Sending Out a Stylish SOS
The stage was filled with screens; downstage center, three cameras faced upstage into the screens. Wires, cables and the stark trees of tripods clustered downstage. From the ceiling a grid of pipes suspended projectors over the no-man’s-land between stage and audience. It was all part of the act as the New York–based Big Art Group performed its own techno Big Top at the Forum at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this past weekend, in its most recent performance piece, SOS.
As the lights went down, the company’s six actors wandered onstage, dressed in Walt Disney animal pajamas, with big friendly heads, their features so generic it took time to sort out their species. Attached to each critter’s shoulders was a camera pointed at his or her face that projected the actor’s red-lipsticked, glittering-eye-shadowed face onto the onstage screens. Each actor/critter talked to its camera even while milling around in terrified discussion with the others. “Where are we?” they screamed, eyes rolling. The surrounding forest was unlike anything they had experienced.
Writer Caden Manson and director Jemma Nelson formed the Big Art Group in 1999. To quote, “The company uses the language of media and blended states of performance in a unique form to build culturally transgressive and challenging new work.” Couldn’t be put more succinctly.
Although the group’s work is most obviously characterized by the huge video graphics, splashy costuming and spectacular real-time theatrics, at the heart of the production is Manson’s text, which is dense, full of art speak and political rhetoric mixed into a stew that is spooned out full tilt and nonstop. The group’s website offers a stunning example of the text in its description of the piece:
“SOS began as an investigation into the nature of sacrifice within a supersaturated, hyper-acquisitive society. Set in a forest of technology the performance unwinds through overlapping abstract narratives. Animals lost in their native habitat turn on each other in a hopeless contest for survival. Revolutionaries broadcasting from a skeletal studio implode under the pressure and failure of their own rhetoric, and technology addicts enmeshed in a self-created universe seek escape from a tightening web of perception. As these environments collide and overturn, the stage transforms into a celebration of chaos verging towards the freedom of annihilation.”
Sounds serious, and on one level it is, but, fused with the madcap production, it becomes a satire of itself as well as of the society around it. Is there a separation between the two? Good question. Self-reference is the soup du jour.
What the audience experiences is a series of rapid-fire fragments that are oddly grand in realization but brilliant in their comedic insight: the self-absorbed techno babies trying to one-up each other in technological au courant currency; the terrorists who are going to recombine their DNA in order to produce the Ur-baby of the future; the various movie-referenced disasters that are played out with superimposed imagery—the car chase, the shoot-out, the earthquake and on and on.
All of it heads to one grand latex finale in which hundreds of long, thin balloons are tied together into some strange manifestation of the-Blob-meets-chromosomes gone knotty, which, leaving behind the frozen raccoon, murdered bunny and slaughtered deer, slouches its way toward birth at the rock-out party at the county dump.
Annihilation? Looks like it. Freedom? Hmmm, OK, if you like to think of death as freedom.
—Jaime Robles
Originally published in the Piedmont Post