Hysteria Never Looked So Good

The natural sciences and art have a long history of inspiring and informing one another. In Witness Relocation's Dancing vs. The Rat Experiment, and in The New Stage Theatre Company's Some Historic/Some Hysteric, science and art collide as the biological undercurrents determining human behavior—and their study—are exposed. Dancing vs. The Rat Experiment, unscripted segments play out like a dance-theatre anarchist's utopia, leading to loosely structured mayhem bursting with energy and color. It is a cheeky commentary on the game of elimination played out by rats in a maze, said to speak largely about our species. After In A Hall in the Palace of Pyrrhus at the Ice Factory Festival in New York, Schriebstück at the Bangkok International Fringe Festival, Dancing vs. Blood on the Cat's Neck and Bangkok Nutcracker at the Patravardi Theatre in Bangkok, as well as a fistful of other equally irreverent works, director/choreographer Dan Safer and Witness Relocation bring us a show that takes John Calhoun's 1964 Scientific American article, "Population Density and Social Pathology," as its premise—to deliver a message about the zones of freedom we enjoy in spite of the games of elimination played out to reduce the stress of overpopulation. In this regard, the show is Cagean: parameters are given, but from night to night, the audience may be witnessing a new turn of events. If one actor-dancer wins the real-time game of elimination on one night, he or she may lose it on another.

The show goes beyond Brecht's smoking theatre and beyond his sports arena theatre: it makes you jump right out of your seat and yell at the actors onstage. Meanwhile, they are getting drunker and rowdier, one-upping each other in an increasingly riotous game of survival. You can't but get involved, especially if one of the players cheats, which is what happened on the night I attended. The audience vociferously shooed her offstage, in a triumphant and uproarious gesture to uphold fair play. Whether this was the result of a social politics put into practice in the theatrical arena or the sick fun of games such as this, I can't say. But the spirited atmosphere—the haphazard, participatory ballgame, quality of the show—was enough to keep everyone on their toes.

Dancing vs. The Rat Experiment opens with the nine actor-dancers (and the show's co-creators), lying on the floor onstage in neat rows in their underwear, irreverently reading magazines while tropical Hawaiian music blares from the loudspeakers and the audience patiently waits for something to happen . . . which takes a painfully long time. A spotlight on one of the performers introduces the first of a succession of short scenes, many of which consist of rough-hewn dance duos and trios, until a buzzer by sound designer Tim Schellenbaum cuts her off. The performers then rush back onstage to dress up in a motley assortment of punk-rock-meets-burlesque costumes designed by Pandora Andrea Gastelum and the company, one of many ways in which this work is collaborative. We are informed, via the use of placards: THIS IS PART ONE. A voiceover by Obie-Award winning actor and La MaMa veteran Richard Armstrong narrates from John Calhoun's article.

Thomas Malthus, we are told, suggested that vice is the often neglected byproduct of overpopulation. So Calhoun subjects a population of wild Norway rats to the test, only to discover that by the end of 27 months of confined life in a quarter-acre enclosure, the population had stabilized at 150 adults, though a population of 5,000 was expected given the rats's normal reproductive rate. The rising population density had given rise to stress, resulting in miscarriages, neglect of maternal functions, sexual deviation, cannibalism, frenetic overactivity, and pathological withdrawal from which individual rats emerged only to eat or drink. The performers are introduced, each doing a short solo for the crowd so we can place our bets on them and cheer them on, as if this were a poor theatre version of an East Village pageant, or...