J.J. El-Far’s Black River, a performance piece about the Gulf oil spill in Hybrid Theatre Works’ Monthly Artist Response Forum. — Photo by Paul Cox
Every month has its big story, whether media-manufactured or legitimately important, and every big story creates a groundswell of artistic reactions and creations: key neural pathways in our cultural consciousness. As the news media cycle tightens, however, it’s running circles around the traditional cycles of artistic production, leaving many responses in the dust of old headlines. With this in mind Bushwick’s Hybrid Theatre Works are starting up a Monthly Artist Response Forum, a space to react to the global event of the moment through any medium necessary. Think of it as the Daily Show of artistic response.
The first gathering in the monthly series, this past Sunday on a residential rooftop in Bushwick, focused on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. While the rig’s owner, and a national news media long past story fatigue, are ready for us to retire this one to the history books, four or five million barrels of seabound crude oil aren’t subject to any human attention span. Bile against the corporation responsible – ideal, almost Bond-worthy villains – isn’t going to subside any faster. Besides, with hurricane season just getting warmed up, there’s every potential for the story to come right back at us.
As live as the issue is we’ve still heard more from Glenn Beck than the creative world, so a little more depth is welcome in any venue – even on a neighbor’s roof. We have gathered here a select group of New York performers, writers, dancers, filmmakers and musicians, bringing ten pieces of freshly prepared work for the evening. We lack the star power of the CW’s primetime special two nights previous, hosted by David Hasselhoff, but somehow we expect more from this.
Tracy Cameron Francis and J.J. El-Far, Artistic Directors of Hybrid Theatre Works, assure us that the creations we are about to see are as fresh and timely as they are unrehearsed. This is here-and-now work, and we dial down our technical judgments accordingly. The first performance, by Alex Muniz, sets the calibration: a wordless search for clean water stashed in bottles and balloons around the roof, it makes up for any triteness of message with a strength of feeling and body language that makes it an emotive reaction to that environmental dread we’ve all been feeling, and confirming, since Dr. Seuss. Muniz also sets the precedent for interactions with our more immediate environment, this typical 1920s-standard Bushwick apartment roof with its strange angles and surfaces, which are used opportunistically by most of the performers in one way or another.
Playwright Rob Parry follows the lead with a two man skit, this time using the rooftop as a rooftop: one hosting two unfortunate PR men who are considering whether to jump off the edge rather than have to defend their employer, BP (the best they can come up with is, “WTF have pelicans done for me lately?”) The scene is half improv and drags accordingly, but the jokes are solid and as a sketch it works. With light fading, Co-Artistic Director Tracy Francis presents her own piece of choreography, Hydrophobic. Again the roof’s structures come into play, the steep slope over the staircase access door proving a Sisyphean climb to the three performers, who flop uselessly under a liquid spill from above. It’s an even bleaker message than the previous piece, which of course ended with the PR men taking the jump.
Following is experimental performer Chris Masullo’s Lacadima, a brief skit which sees him take on the persona of a suit-wearing leopard with a National Geographic voiceover. On some level, obviously, it’s really about the oil spill, but it’s a level to which Chris Masullo alone has access. From here Dr. Gary Gollem, an esteemed and inebriated lecturer on Leisure Studies, launches into an intentionally tedious PowerPoint on oil and leisure with help from his intern Matthew C. Lange. The lecture – again mostly improvised – confuses crude oil with baby oil and tanning oil, cracking open the possibility of interplay between the visual language of oil spill coverage and pornography, but this interesting note is lost in the muddle of shouting and fake Israeli accents. It still meets the criteria of “this is better than watching the Hoff in a television tribute,” but only just.
Fortunately the audience is refreshed by a palate-cleanser of a short film by Bushwick actor, artist and urban explorer T-Rex of TRexNYC. While the no-budget Noir caper starring stuffed animals seems to be making light of disaster, T-Rex does us a service by showing how easy it is to cast the simple villainy and victimhood of the oil spill narrative as a puppet show, making it necessary for others here tonight to delve deeper.
Dancers Lyndsay Dru Corbett and Jessica Shea Alverson take the same path of levity with an allegory in mime, complete with a cardboard Gaia costume and a bowler hat. Singer Jimbo Brown is more serious, as is his “Spanish Harlem post-apocalyptic hillbilly band” the Neptune Noon and 40, the apocalypse in this case being one of oil. Brown’s near-hysteric wails in his Oil Song are allowable, as he hails from the Gulf Coast and clearly isn’t just trying to sound outraged for effect.
The audience moves to the neighboring roof for the final two pieces, orienting us towards the New York skyline in its full nighttime, fossil-fuel-fired glory. Maybe, a thousand miles away, this is as close as we can get to the disaster. In front of this vista of the energy economy, Christy Denny directs Anna Moench’s Obviously Unfortunate Situations, in which the empty platitudes of the oil company are measured up against a series of more personal disasters. Achieving the absurd through repetition, it makes its point like a four-panel comic strip.
Finally, we are left with the other half of Hybrid Theatre Works, J.J. El-Far, and her powerful contribution Black River. Some of the viscous movements of the four dancers, as they spar and flounder, feel very familiar from both Alex Muniz’s and Tracy Francis’s pieces. It’s not for lack of originality; it just feels like, faced with an ecological crime of this magnitude, this powerless, struggling, fish-out-of-water motion is the most natural of responses.
Hybrid Theatre Works will continue their Artist Response Forum on a new topic and in a new space every month. Next month’s topic has not yet been decided, but they assure us it won’t be the “Ground Zero Mosque.”
