Vanishing Pictures by Beverly Brown, Ruth Maleczech (review)

retaliated with the synthesized sounds of technology. While the machine is often the postmodernist 's answer to the romantic's abyss, the contemporary pathetic fallacy (of technology-with-a-will) is the more interesting in that human invention does reflect the characteristics of its creator. It is not too far off the mark to say that Night Voices was a sort of 2001: A Space Odyssey in minor key; in a small way, Davis and the voice did for radio what Dave and Hal did for the computer. The thought of a technology tearing away from its humanist foundations by its own volition is both exhilarating and terrifying; and when Davis rushed from the F.F. to pull the plug, the joy of fear avenged faded into pity for a creature dead and silenced. Beth Anderson's Hedgemony HodgePodge was a collection of exercises (sometimes tedious, sometimes humorous and sweet), poems with sound as text, short narratives with or without a brooding B-flat accompaniment , and musical pieces for flute, piano, and ocarina. The sound poems worked with repetition, which can be as boring as it is mesmerizing,. but Anderson managed, more or less, to hold off the boredom with rambunctious delivery.Her reiterative permutations of the phrase/- .question "if-l-were-a-poet-what-would-l-say," came out sounding like a half-crazed yokel/hermit breaking out of silence on a hilltop under the stars. That was nice. The light-weight quality of word-play can be good, clean fun; a magic-square piece, Poem to Pauline, John & Martha, reduced Martha Graham's name to "Art-Hag." However, not all the text/sound poems were as sucq*Aful; after three minutes of "can't stand it I an't stand can't stand I can't it stand can't; 'this witness couldn't care, and standing was not even a possibility. Six Stories ina Series was a train of narratives HEGEMONY HODGEPODGE of personal catastrophe, rather like plot summaries of magazine stories from True Life or True Romance. The readers' voices provided the irony; they were naive and cheerful, with that special, depraved, "oh-by-the-way" quality of the Southern-Gothic mood. The musical pieces were distillations from medieval and folk traditions-light and soft with a slow and careful exploration of scale' They were full of "sweetness and light"-especially the final ocarina solo, "Prep4tration for the Dominant" which cleared one's mind of the occasionally pithy ironies of the preceding pieces and again filled the evening with air. NancyJones Beverly Brown and Ruth Maleczech, Vanishing Pictures. The Performing Garage (February). Vanishing Pictures, directed by Ruth Maleczech, and performed by Beverly Brown, is a current example of how the theatre world is absorbing attitudes from performance art. One might, in fact, call this piece with vocal music by Debussy, Ravel and Satie a performance art song of sorts. But it is not only music that makes the piece, it is the intertextuality of Poe's"The Mystery of Marie Roget," letters of Baudelaire, poems by the latter and Mallarme, and the film soundtrack of Murder in the Rue Morgue that really comprise the narrative. Maleczech's directorial approach is essentially semiological: how to turn language into signs. This she does often affectingly because she knows how to think visually: overlapping images on projected photographs concretize Baudelaire's obsession with Poe, small scale models of settings from the narrative suggest a poetics of space, slides projected on the body of the performer produce an eery gothicism that is at home in the Romanticism of this period piece. The small photographs that line the back border of the space suggest a subconscious acknowledgement of the lik between impressionism, which is the style of the piece, and the creation of photography, which is its generating spirit. (Maleczech has, incidentally, added photography to the already lush image repertoire of Mabou Mines, of which she is afolinding member.) If I have pondered the imagery too much it is because thaVs all there was of Vanishing Pictures for me. Beverly 1Brown, who worked clopely with Maleczech in shaping the material , performed it without penetrating beyond the surface of technique. Maleczech directed...