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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2010 > April > 29
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Fusebox 2010: Review of ‘Comme Toujours’
The spirit of exploration at the heart of disciplinary-crossing art making — blending dance and theatere or visual arts and music — can be an interesting, but messy affair.
Big Dance Theater’s “Comme Toujours Here I Stand” proves boundary crossing can also be slick, without sacrificing complexity. There’s no better place to ponder such gradations of performance approaches than the Fusebox Festival, which presented New York-based Big Dance Theater’s popular work Tuesday at the Long Center. New York critics hailed “Comme Toujours” as the most compelling example of the company’s work, and Tuesday’s performance demonstrated a stunning, unsettling sophistication in a range of vocabularies.
Since founding Big Dance Theater in 1991, co-directors Annie-B Parsons and Paul Lazar have always purposefully straddled the line between dance and theatre. “Comme Toujours” riffs on Agnes Varda’s 1962 French New Wave film “Cleo de 5 a 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7),” which follows a pop singer through two hours as she awaits biopsy results. Big Dance Theater combines the film’s plot and making of the movie to comment on the diva’s brush with mortality as both a moment filled with everyday occurrences as well as deep sorrow and fear. The mix of songs, dance and dialogue exchanges result in a very funny piece whose final moments have a gut-punching beauty that brilliantly sidesteps sentimentality.
“Comme Toujours” refuses to ever locate the story in one place or time. Dressed in black suits, the cast’s men constantly re-configure the space to shift the action between a movie set and the fictional pop star’s life. The men roll several rectangular cloth pieces, which sometimes serve as walls to frame vignettes performed by the cast’s women, sometimes to serve as screens for Jeff Larsons’ atmospheric videos. Molly Hickok is a most convincing, yet sympathetic diva. She combines an extravagance of gesture with a slightly flat affect, allowing her to read sometimes as pouting and other times as sad. Claudia Stephen’s costume design and Joanne Howard’s set enhance Hickok’s excess. As the show progresses, it seems almost as if Hickok gives birth to yards of white fur that cover more and more of the set and the characters’ props. One cannot help but notice how she changes the spaces she inhabits. She is funny, and she is overwhelming.
To some degree, all of the performers traffic in the same paradox of largesse and flatness that Hickok wields most extravagantly. Everyone in the cast plays a variety of roles, but the style suggests it’s never that important who the character is — a whiny girl involved in a series of melodramatic fights with an over-the-phone boyfriend or a macho male lover.
The acting style and insertions of quirky dance numbers keep the characters just beyond the audience’s grasp. The performers are in such control of their choices and the work overall has a sense of careful construction, creating an amazing world to enter, but never to be understood.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
Photo by Mike van Sleen.
