Fringe Lab: Experimental Performance 08/18/2011 3:06am

Editorial
Overview The 2011 Fringe was probably the best Fringe I've ever been to, and I've been going since 1999 (though not every year consistently). For my first Fringe, I drove seven hours from the camp I was working at in northern Minnesota and went to one show--a one-woman show/Noh play about gender, aging, and shame that featured a middle-aged woman on a stationary bike surrounded by random household objects. I was mesmerized by the "real-ness" of it, and of the bohemian atmosphere Loring Park still had in those days, before the Loring Cafe and Amazon Books went away, replaced by ad firms and upscale shops. That "real-ness" was something I pondered on the first Saturday afternoon of the festival this year, while I drank iced tea at Hard Times and waited for the beginning of the show I was about to see. I wondered what I meant by "telling it like it ain't" in my first post. I was thinking of my years in high school theater--beginning with Man of la Mancha and ending with a woefully un-ironic production of The Music Man, with some jazz choir thrown in for good measure. As a cast and crew member in these productions, I remember feeling alienated and confused by the emotional content--nothing I had ever experienced in life correlated to either the wide-grinning, perky energy I often encountered or the over-the-top melodrama I occasionally encountered. What especially bothered me, though, was what sometimes happened in the green room after the latter example--someone would come in from having just done an incredibly emotional scene while the rest of us were just yammering away, and sometimes they'd join in the discussion, and other times they'd grab a soda from the machine and leave, and we wouldn't even stop to look up from our conversation. We weren't terribly moved by these musicals as an art form, and I don't think there was anything particularly life-changing about most of the shows we did, at least from an artistic standpoint (with the exception of Godspell, an experience I will never forget). So I'm guessing I wasn't the only one who felt alienated by the "thea-tray" in such a form--it was too codified, too artificial an experience for us to relate to. It felt like church. Eventually I came to the conclusion that art shouldn't feel like church. I went to a summer camp for teen playwrights, where we explored all sorts of different ways of writing and performing, and even went to a small black box theater festival that, if I remember correctly, was in the basement of some other theater (I think it was called the Sell the Cow Theater Festival). In the spring of my junior year, my English class took a trip to see Yang Zen Froggs in Moon Over a Hong Kong Sweatshop at Theatre de la Jeune Lune--a dark, surreal play in the best Jeune Lune style. By that time I was reading the Beatniks and Sylvia Plath, so there was pretty much no going back to the Music Man at that point. And then, in 1999, I went to my first Fringe--and from then on, it was my dream to someday be involved in the festival. Fast forward to 2002. I was 23 years old and a newly minted member of the Afunctionul artist collective. That summer, I blew my budget on my first Fringe multi-pass. At the time, Yoko Ono had just come through town at the Walker, and I had just finished Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter (a book about as groteque and carnivalesque and feminist-esque as you could ask for) and was in the middle of a book about the performance art of Carolee Schneeman. So I fully expected to have my mind blown, along with my budget. Let's just say that, but for a few notable exceptions, I was underwhelmed. Why? These were high-caliber actors who played in theaters around the Twin Cities all year, taking chances on exciting new plays. But what I saw was more perkiness and wide, uncomfortable grins...even in the show I'd looked forward to most, a revue of Kurt Weill songs. This year, I saw ten plays in as many days--and my only one of two regrets is dawdling too much on Saturday and getting to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock at five-thirty on the nose (they had just closed the doors a moment before I walked in). It wasn't exactly the Fringe marathon many people enjoy, but for me, it was more than enough. I saw strong beginnings and finished, polished work. I saw one-person shows that bent genres and tested boundaries. I saw plays about being from Minneapolis and plays that could be set anywhere. I saw a woman dress up as her Egyptian father and do a convincingly awkward rap number, I saw a man seduce a toilet, I saw an ambiguously gendered person (well, throughout most of the piece anyway) convincingly portray a bird, and I saw what might or might not have been an actual suicide via overdose on stage (my stomach was in knots until the guy got up and took a bow). It was so intense, so much to take in, that I had neither the time nor the energy to write about every single show in the way it deserved to be written about (my other regret). And, to my surprise and delight, I saw maybe three or four cheesy, uncomfortable grins the whole time. This was performance that, by and large, tells it like it is--powerful, intense, and real. It was everything I look for in experimental performance...and then some. A note on aesthetics One of the interesting things about Fringe is that it is perhaps the only event of the year that brings the “theatre crowd”—those who go to the Jungle, Mixed Blood, the Guthrie, and other similar venues—together with the theater-goers I will, for lack of a better term, collectively refer to as the “underground theater crowd,” including Bedlam, Barebones Collective, and Heart of the Beast. I sometimes wonder what each community makes of the other—there aren’t a lot of forums for the exchange of ideas on the subject. And yet I wonder whether each is able to fully understand and appreciate what the other has to offer for one very simple reason: aesthetic expectations. Those who pay a lot of money for tickets and get dressed for the theatre and retire to a quiet wine bar afterward to discuss the show expect a certain level of polish in both the performance and the aesthetics. Realism, abstract expressionism, surrealism, or minimalism—the artistic influence doesn’t matter, so long as the aesthetic appears fully realized and professional. Those who go to Bedlam romps and enjoy the $5 all-you-can-drink beer from plastic cups (well, that was the old days, anyway) would expect no less in the performance quality (and, indeed, after about a gallon of Black Label, would freely express their expectations, often while the performance was in progress). And back when Bedlam was on the West Bank, there was plenty of time to discuss the show afterward—the theater was only a short stumble away from the all-night Hard Times Café. But these theater-goers’ aesthetic expectations are different—perhaps altogether opposite. Too much polish would be off-putting—they’re looking for a raw, scrappy feel, a certain unfinished quality that, to this audience, is more “real.” The truth is that I think there’s less understanding of the “underground crowd” by the “theatre crowd” than the other way around. Many, if not most, of the artists in the Bedlam, Heart of the Beast, and Barebones communities—at least those who keep at it for years and years—are fully trained and experienced. They give the aesthetic an unfinished quality not because they don’t understand how to do anything else, but because they know it’s what their audience expects. Contrary to the views of what is now probably only a handful of grandparents and school administrators, it actually takes a lot of work to create a punk-rock look—brightly colored dyed hair, safety-pinned clothes, and God forbid, the manchild-with-facial-hair look we see everywhere today, all require forethought, time, and effort, if not very much money. Still, the creation of social norms, whether at the Heights or the Hexagon, invites the presence of iconoclasts. At the summer camp for teen playwrights, our instructors took us to the Guthrie one night. They asked us to dress as nicely as we could, to fit in with the respectable theatre crowd. Naturally, after hearing that, one of my friends decided to “punk out” for the occasion. He spent that afternoon dyeing his hair green and orange and spiked it into a single point—he lay on the common room couch for two hours while waiting for the glue to dry, adding a pair of 80’s punk sunglasses for a finishing touch. The whole effect was more Shinjuku than CBGB, but it achieved the desired results—the stares of the well-dressed Guthrie patrons and the ire of our instructors. There have been similar trends in the various punk and underground music scenes throughout the past thirty years or so—people going to punk shows wearing suits and ties. In fact, it's something a young punk named Cody Bourdot, who I interviewed last summer for my blog, commented on. We were talking about Uggs, but then he expanded his view to the punk scene, and any scene where everybody does the same thing to fit in, and he wondered aloud "why people fall in line like that." And I'm afraid I don't have an answer. But, to me, it's a phenomenon that will always invite the presence of iconoclasts. And that's why I'm glad there's a Fringe, and hope there's a Fringe for many years to come. Endnotes: the white paper elephant in the room One of the shows I saw this year was an incredibly ambitious, highly nerve-racking show called The Great Midwestern Drug Circus. In the mode of Antonin Artaud, one of the young actors began with the bold, accusatory statement that the rules of the theater were so prescribed, so dutifully followed by performer and audience, that he could kill himself on stage and we'd just sit there and watch (and maybe laugh, I thought, considering the uncomfortable titters going on around me throughout the show). Why? Because of the kitties, he said--it was the straw that broke the back of his already-broken life, which he'd made one final, desperate attempt to salvage meaning from by putting together a Fringe show. An hour's worth of screaming, running around, scary mask wearing, and literal mess-making later, the guy puts on a clown nose and a tutu and makes it look as though he's really injecting himself with a syringe. After he collapses on the floor, his companion climbs atop a box that's next to a white paper elephant and air-conducts a melancholy but uptempo song while, presumably, the guy on the floor is lapsing into a coma. In the end, the lights go black, and the guy leaps up and runs to the front, side by side with his companion, and they both take a bow, to the thunderous applause of the tens of people in the audience. Tens of people? Yep. This was not a sold-out show--nor, for that matter, were any of the shows I attended. (Fletcher and Zenobia sold out while my husband and I were in line, though--due mostly to the group of a hundred people who showed up just before we got there. How does a group of a hundred people spontaneously decide to go to to the theater? What group was it? Mormons? Jehovah's Witnesses? The Southwest High 25-year reunion? AA? I guess I'll never know.) So the reason my stomach was in knots the whole time during the Drug Circus was because the guy laid out an entirely plausible scenario by which a misguided and desperate person might come to end his life. As an artist, when you create something, if you're doing it right, you're putting your whole life on the line. So if it fails, you might feel (especially as a vulnerable young artist) that your whole life has failed. It's not an easy thing for anyone who isn't an artist to appreciate. It's not like making better widgets than the next guy--it's about everything you've ever seen, heard, felt, thought, or survived. So if you feel like your work is a failure, especially early on in your artistic career, it can be a wounding and deeply humiliating experience. And if people mock your art online, especially if it came from someplace deep and heartfelt, you might just feel ripped in half--and not very inclined to put yourself out there again. It was like that for me, in two of my three experiences as a Fringe artist. I know now, from reading years of comments and reviews and the like online, as well as from personal experience, that there are people out there who don't like something (or maybe that they feel like they can't like something) unless it's perfect. I'm not one of those people. The one thing I ask for is sincerity and heart. If I don't see it, or even the possibility for it, then I don't see much of a reason to like a show. We don't go to art for the technical aspects, or to behold works of genius in all their geniusness. We go to it for the message it contains--for what it tells us about our lives from the kernel of wisdom it contains. And wisdom doesn't always come in a polished package. It isn't always a feel-good message. But it gives us a depth of understanding and perspective of the things we experience in life. There's a great deal of show diversity in the Fringe. But there's not a great deal of diversity in the shows that sell out and get high kitty-marks. And that kind of success and exposure is great for those artists who receive it. But what I don't understand, what I've never understood, is this need to attack things that are "different" in something like the Fringe Festival. I've seen zero-kitty reviews of work I thought was brilliant. To me, that means either someone was offended that they didn't get it or were on some kind of personal vendetta against that artist. I do think the audience reviews were a little better this year than in years past--my theory is that it's because of the video previews. People know more about what they're getting into before they go to see a show. That means the audience for experimental shows is going to be more dedicated, which means more concentrated, which means smaller. If you follow in the footsteps of Antonin Artaud and Yoko Ono, you're not likely to break the bank unless you marry a Beatle. But you might get to share a little piece of your soul with someone else, and in so doing, feel a bit more at home in the world--like there's actually a community of people out there who "get" you and appreciate the things you make for it and give to it. So, maybe, a grant or two would be nice, but all you need, really, is love. That's what I've tried to give, fist over handful, in this blog--and what I hope to give to the Fringe, in one form or another, for many years to come. And I hope to spend more Fringes as emotionally engaged and fully present in mind, body, and spirit as I was this year. It's the kind of experience that makes me glad I'm alive, waiting to discover what's just around the bend.
Headshot of Sarah Wash
Sarah Wash
Fringe Lab: Experimental Performance : All art is an experiment. But some experiments are more…well, experimental…than others. With some, you know pretty well what the results will be. With others, you can't be sure. What do you get when you mix baking soda with vinegar? Carbon dioxide (and, on occasion, an enthused five-year-old). What do you get when you put on a show and there's no one to see it?