We Review: Clockwork Reduction Live

"They should take off their left socks."

"Let's dance to Jesus."
"Let's talk about Jesus."
"It's a time to be jolly after all."

"It's like a wine disco."
"It's like hanging out covered in blood."

"We need some leap frog!"
"We need some Percosets."

Seattlest actually heard all of the above during Clockwork Reduction Live Friday night at Northwest Film Forum. Some of the words came from the mouth's of performers, others came from the audience, who were a part of the performance as well. They weren't uttered in that order, but may as well have been for all the sense we could make of the overall happenings.

The show was an attempt to re-make Andy Warhol's 1965 film "Vinyl," itself an interpretation of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. It was made years before Stanley Kubrick's vision of the book. Much as the people behind the event -- Seattle School -- love the original, they didn't want to simply film a new version of it. That wouldn't be in the Warhol tradition.

Instead they decided to film a bunch of actors and a bunch of directors in front of a live audience in one room without benefit of a script. In a second room, they put another audience and played them two live feeds from the first room. A camera and microphone roved the second room and audience members told the directors what they wanted the actors to do. When the directors in the first room chose to pass on an instruction, they had to do so without words.

We decided to go because we tend to be intrigued by promises of weirdness and because so much else of what Seattle School does has been so good and well loved.

The best we can say about what we experienced is that great artists are those who don't have a fear of failing, spectacularly, in public. Seattle School failed, spectacularly, at this experiment.

In the first room actors moved fluidly through the space, but there was so much freedom none of them felt a need to relate to what the others were doing. Meanwhile, the silent directors tried to do their jobs, but with so many voices coming at them from the other room, they had no concrete vision to offer the actors, who could tell. If actors need anything, it's a vision to reign them in.

In the second room, we didn't even have the ability to hear what was being said in the first room. We just had two video feeds, one from way upstage looking at the six directors miming what they wanted, and the other from behind the actors. (That actually happened to be the best part of the show because there was usually a tighty-whitey clad ass of one actor or another parked in front of it.)

With such little connection to the filming, the room-2 audience, after a brief stint of attempted creativity and real directorial-interaction with the first room, devolved into simply joking with each other instead. Unfortunately, the only "direction" that didn't get lost in translation was one of these jokes. It was the one about the socks.

Kudos should go to Seattle School for trying something so ambitious and different. Without such efforts, performance art would soon become as stagnant as we think live theater has become. As long as Seattle School keeps trying for such "wild exuberance," we're pretty sure they'll reach it now and again. And really, we're willing to keep trying with them.