Quixotic Fusion - "Paix Reveuse"
at The Madrid Theater
17, 18, 19 June 2010
3805 Main, Kansas City, Missouri 64111
After dress on WednesdayPaix Reveuese
This time the show focused mostly on the music, composing, performing and less on dance choreography. Most of the movement performance was in the aerials. Basically the entire set of performances was packed with the 10pm Saturday performance a little less so. The Madrid is a great space for dance, I've spent enough time shooting salsa here, but with a forward-extended space it begins to get a little packed with seats.
This was actually a somewhat smaller show all around with a larger show coming up shortly between Quixotic and the symphony.
First, let me get my gripes out of the way then we can get on to the neat stuff. One is totally minor but is one of my small "things" I look for, having been an early adaptor when desktop publishing came out in the early 1980s. The program. The second grip is the sound. I will handle that mostly on another page because while it is an important one, it is certainly not limited to Quixotic or to this performance.
Gripe 1: This is teensy, tiny minor and will take more words than it is probably worth. The program was just about impossible to read, seemed to have been hastily assembled from various documents, with inconsistent formatting between them and ... worse for me, trying to use the program for photo IDs, the last few pieces with names and credits didn't seem to match up. I wasn't the only person who had problems with it including some young women near me. Usually it is old eyes like mine which have problems with Agate type - the very tiny type, 5.5 points.
Gripe 2: This is important but I will address it separately because Quixotic is hardly the only offender and because all of us with sense, (hello, special note to self) should have walked out of the range of that loud sound. One couple, right in front of the left speakers, did leave their table seats, I assume to another part of the room, though I didn't check to see where they went. Click at the following URL link to view a page for what is a more general problem. sound_and_hearing.htm
THE SHOW! - Heavy on light and sound with a constantly moving two-ring circus. Soloists and groups. Singers, instruments, dancers, aerialists, all criss-crossing. I am not sure how much the program mattered to the experience except to indicate that there were a series of moments leading in a general direction, less a narrative sense than a set of topics on the way to the final piece, Transcendance.
Not vignettes, each piece, more a representation of a concept, starting with "Closer to the Sun" moving to questions and concerns - "What is This" - "Passerby" - "So They Say" - "Undercurrent" - "Transcendence." This includes aerial choreography with two or four aerialists on the steel basket. For "Passerby" Megan Stockman takes the basket on a solo tour. I should note, that these are not pieces in which the curtain is closed and then opened again. They all run together, one merging into and with the next.
Along the way there are package performances by aerialists. Francois Volanger in a blue costume moves on the straps in "Bound" then later, near the end, Jillian St. Germaine, in a white costume identical in construction to Volanger's blue costume, does a near transcendent aerial number on a white cloth rig.
The strongest dance performance, was from Chris Stuart and Kimberly Cowen, mainly because Devotion was the only piece which was mainly just dance, no extra distractions or devices. Which is not to minimize it. These are good dancers. Even so, the piece was more poses than movement. The other dance movement was buried in devices. But then this show was intended as a vehicle featuring the music as the core. I don't want to describe the dance as just a filler but it was less (by design) than some of their other shows.
Singer, composer, musician Laura Scarborough is a constant thread through all the pieces, sometimes at the side of the performance and sometimes performing solo. And Shane Borth on violin, with Pan makeup on his eyes, is flat out evil, sometimes a player and sometimes a soloist, moving into or around most of the pieces in the show.
So how important is the string of themes? I'm not sure except as a conceptual framework to construct the show. For the audience it is probably less about any seeming narrative or set of concepts than it is about the experience of light, and sound and motion. The front table seats went for $93 for two and more than a hundred for three. General admission was $30. Quixotic is at least partially about being fashionable. So showing up is as much about watching a show as it is about showing off threads for the night. A social investment. A fashion accessory.
- 30 -
P.S.
So - let me get back to gripe #2 - sound levels. Quixotic is a fashion leader in entertainment in Kansas City. Quixotic should take that position and do everything they can not only to reduce sound levels and protect audiences but to safeguard the hearing of their musicians, dancers and other workers. Then make an issue with other groups.
Even if this is not to appease a "social agenda" of someone (i.e. moi) at least it should be a matter of personal self preservation for people who depend so heavily on their own hearing to make a living and to perform at top levels. At the level of performance Quixotic occupies, small things make big distinctions.
Laura Scarbourough and Megan Stockman in Passerby
Chris Stuart carries Kimberly Cowen in Devotion
Laura Scarborough
Jillian St. Germaine
Shane Borth
Francois Volanger
Francois Volanger and singer Laura Scarborough
Above and Below - Bows at the end of the show
Live Free - and a little Image History
Laura Jones in "Live Free" interacts with light patterns projected on a scrim between her and the front of the stage. The coordination between projections and actions was done smoothly enough to delight the audience and me. The shapes changed form from a compact ball or light, similar to the glow ball she also handled, to random lines in space, as here, to clouds and cloudy diaphanous shapes and video of aerialists.
This piece immediately reminded me of Gjon Mili photos published in 1945 and 1949.
Skater Carol Lynne (left) in March 1945 issue which inspired the light painting by Pablo Picasso above in 1949 issue of Life Magazine - both taken by Gjon Mili. The Picasso pictures are the more famous of the two mainly because of Picasso.
In the Life Magazine issue of March 26, 1945 (link), photographer Gjon Mili mounted 3/4-pound flashlights on the figure skates of Carol Lynne for a series of photographs. The photographs were revolutionary in concept and produced great swirling patterns of light streaks. In 1949, Mili showed these pictures to Pablo Picasso who was inspired to paint in the air with light in place of brushes, producing another series of photographs by Mili.
Mili pointed his camera in the dark, opened the shutter for the time it took to produce the light trails. The light trails came from small lightbulbs (continuous light) while electronic flash produces the images of the skater and Picasso.
Gjon Mili was the first photographer to photograph dance, sports and theater using electronic flash and stroboscopic light. His photographic work really starts in the 1930s with the greats of dance, as well as sports. His photographs led directly to the captured-in-air photographs imitated by so many photographers around the world today.
In 1923 Gjon Mili (about 19) came to this country from Albania to attend MIT where he and grad student Harold Edgerton got together. Edgerton developed and refined the strobe (he did not invent it - a common, understandable error). Edgerton was also one of our "Regional boys" being from Aurora, Nebraska where they have a small museum for him.
In the mid 1930's Edgerton traveled across the U.S. with his strobe equipment and his family. The equipment was in the trunk of the car and Edgerton was a missionary for electronic flash. Mili, in 1939 became a photographer for LIFE magazine. His photos of sporting events, of dancers and other performers transformed our visual sense of motion in photography in his time, with his work directly and in his influence on the wide range of other photographers who followed his trail. Mili spent more than four decades working for LIFE. Mili died in 1984.
http://burstoid.com/2009/06/28/gjon-mili
LIFE Magazine March 1945
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gjon_Mili
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