John Leonard
Just saw a performance of various pieces at the ODC theater, presented under the aegis of sfSound. Highlight: the eye (unblinking), by David Bithell, for a sextet augmented by computer-controlled lights, which mostly illumined each player only so long as he or she was playing, though there were occasions on which that wasn't the case, including, quite effectively, a section in which no one played anything at all, but the lights came on and off at intervals while the players looked around dartingly. It was a very effective use of silence, and stands, as a bit of experimentalism, in sharp contrast to Implied Violence, a horrendous theater troupe that performed before The Dead Science at 21 Grand on Friday. Not only was IV's piece extremely long, it was composed nearly entirely of played-out absurdist tics and generically avant-garde gestures. One part, which they saw fit to repeat at least four times, seemed basically to be Lucky's monologue made boring (and augmented by some idiocy that was, I suppose, intended to "comment" on class or the bourgeoisie (though the complaint seemed to come down to "how tacky they are, not like we sophisticates!") or something along those lines, because, well, you've got to have some of that, right?). In fact I would say that the reason it was so uninteresting and phenomenologically interminable was that it seemed to be intended to freak the squares, but there were no squares in the audience (I pay myself this compliment), nor could one reasonably have expected there to be squares in the audience, so the only thing it could do was display itself to the audience as something that would freak the audience's stereotype of a square, were any such squares to be present or, for that matter, exist. And even as an exercise in self-satisfied group identification it was trite. (There were other reasons I didn't like it but that's the chief one, methinks.) Anyway, David Bithell, the eye (unblinking), it's good. In fact everything at the concert was good except for Helmut Lachenmann's Serynade, which nevertheless drew extremely enthusiastic applause, as did Implied Violence. Go figure.
Comments
on 2007-06-26 6:13:57.0, standpipe commented:
John Leonard
and, further, on 2007-06-26 8:46:29.0, ben wolfson commented:
What about him?