Northwest New Works Festival Round-Up

Back when we were in college, one of our favorite theatre professors down at the University of Oregon was Grant McKernie. McKernie was an expert in experimental theatre and performance, and would occasionally tear up while recounting a particularly moving production by someone like Eimuntas Nekrošius. The challenge he always faced was convincing skeptical students that radical experimentation in performance wasn't just weirdness for weirdness's sake, or vapid pretension masquerading as high-brow art, but that in fact it could be extremely liberating. As he put it once, "Sometimes, you just need a camel to walk across the stage for no reason."

Attending the Northwest New Works Festival at On the Boards on Saturday, we tried to keep that in mind. A veritable who's who of Pacific Northwest performing artists set out to present challenging new work in experimental performance. Some of it was good, some was incomprehensible, and, surprisingly, very little of it was awful.

In terms of sheer ambition, Portland's Liminal Performance Group takes the cake with The Theory of Love. More than any other group, Liminal integrated technology and mixed-media deep into their performance, so that the performers were interacting constantly, in diverse ways, with video, still images, music, and more quotidian props. The piece takes as its subject love, in all its diverse forms and representations, collecting not just opera arias and pop song lyrics but classical poetry, erotic painting, biological research and archaeological finds. Two lecturers take turns narrating such information or singing more or less a capella songs, set to a rough techno soundtrack. A group of three helpers take turns singing back-up or further demonstrating concepts by drawing them out on an easel. The sum total of the performance seems to be to present this massive topic of love, so that the viewer is overwhelmed with the enormity of what is one of our deepest and most widely shared experiences. At the same time, it struck us as a pretty cerebral approach to a pretty instinctual subject. But again, points for ambition and execution.

For our money, our favorite performance was by another Portland troupe, Hand2Mouth Theatre. A troupe of performers working in music, clowning, and comic performance, they were definitely a crowd pleaser. Repeat After Me is a work roughly based on what it means to be American. The performers wear various stars and stripes-themed costumed. They sing songs like "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" and "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue." They have a pie eating contest only to follow it with a re-enactment of Abu Ghraib prison-torture. By turns funny and troubling, despite a lack of plot or narrative, the performance holds together around its malleable concept.

A group working in a similar vein, Seattle's Helsinki Syndrome, wasn't as successful. Main Event lacked a cohesive central concept (at least insofar as we could discern, unless you count their own description as "a show about life) and was subsequently harder to get into. The performers were definitely up to snuff though, and technical aspects of the show--particularly the use of a parachute to various ends--was more ambitions than what we saw of Hand2Mouth. Like Hand2Mouth, Helsinki Syndrome directly engaged the audience, creating a sort of pep rally dynamic with the performers as the cheerleaders or pep squad. But despite strong performers and occasionally hilarious (and one rather shocking) bits, it didn't seem to entirely come together.