Warren Street Festival

REVIEWS REVIEWS REVIEWS 5 Evenings. 75 Warren Street (July). Creative Research, an informal umbrella group of performers, sponsored a week of events by associates and friends, each evening featuring four to six performances of dance, music, film, and poetry readings as well as the standard brand one-person show. The bare loft, with its minimal technical resources, was a low-key set-up for both the sketches of experienced performers and the initial peices by newer ones. Ideally, this situation should have turned up plenty of minor surprises, works saturated with personality , originality, and just plain idiosyncratic talents which are performance's strongest qualities. That these delights were in short supply is somehow consistent with such enterprises, which always contain hints of Vanity Fairs, and at the same time, a little disappointing -is the genre itself getting soft down at the farm club level? Aside from the accepted quota of bad acts, most were simply unremarkable. Yet a couple of positive points did seem clear. First, the large number of dance performers as a group made up an across-the-board exception to the rule of little interest, showing that the idea of a "downtown" dance continues to develop and attract thoughtful performers. And further, the week of events was well-attended, demonstrating that a constant audience remains fascinated with this most unpredictable of art formats. Some brief comments on individual performances (I attended four of the five nights): PETER ROSE improvised with some of the props and activities from his the circular heavens: objects pulled out of a garbage can (a folding chair, a suit of clothes), messmaking (cat litter spread on the floor, liquid spilled from an overturned box of bottles), dance-like movement (a sort of jig while putting on the suit). His actions were accompanied by a semi-intelligible audiotape which turned out to be Joyce's reading of Finnegan's Wake. The tone was uncharacteristically subdued and tentative with occasional flashes of Rose's intense presentational attitude and emphatic timing. The first two-thirds of ERIC BOGOSIAN's piece was preparatory; a woman in a dressing gown applied garish make-up while Bogosian moved around adjusting audiotape equipment which played diatribes spoken by alternating male and female voices. Bogosian then applied make-up to himself and the woman changed into a black satin pants suit. Finally, the pair stood near the audience, the woman repeating Bogosian's whispered fascist, sexist statements. Some real dramatic meanness threatened to develop at this point, but the elements of Aggression Chic-Germanic decadence, partial nudity, gender switches, loudspeaker sloganeering, the woman-as-puppet and man-as-despot im37 WARREN STREET FESTIVAL ages-remained undeveloped hints as the piece ended where it could have begun. EILEEN MILES read prose anecdotes of lesbian life and love in the city in a nervous manner which involved lots of cigarette lighting and beer drinking. As writing, the episodes were no great shakes but were entertaining enough as filtered through her wise-cracking personality. A coda to her urban jitters occurred hours later when she ran, laughing, past Magoo's windows and disappeared up Sixth Avenue in a headlong sprint. FRANK CONVERSANO intermittently performed some dance-like movement while constantly adjusting a transistor radio's wandering signal. All the while-and it was a while-RANDI FAIN lay slumped over at a desk. This hermetic and unfocussed action ended in an obscure climax when a stream of red glitter dropped from Fain's clenched hands and Conversano snatched up the desk. JACOB BURKHARDT showed a fiftyish film, a sort of Son of Pull My Daisy which featured set-pieces of furtive gay dockside sex, an argument between a man and a woman, a poker game with outlandish stakes, an armed robbery of the other players by one of them, his escape and accidental dropping of the loot on the street. All of these scenes were set to a jazz soundtrack and edited in a quick, energetic style. Unlike most such quasiadolescent movies, this one was well made and fairly entertaining. CAROL PARKINSON played dissonant chords on an electric organ while JUDY RIFKA chanted and shouted some indistinguishable words. Visual accompaniment was comprised of slides...