Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Friday, 02 November 2007
John Moran and Others: What if Saori Had a Party?
What if Saori Had a Party? (a.k.a. Saori's Birthday). Composed and directed by John Moran. Choreography by John Moran and Saori Tsukada. Production assistant: Celine Aguillon. Lighting by Yi Zaho. With Saori Tsukada (Saori), Joseph Keckler (Singing Telegram Man) and Katie Brook (The Baby). Running time: 45 minutes. At PS122, 150 First Avenue at East 9th Street, 21 October-4 November, 2007. Tickets and schedule information.
Katie Brook, Saori Tsukada and Joseph Keckler
attend Saori's curious birthday (and deathday)
party.
A Philip Glass protegé, composer John Moran has been working with dancer Saori Tsukada since 2003; this is their latest, a commission whipped up for PS122 within the space of six weeks. This parody of anime children's shows is a fleeting amusement -- precise, affecting, but fleeting nonetheless, memorable most for Moran's eclectic score, which distills various musics and sounds into something resembling an operetta, and Saori Tsukada's knowing takeoff on the all-surface, no-texture gleaming cheer and exaggerated pouting of children's television shows.
Hostess Saori lives in a computerised bubble; she greets every day, the warm sun that comes through the window, with a bubbly cheer, and this she can do because, her computerised companion tells her, she has no birthday. But she desperately wants one today, she wants a present, and before long a Singing Telegram Man (Joseph Keckler, possessed of a fine bass-baritone) arrives at her doorstep, bringing her a unique birthday present indeed: a baby (Katie Brook). But with the introduction of birth and reproduction, death is never far in the distance, and when Saori's clean well-lighted bubble bursts after she tries to bring the baby into the bubble with her, all is utterly lost, and Saori winds up writhing on the black floor (trimly but elegantly lit, circus-style, by Yi Zaho), dying and in anguish.
Saori Tsukada's task here is to bring a three-dimensionality to a two-dimensional figure, and to do so largely through movement (her own dialogue is almost entirely in Japanese, the contemporary Japanese that freely integrates English words like "computer"). The precision she brings to the stylised movements of anime (not unlike the exaggerated movements of children's show hosts here in the U.S., too) goes far to putting over the somewhat old-news revelation of the consciousness of death and the persistence of the memory of pain; she and Keckler, a telegram man who wouldn't be out of place in Mr. Rogers' neighborhood either, make a unique team, and Katie Brook's Baby, in a demure babydoll dress, becomes more watchable the more she explores the strangeness of the world into which she's been invited.
The running time isn't much longer than those old Pee-Wee's Playhouse episodes, and John Moran's playhouse appears to be in the same neighborhood: colorful, manic, and closed off from real experience, in an eternal childhood. The irony is that childhood itself brings the worm of mortality. What if Saori Had a Party? is very much in line with his other works that have drawn on popular culture for their formal structures (such as his 1989 Jack Benny! and the 1997 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), but, as Moran said as he introduced the piece last night, this is a piece composed for the "party" that appears to be the overarching concept for this season's programming at PS122. And if you're not hungover the morning after, the memory of a party, like those of most good parties, lingers pleasurably, but begins to dissipate not long after the music stops.
But if you like parties, you'll like What if Saori Had a Party? too; I did. And what better nights for parties than Friday and Saturday night? Final performances tonight and tomorrow at 8:30pm and this Sunday at 6:30pm.
Posted at 8.51 am in /Notices
Permanent link to this story
