performance

Review: Children Get Stuck Places Underground

A snake is an alimentary canal is a hole in the ground. In spite of some decades now of avant-performance and theater  under our collective mental belts, some still seek neatly tied up referential packages and will be puzzled by the shifting tectonic plates underlying performance/installation artist and writer Bethany Ides’ recent opera Children Get Stuck Places Underground, performed Friday and Saturday nights as part of Half/Dozen’s + Projects performance/installation series.  In her process blog for Children, Ides quotes Mister Rogers testifying before the United States Senate, “What’s important is you can pretend about things and dream about things that you don’t completely understand.”

And this is the point from which audiences enter into an Ides performance—memory, make believe, erudite reference, and dream—that is layered like a puff pastry, folded over again and again to make little pockets of coherence, little pockets of illumination, of meaning integrated into the complex whole. In Children, insides and outsides are conflated as the players are alternately in the hole, containers themselves, and at one point late in the game, at the edge of the hole peering down shouting garbled (swallowed, really) reassurances or remonstrations.

The players wore sashes to reference their Greek chorusness, frequently singing in unison squarely facing the audience, or rather singing over our heads. Beginning with video depicting the choir listening ear-to-the-ground to the voices below in a graveyard, to a beautiful section of the white-clad figures embedded in a green landscape, they then in silhouette pantomimed a slow swallowing to the sounds of a growling stomach, and they too were eventually swallowed by the earth, buried by blankets. The libretto referenced floods and wells and waiting for rescue; the melodies were innocent, almost sweet, but disonant because after all, the children did get stuck.

The 7 PM Saturday show felt loose, like the paint was wet, but Ides’ intensity is a firm hand on the rudder in a ritualistic performance of this nature, and Morgan Ritter, in particular, had the kind of convincing presence that can carry off this kind of show. As always with Ides, the performance is the tip of an iceberg.

POSTED: June 29th, 2010 | AUTHOR: admin | FILED UNDER: performance | No Comments »

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