Too Cute, 12/7/09

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Jeremy Wade's There Is No End to More at Japan Society.

http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/performance/too-cute/777/

Jeremy Wade’s There is No End to More, through last weekend at Japan Society, is like being inside a restless web surfer’s brain for an hour. It veers from a fantasy narrative, to comic book, to variety show, to LOLcats and dogs, to speeches on community, family, and consumerism, to the end of existence. And Wade, who lives in Berlin, has found a stellar interpreter of this marathon solo in everyman Jared Gradinger, eyeglasses and all.

There is a roller coaster dimensionality within the multiple sections of the work, on the Japanese concept of “kawaii”—cute—which can morph into bizarre. The fantasy story that begins the piece (whispered loudly and creepily in a voiceover) shifts from rainbow-and-unicorn pastel imagery to intergalactic warfare. Gradinger moves frenetically through task-miming actions to simple physical punctuation, like punching fists or contorted poses. He wears fanboy clothes—cartoon-print boxers, a football jersey—and takes the mic to speak for parts. The production is so well-executed that voiceovers and live sections blend seamlessly.

chelfitsch—Babblings and Buzz, 2/3/09

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chelfitsch's Five Days in March at Japan Society.

http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/performance/chelfitsch%E2%80%94babblings-and-buzz/670/

One of Japan’s buzz-worthy young theater companies, chelfitsch, is in town this week at theJapan Society on Feb 5-7. The troupe’s name is a baby-talk twist on the word selfish. This makes perfect sense given the context of the play, Five Days in March, written and directed by the group’s artistic director Toshiki Okada. The characters are maddeningly navel-gazing – holing up in a love hotel for five days at the onset of the US invasion of Iraq, deliberately losing total track of time. The actors babble on about liking bad films, boring soundtracks, travelling to Mars, escaping from the war, SARS.

As guileless as the characters seem to be, they can also set rules to shape apparently random acts, such as deciding to remain in the hotel for five days (the amount of money they have contributes to the length of their stay too), and buying three dozen condoms to use in that length of time. Their blithe hope is that when their time together is up, the war will have ended. They experience this intimate bond and yet never even learn one another’s name, and hope they don’t have to deal with future encounters. It’s not dissimilar to the confidences shared through avatars online — at times more personal than those shared among best friends in real time, face to face. Anonymity as the ultimate freedom; no pesky obligations.