Better, Stronger by Ed Bowes (review)

Sellers all used plot lines as vehicles for their gaggery, and if, contrariwise, Laurie Anderson , Julia Heyward, Eleanor Antin, and other current performance artists use technical and stylisitic formalities as vehicles for their narratives, the Kipper Kids invent personae (sketchy as they may be) as means to the realization of humorous (in fact, often hysterically funny) imagery, and Bob & Bob realize humorous (in fact, often hilariously dumb) situations in the evocation of personae . Are the personalities taking over from the storytellers? No, they are just augmenting the performance art field with another possibility. Peter Frank Joan Jonas, The JuniperTree. 112 Mercer Street, (December). Joan Jonas was orginally commissioned to produce The Juniper Tree, a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, as a children's show. She continued to develop it into a full scale performance piece to evolve a narrative of epic domestic relationships and complex images of transformati6n in her intuitively arranged imagistic method. Her final solo performance version of the piece walked the line between obfuscation and the creation of truly mysterious effects, a risk inherent in the attempt. The story (which involves jealousy, murder, a frame-up of a loved one, cannibalism, transformation , epiphany, and justice) is told on tape throughout the performance. The visual images, performed on a stage characterized by a bright contrast in colors of chinese red and white, and the recorded story line proceed disconnectedly, alternately foreshadowing , reflecting, or recalling each other. Likewise, single images are THE JUNIPER TREE manipulated to represent several things. A tin roof swinging suspended on ropes, for instance , suggests a cradle, a window, a falling millstone. A ladder is both a tree and a shamanistic site of transformation (a stunning bit of business when Jonas reverses a red kimono with white lining). Dances and music (songs chosen and sung by Simone Forti) serve to further evoke an associative ambiance. Jonas's treatment of this tale is full of personal ritual. At one point, she holds a box of human bones, unrevealed to the audience. And throughout a large portion of the piece, she uses the persona of the evil woman in the story to create a kind of witchcraft. At times, Jonas's involvement in this fairy tale with images from personal and universal myth produces merely curious associations; at other times, moments of highly symbolic significance. Dale Worsley Ed Bowes, Better, Stronger. The Kitchen (March). Better, Stronger is one of a new genre of videotapes built around cinematic narrative rather than electronic experiment or artful research. Its lavish funding (NYSCA, NEA, Rockefeller Foundation) and WNET sanction (produced for that station's TV Lab) would seem to indicate a real breakthrough for this recent video development. Unfortunately, Bowes' tape barely achieves an unremarkable technical competence despite all the money, and its amateurish acting and incoherent story line display naivete and pretension instead of any innovative ideas. As "Lana," a Californian actress flown to New York to complete some film looping, Karen Achenbach races around like Diane Keaton on speed, mouthing a breathless, sing-song dialogue meant to be idiosyncratic and catchy but which seems only idiosyncratic (Achenbach is credited with script collaboration ). The rest of the cast struggles to say their lines-all written in that stylemuch less express anything. Lana's work (we see her loop an argument with a woman weight-lifter) and her adventures (an accident on the street, a visit to an after-hours club) are equally unconvincing in this film which mistakes sheer movement for significant action and an incoherent structure for enigmatic reality. The other non-actors in Better, Stronger reveal, in different degrees, every nuance of strained self-consciousness. One exception is a wonderful found object of a family of characters, a heavyweight Italian family named Trapani. A sequence in which some Trapani sons maul, paw, and tease their "actress cousin" Lana while riding around aimlessly in a car has the energy and comic flair of a grounded improvisation. Apparently, Better, Stronger is scheduled for 45 a future showing on WNET. Too bad, because video as a medium has not delivered on many of its promises, and Bowes' work appears to add a new category to the list of failed possibilities.One...