Jill Kroesen; Peter Gordon (review)

it with the focus on how to imagize the text, almost as if that were a problem to be solved. Maleczech, whose first directorial effort this is, is a good director but her work doesn't express any involvement with the text, or urgency on her behalf. It is as if Vanishing Pictures exists solely in terms of its performance vocabulary, yet is unable to speak. VANISHING PICTURES The lack of soul that is apparent in the work of third wave theatre avant-gardists is in part responsible for the crisis of that world. Many people now have the skills to execute work but not the burning need to do what they are doing. So, while I applaud the care Maleczech took in finding Images to dramatize the text, I cannot find necessity in herwork with It.Doing "takes" on gothicism, pornography, Grand Guignol, symbolism, and the romantic imagination is not enough because takes are only copies of a vision, not a vision of their own. Vanishing Pictures is the first piece of Recher -chez, the studio in the East Village founded by Maleczech and Lee Breuer who initiated the place to investigate the increasingly intertwined aesthetics of performance art and theatre. As such it exists to investigate the difficult area of performance vs. acting which is one of the most provocative dichotomies in the world of performance today. The larger significance of Re-cher-chez is, of course, the fact that it is the only formal studio in the country that provides an alternative to Stanislavsky-style training and all its off-shoots. That is a tremendous hope for the training of a new generation of artists who will have the opportunity to absorb and build upon the experiments of twenty-years of avantgarde performance, in a laboratory setting, and under the guidance of experienced performers . Bonnie Marranca JillKroesen; Peter Gordon. Sguat Theatre (February). Like all kinds of current art, music-performance now looks out at the question of audience as much as it looks in at its own processes . Economic motives and the resulting dominant cultural conservatism of the day figure here, as does the high level of recording business activity where all is in flux. Rock has the audience numbers of course, but it also lures art-music with big bucks and a kind of glamor-fame (as opposed to prestige-fame) which exert a tremendous pressure on experimentalism to succeed. So the downtown club scene is overrun with born-again conceptualists who are "intrigued" with the idea of rock and roll as if it were simply a new kind of old suit to put on. These "artists" play at rock's forms and roles-the pose is all-ignoring a history (and common sense) which clearly shows that the greatest acts add up to something more than calculated attitudes. Two obvious and available measures of musical sincerity for such experimental-rock attempts are shifts in venue (from performance spaces to rock clubs) and the cold fact of a recording. A recent twin bill by performer-musicians Jill Kroesen and Peter Gordon illustrates how their work might affect and be affected by such circumstantial crossovers. The Squat Theatre's space has become a notable venue for blues, jazz, and new music which draws on those idioms. Kroesen led off with a solo version of her mock-innocent, "abnormal love" song-theatre, material known for some time now as the Lou and Walter Story in a variety of performance formats. With their cartoonish lyrics (sample title: I Really Want To Bomb You, "Russia's love song to the USA") and minimalist bluesy music (simple melodies repeated at length, usually played on an electric piano), her work always risks terminal archness. The largescale Lou and Walter productions (big cast, elaborate sets, musical comedy costumes) have swamped her idiosyncratic skills with a deliberately giggly payfulness which presents something more like a smarmy home theatrical than a serious voyage into some truly funny weirdness. Kroesen's solo acts using the same material have always seemed more compelling, even genuinely moving, as her low-pitched voice, wavering pitch, and only adequate piano-playing skills somehow enhance a mood of soulful isolation, filling...