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Fresh Terrain: A Performance Art/Theatre Festival and Symposium (review)
- Theatre Journal
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 55, Number 3, October 2003
- pp. 519-522
- 10.1353/tj.2003.0117
- Review
- Additional Information
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Theatre Journal 55.3 (2003) 519-522
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Fresh Terrain: A Performance Art/Theatre Festival &Amp; Symposium. Co-produced by the University of Texas at Austin's Department of Theatre and Dance and New York's P.S. 122. Austin, Texas. 22-26 January 2003.
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P.S. 122 has established itself in New York as a forum for new innovative performance practices in dance, theatre, and performance art. University theatre departments, on the other hand, are known [End Page 519] more for training students in performance traditions, often emerging from practices based in psychological realism. So it is something of an event when The University of Texas at Austin collaborates with P.S. 122 to host a weekend of performance art/theatre as part of the departmental season. Curated by P.S. 122's Mark Russell, an alumnus of UT's Theatre Department, Fresh Terrain offered seven distinct styles of new performance over a four-day period, combined with two days of symposia. The featured artists were New York's Richard Maxwell, Big Art Group, Ann Carlson, and Universes; Toronto's da da kamera; Diana Szein-blum of Buenos Aires; and Austin's Rude Mechs.
The festival was broadly termed "performance theatre," combining elements of performance art, dance, spoken word, and the visual arts. None of the works allowed spectators passively to let the experience wash over them; they all insisted on active intellectual engagement. Although the festival was marketed as a forum for cutting-edge work, none of the pieces were new. They ranged in age from two to twelve years since their premieres. A secondary facet of the festival came three weeks later, featuring performances created by UT students in collaboration with Ann Carlson, Gamal Chasten from Universes, and the Rude Mechs.
Richard Maxwell's Drummer Wanted, performed by Ellen LeCompte (Mother) and Pete Simpson (Frank), offered a melodramatic narrative that at times felt incestuous. Frank's doting Mother nurtures him through the physical, emotional, and legal fallout from the injury he sustained from a motorcycle accident. This relationship, which feels very white, suburban, and middle-class, is subordinate to the style of acting Maxwell has created. The performance of the script was intentionally understated with occasional bursts of controlled emotions. Responses to Maxwell's style are as varied as audience members (see Reagan, Theatre Journal 54.2). The combination of melodramatic text and flat performance provokes the question of acceptable norms of emotion in performance. What does an audience need to understand the depth of an argument, or disappointments, hopes, and excitements of characters in performance? One must be an active audience member to derive meaning from Maxwell's piece.
Requiem for Tesla, written by Kirk Lynn, directed by Shawn Sides, and created by Rude Mechs, is a biographical/psychological interpretation of inventor Nikola Tesla, presented as a 1950s science fiction extravaganza. Michael Raiford's set performs as fully as the actors—with video projections, [End Page 520] hundreds of light bulbs, a working Tesla Coil (created by Pete Whitfill), and multiple fluorescents forcing the audience literally to feel the electricity onstage. The sound of electricity and the smell of heated electric objects turned on and off complement the visual stimulation of the set. At one point, almost every electric object is turned on, creating a palpable heat in the theatre. Lynn's script aided by Sides's direction moves quickly, giving the audience seemingly limitless information about Tesla's life and experiments with Freudian psychology and electricity. Controlled repetitive dance sequences signal both Tesla's Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and a suppressed erotic energy.
The use of technology as a critical element of performance was repeated by Big Art Group in Shelf Life directed by Caden Manson (a graduate of UT's Department of Theatre and Dance). Three video cameras positioned downstage documented the actions of the performers, which were shown on three video screens linked across the front of the stage. The audience could see the performers' heads above the screens and their torsos on the video screens. The success of each Shelf Life performance depends on the...