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KVICW 'Vent Blog Kyle Kaufman Michael Joyce No event more amply demonstrates Small Press Traffic's value as a finetuned barometer ofexperimental writing than the annual Poets TheaterJamboree, a three-night offering ofinnovative performance work (see www.sptraffic.org). January 27, 2006, saw the finale of this three-day event. To begin, as you'll see, with last pieces first: In The Late Education ofSasha Wolff, or, The Son and Heiress Shonni Enelow calls out skeletal back-story and character names as the players mount the stage. The Late Education, flamboyant and highly confident, draws from the imagery of successive countercultures (beatnik to riot grrl), inserting the worldly-wise figure ofporn-star Jenna Jameson, presented as a manifestation of Sartre's Saint Genet. The play bursts its seams, insisting on a convention-shattering hyperkinesis and culminating in the hijacking (in a play concerned with hijacking) ofthe infamous D.A. Pennebraker scene of Dylan mutely dropping cue cards to the score of his "Subterranean Homesick Blues." Over Dylan's familiar voice, Taylor Brady, as Sasha, drops the cards and declares a Utopian world via "personal flying machines." The characters in Géraldine Kim's Donning Cheadle move into and tentatively out of identity crises, as the characters Kim, a Korean American writer (played by the blonde Caucasian Malia Jackson), and Don Cheadle, the African American character actor, explore their metafictional relationship. Is Don Korean American? Is Kim Don? Where does one go once one realizes one is a character? The anxiety of post-identity politics amid the intrusive stock-character realities of daily life remain unresolved, as the characters carry on, Waiting for Godot. But it's 2006, so the tramps are camcording the whole thing, arguing over who Pfilm and who holds the camera. Margaret Tedesco's "Short Dramatic Monologue" B-RoIl, the nee, not the performers, enacts doubt and anxiety. B-RoITs two rienting monologists (frequently sharing one character's "I") retell¡imple story of an unusual encounter: Out walking with friends, the ?" is hit on the back of the head by a faceless man with a prancing side-to-side gait. The monologists incessantly modify the story, repeating divergent versions, disavowing narrative mastery with a presentation alternately dynamic and all but mumbled. Each gesture opens speculation; the textures of the telling possess power equivalent to what's told. Utilizing dance, storytelling, audience intervention, film, livedrawing , and dialogue, B-RoIl sketches an emotionally detached iteration of its mystical—and never revealed—central figure. Its performance is most disturbing when, at what appears to be the end, the stage erupts with a montage of violently explosive and blindingly edited grainy blobs over a discordant electronic score. This segues into a heavenly vision of a woman (eerily familiar as an "early 80s" image) floating before us in some unknown bluescreen ether, staring intently, vacantly out. Between these playlets, Brent Cunningham offers a four-part tribute to the late aleatory great Jackson Mac Low, underscoring Mac Low's precise methodological discipline. While the above-mentioned contemporary pieces largely avoid offering the generative "how" of their making, Cunningham carefully presents a "how" for each Mac Low work, underscoring the formal discipline in Mac Low's use of chance and constraint. The pieces themselves provide a generous and surprisingly playful counterpoint to those of writers who could easily be Mac Low's grandchildren. To end, then, with first pieces last: The evening commences with several unannounced recordings of Mac Low's, ranging from quiet, off-kilter melodies to primal, mantric sound-surges. Nervous laughter attests to the persistence of their unsettling power. A live, four-poet performance of Piece for Recorder, One Hand Moving (1961) is followed by two other pieces that complete the full range ofMac Low's vision. Keyboardist David Buuck performs the challenging Gatha in Cfor Theresa Salomon (2001-02). Gatha requires the performer to translate a grid-score of words, composed entirely of letters from the seven-pitch classes of C major, into the musical notation ofthat pitch class. Buuck accomplishes the chore with virtuosity. Is That Wool Hat My Hat?, an extended pulse of four simultaneous voices intoning chance-determined variations of the title, locates an intriguing and overlooked...