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Reviewed by:
  • The Ko Festival of Performance
  • Kermit Dunkelberg
The Ko Festival of Performance. Amherst, Massachusetts. 1107– 08082004.

For the past thirteen years, the Ko Festival of Performance (produced by Ko Theater Works) has brought innovative new theatre to audiences in the western Massachusetts town of Amherst. The company and festival are named for the forty-ninth hexagram of the I Ching, "Ko," which describes revolution as a shedding of skin. The festival strives [End Page 117]to shed conventional approaches to the creation and presentation of performances.

This year the festival was organized around the theme of "The Document, the Documenter, and the Documented, celebrating the preservation of knowledge, and lamenting its loss." As the facilitator of postperformance conversations between artists and audiences, I was able to track this theme through the various works of the festival. Sources for the performances included ancient texts, twentieth-century political history, autobiography, and biography. Beyond the preservation of knowledge and its loss, the performances raised issues of the manipulation, falsification, and untrustworthiness of documents. In all of the performances, the performers, directors, and designers were documenters. In some cases, they were also the documented.

As is traditional at Ko, the festival opened with a performance on the Amherst College Observatory Lawn by Ralph Lee's Mettawee River Company (Salem, New York). This year's piece, The Heroic and Pathetic Escapades of Karagiozis, centered on the title character: a trickster figure of a Mediterranean shadow puppetry tradition dating back to the fourteenth century. Like Arlecchino in the commedia dell'arte tradition, Karagiozis is an Everyman with insatiable appetites for food and mischief.

Lee had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to research the surviving Karagiozis puppetry tradition in Turkey and Greece. Setting a precedent for the use of documentation throughout the festival, Lee chose not to reproduce the style of this folk tradition, but to adapt two tales from the Greek tradition to Mettawee's own style. Rather than shadow puppets, we were treated to whimsical masks, puppets ranging from finger-size to twelve feet tall, and crazy dragon contraptions, all accompanied by a three-piece jazz combo. Evan Zes as Karagiozis demonstrated remarkable physical comedic skill, and a wonderful sense of scale. A gesture (or Brechtian gest, in its most popular form) might begin in his belly, travel to a finger, and then become a full-bodied run around the playing area.

The festival next moved indoors, to Hampshire College's Emily Dickinson Theatre. Ko Theater Works' Out of the Garden: A double bill of Eve and Exilebrought together two pieces written and performed by actor-dancer Lesley Farlow, both based on ancient source materials.

Exile, directed by Mitchell Polin, filtered the story of Medea through the contemporary stories of convicted child murderers Susan Smith and Andrea Yates. The juxtaposition of a figure from Greek myth and tragedy with contemporary figures known primarily from journalistic accounts (an episode of the television program American Justicefocused on Smith played in the lobby) humanized the archetype, while bringing a sense of tragic distance to the acts of Smith and Yates. Exilebegan with the sound of water—evoking Medea's exile, the act of childbirth, and the fate of Susan Smith's children. (The sound score was by Polin.) Hieratic gestures reminiscent of Greek vase paintings gave way to a more quotidian movement vocabulary as Farlow slipped us into the contemporary. In a long, affecting passage, Farlow first sat listening to a Johnny Cash rendition of Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." Then, evoking pregnancy, labor, and childbirth, she lugged four plastic bags (the number of Andrea Yates's children) filled with Styrofoam peanuts to separate locations, covered them with a blanket, and "put them to sleep." The bags, it turned out, were the insides of bean bag chairs—quintessentially suburban domestic objects. Farlow navigated between Medea's and Smith's feelings of betrayal, between the archetypal and the hyper-real. In the last moment, she transcended the creepy banality of the desperate acts of Smith and Yates by reaching back to Medea's cry of anguish, uttered in Euripides' ancient Greek.

Eve, directed by Janna Goodwin...

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