junior in college, to see. I went to http://www.seattleperforms.com/ and looked at the performances for that evening. Among my options were "Breach," a play at Seattle Rep about Hurricane Katrina, and "Fluke," by Radiohole, at On the Boards. I decided to go with the more experimental fare.
Radiohole, I learned that night, performs in Europe a lot but this was to be their first performance in an Amertican city outside of New York. A performance group that's big in Eurpoe but underappreciated at home can only mean one thing: the piece was going to be complete nonsense. And that it was but in a good way.
Sadly, American audiences usually don't know what to do with nonsense. We think that art, especially theater, is supposed to tell a story and we forget that art's primary concern should be to evoke an emotion. Telling an ordered story is certainly one way of evoking emotion but it's not the only way and it was certainly not Radiohole's way. The piece, "Fluke," was of course a rif on "Moby Dick," a novel that I happen to love. If you love a piece of literature, you better not be invested in it maintaining its form if you go see other artists work with it. A number of years back Laurie Anderson did a performance piece called "Songs from Moby Dick" that interpreted the novel through sound. This performance seemed less intent on interpreting its plot and instead chose to create impressions related to the novel.
The piece opened with a woman in a red dress and her dark hair rolled on top of her head strapped in above the audience, leaning forward, quietly reading the weather report. She was striking, largely because she was pretty and peculiar in that side show kind of way at the same time. The whispering of her voice was like a day on the calm sea with a promise of romance or maybe even love. At some point, though, you begin to suspect you're being teased more than romanced. A figure loomed on a video monitor above stage left, his presence heavy and oppressive. At first I got the sense that he could be Ahab to the seamen, then Moby Dick to Ahab, then eventually just the feeling of a painful obsession. About halfway through the piece, the three performers on stage closed thier eyes and painted a second pair of eyes on their eyelids and mostly kept their eyes shut for the rest of the performance. This was fascinating and creepy, like a twisted cartoon. There were beautiful video images made from drawings, some seriously loud and fun rock-n-roll numbers, lots of driving around in little boats, and by the end, dozens of little fish skimming the surface of the stage with lights for eyes.
As you can see, what I'm largely left with are impressions. The dialogue was enigmatic. I couldn't string it together to make sense of it but I laughed out loud at parts. I liked it most when the woman was reading the weather report, which she did periodically throughout the play, and when the big guy sang. For the first 20 minutes I was afraid to look at my nieces, afraid they were bewildered and hating it. However, I began to hear laughs coming from them and eventually I saw that they were enjoying the performance as it was: a series of impressions -- some funny, some moving, some magical, some downright confusing. When the piece ended and the audiences did their curtain call, the figure on the monitor was naked. While we had seen only his face throughout the performance, we got to see his torso during the curtain call. I guess if one is to take a bow, one has to show more than one's face. And if you're going to be backstage the whole time, why not be naked? Maybe this sums up the piece - unexpected, titillating, and it makes sense in a way.
As a spectacle, the piece was too contained or too small for the On the Boards space. The theater, which seemed to have about 300 seats, was packed that night, which speaks well of Seattle. But the style of the theater did not do the piece justice. In New York, it had been performed at PS122 and I can imagine what it would have been like there. The audeince would have felt more like they were inside the piece, proximity to the actors would have been much closer, allowing the audience to feel more involved, and the visuals would have been far more striking. Sittting near the back of the theater, I had the sense that I was watching a piece rather than experiencing it. And with a piece like this, experiencing it is the way to go.
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