Moving Ethos Dance Theater: To Have and Uphold

Pretty much everything I know about contemporary dance comes from watching "So You Think You Can Dance." The beauty and power of the dance Travis Wall choreographed to "Say Something" by A Great Big World is forever etched in my memory. And so when I read that Moving Ethos Dance Company would be performing in Urbanite Theatre's intimate space, I persuaded Janice to join me in checking it out. If a single number had even a sliver of the impact of the Travis Wall piece, it would be worth the price of admission.

When we entered the theater, we found the six dancers tucked into onesies lying on the stage. I was intrigued. How this fit with the upcoming performance was an obvious question, as was how they would leap into action after being prone for a good half hour. It all became clear (well, sort of) once the show began.

As the music began, the dancers got up, stripped off their clothes (revealing red lingerie and, in the case of the one male dancer, red briefs), made their way to the wall where multiple sets of the same attire were hanging, and got dressed. They moved first to chairs (which we later learned represented the workplace) and then to a rowdy scene culminating in an argument between two of the women and a slap. Their clothes were shed as they climbed back into the onesies and repeated the chronology five more times.

It didn't take long to figure out the "dance" was a replica of the daily rat race we have all experienced. I was struck by the ability of the dancers to duplicate their facial expressions and physical movements each time. One dancer had a unique little hop as she got her onesie back on. Another looked into the distance as she seemed to contemplate the next day before heading to sleep.

By the end of the number, clothes were strewn around the room where they stayed until the end of the performance. (The orange peels seen in this picture didn't come until later.)

Two other numbers particularly struck a chord with me.  In the first, the dancers were chaotic as they moved and spoke. The words of one woman were the loudest as she declaimed Trump and his rhetoric. She mentioned the wall he wants to build and the proposed ban on Muslims. She posited that his way to "Make America Great Again" involves rolling back the clock to the days of segregation. In the talk-back after the show, the choreographer referred to the piece as their "Trump PSA."

Victoria Mora & Jessica Pope

The second piece was a commentary on the struggle involved in maintaining a relationship. While the work began with two separate individuals, it wasn't long before Victoria and Jessica were entwined in a variety of seemingly impossible positions. This wasn't a couple coming together in harmony, but a pair fighting their way through their issues to remain together. The message was clear: relationships take work.

During the post-show talk-back, an audience member offered his one word description of the performance: "endurance." That seemed just right, on both physical and emotional levels.

Settling in for the talk-back

Among other things, the dancers talked about preparing for the show. Choreographer Leah Verier-Dunn's first assignment had them constantly in motion for a full hour. Then they had to keep moving for an hour while always touching another dancer. Finally, they had to move and continually repeat a 16 count phrase. One dancer shared her amazement at the range of feelings this training evoked. One moment she felt she could go on forever; the next she thought she couldn't make it another second but knew she had to power on.

The show pushes the dancers emotionally as well. Most, we learned, were uncomfortable at first with speaking while dancing. "We talk with our bodies," one dancer said. Verier-Dunn commented it was when she felt discomfort from the group that she knew she was on to something. "What you resist is often what you need to do," she said. So true.

Kudos to Moving Ethos for bringing such a unique and powerful performance to the stage. I am looking forward to seeing their work in the future.

10:04 by Ben Lerner

Donald Judd box sculpture in Marfa, Texas

 It's the calm before the storm of the season in Southwest Florida, and I'm enjoying having time to read rather than run. Ben Lerner's "10:04" has been on my list for some time. Wendi, my cultural guru, and I have talked about "10:04" because of Lerner's inclusion of Marfa, Texas in the story on more than one occasion. An article in NPR said of Marfa, "This tiny town perched on the high plains of the Chihuahua desert is nothing less than an arts world station of the cross, like Art Basel in Miami, or Documenta in Germany."(To read the article, click here. Needless to say, I want to visit.) But while Marfa plays a role in Lerner's "10:04," it is not the focal point of the book as I had expected. Instead, "10:04" is a story of friendship in a book about ideas with a heavy sprinkling of art and literature and popular culture. It's unlike any book I've ever read. I loved it.

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When we first meet our protagonist, he is leaving a celebratory dinner with his agent, who has just secured a book deal for him with a "strong six-figure" advance based on a story that appeared in the New Yorker. (A story Lerner wrote for the New Yorker is later dropped into the book. While "10:04" is fiction, the narrator bears much more than a passing resemblance to Lerner himself.) The question of how the story will be expanded is a thread that weaves throughout the book. But our narrator has other issues on his mind as well. He might have Marfan syndrome, a genetic disease. His best friend Alex wants a sperm donation to get pregnant. And then there are the complications of every day life and relationships.

Lerner's writing had me constantly reaching for my post-it notes.  Sometimes I was taken with the images and feelings his descriptions evoked. In his account of Alex raising the idea of the pregnancy during an outing to the Met, I could visualize the moment while getting a glimpse into the way their relationship worked. "Maybe she broached the subject at the museum and not over coffee or the like because in the galleries as on our walks our gazes are parallel, directed in front of us at canvas and not at each other, a condition of our most intimate exchanges; we would work out our views as we conconstructed the literal view before us...Which meant we'd eat a lunch in silence or idle talk, only for me to learn on the subsequent walk home that her mother had been diagnosed in a late stage.You might have us walking on Atlantic, tears streaming down her face, my arm around her shoulders, but our gazes straight ahead."

Other times our narrator's way of looking at the world made me stop and think. He relays, for instance, comments by a parent about why she is sending to her kids to private school. "A lot of the kids were just out of control....Obviously, it's not the kids' fault. A lot them are coming from homes...well, they're drinking soda and eating junk food all the time. Of course, they can't concentrate...They can't be expected to learn or respect other kids who are trying to learn." The narrator refers to this justification as "a new bio-political vocabulary for expressing racial and class anxiety; instead of claiming brown and black people were biologically inferior, you claimed they were--for reasons you sympathized with, reasons that weren't really their fault--compromised by the food and drink they ingested; all those artificial dyes had darkened them on the inside." Definitely some food for thought.

A photo of Christa McAuliffe from "10:04"

I was intrigued by what I think was the narrator's concept of the simultaneity of the past and the present and the future. His memory of his seven year old self in a classroom being told about the explosion of the Challenger by President Reagan is one example. "...I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery...The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them."

The title of the book itself is a play on time. It's a reference to a pivotal moment in "Back to the Future." At 10:04 p.m., Marty McFly (played by the wonderful Michael J. Fox) crashed back to the future from his visit to the 1950s in the time-traveling Deloreon. It's an important idea to the narrator, but I just can't quite figure out why.

I know I haven't done the book justice in this somewhat disjointed description. But my meandering captures the way Lerner's writing made my mind dart off in a dozen different directions. Clearly I need to re-read "10:04" to better understand some of the concepts the narrator raises. It's an assignment I welcome. And I eagerly look forward to reading Lerner's "Leaving the Antioch Station," his earlier work that introduces us to the narrator. But first I'm tackling some of the books recently nominated for this year's National Book Award. So many great books, so little time. 

Square One Improv Hits the Lab Theatre Stage

I am a fan of long-form improv.  I say this with utmost confidence despite requiring only one hand to count the number of performances I've seen.

Chicago-based Baby Wants Candy creates musical improv

In case you're not familiar with the genre, long-form improv is essentially a one act play created on the spot around a theme suggested by the audience. At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Wendi and I have been doubled over with laughter during shows put on by the horribly named Baby Wants Candy.

While the speed with which improv actors come up with funny lines always impresses, Baby Wants Candy kicks it up a notch by creating a musical performance. This year's show brought us right back into the political arena we'd hoped to leave behind when we crossed the pond. The theme -- Donald Trump Goes to Hogwarts.

Being up on cultural references definitely helps your appreciation of improv, and neither Wendi nor I caught all of the Harry Potter cleverness. But I did know enough to understand the apt references to "he who shall not be named."

Fresh off this experience, I was intrigued when I saw an ad for Square One Improv, a group self-proclaimed as "the best musical improv in Southwest Florida." How could I resist?

My friend Gail and I headed down to Fort Myers' Laboratory Theatre to check out their show. The first half was standard improv games familiar from "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" like playing the same scene with different accents or attitudes.

Part of the fun of an improv show is yelling your ideas to the performers. I am generally not quick enough to think of something funny, but I did respond to their request for an embarrassing incident. My mind immediately harkened back to a morning in the late '80s when I decided to walk to work after a bit of a late night. I had gone several blocks before I realized that people were looking at me funny because the back of my skirt was tucked into my pantyhose.  (I know, there are many things wrong with this picture -- and that's without adding the sneakers and inevitable shoulder pads of the era.)  While the guys admittedly couldn't draw on their own experience, they did an admirable job of incorporating this scenario into an Irish drinking song.

Scott Beatty, Dan Klein, Gregory Sofranko and Shaun Johnson

But it was the second half of the show that really had me laughing. During intermission, audience members posted suggestions for the theme of the 30-45 minute play that would be created before our eyes. A recent convert to "The Walking Dead," I thought a zombie apocalypse would be fun. But the audience was more in the mood for a romance -- a la "Fatal Attraction."

The speed with which the guys developed their roles was pretty amazing. The set-up was a businessman (Dan Klein) has to satisfy the desires of a strong woman (Scott Beatty) in order to get his promotion. His naive wife (Gregory Sofranko) just wants a bit more time with him. Shaun Johnson assumed a number of hilarious roles, including a hairdresser, a butler of sorts and the wife's sister.

Again, cultural references played a part in the hilarity. Obviously, if you weren't familiar with "Fatal Attraction," you wouldn't have known where the story was going. My favorite bit was when Shaun, as the sister, said that the Dixie Chick's song "Good-bye Earl" kept going through her head and that maybe they should just kill the husband. All the wife had to do was say "Earl" and the deed would be done. Music not being my forte, it was amazing I knew the Dixie Chicks' song related to two women resolving a domestic abuse situation in their own way. (To see a video of the song with Dennis Franz as Earl and Jane Krakowski as the wife, click here.)

Square One is made up of four guys with day jobs sharing their love of improv with local audiences. And so they are forgiven for not having the slick professionalism of Baby Wants Candy. I was a bit disappointed in the small amount of musical improv given their marketing. (Admittedly, the competition for the "best" musical improv in Southwest Florida is probably not very heated.)  But it was a fun night out, and I would definitely see them again. For upcoming performance schedules (including several at Lab Theatre), click here. Perhaps I'll see you there.  

Two Books that Envision the Future

The world has changed so much in my lifetime. I remember getting a computer on my desk when I was a baby lawyer and thinking its primary purpose was to carry on conversations with my friends at the firm. We laughed hysterically at the pioneer lawyer who was "telecommuting" from home. Today, of course, working from home is a given, and we are lost without our smartphones. And let's not forget that self-driving cars seem to be just around the corner.

Louisa Hall has taken our technology-driven world a step further in "Speak." The book begins with a truckload of babybots being driven deep into the desert. The reader soon learns the bots have been banished for being "illegally lifelike." The Turing Test measures the ability of a computer to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to that of a human. These bots were functioning at a 90% level.

Hall tells her story through the eyes of several characters living at different points in history (including the near future). We meet a woman obsessed with imbuing computers with memory in hopes of communicating with her family lost in the Holocaust. There's the programmer whose creations have landed him in prison for the Knowing Creation of Mechanical Life and Intent to Endanger the Morals of Children. And, perhaps most striking, there's a teen-ager suffering the effects of having her babybot taken from her.

The "girlfriend" android with woman she was modeled after

"Speak" is a fascinating contemplation of the emotional consequences of a world in which bots are displacing humans. Such a world might not be as farfetched as it sounds. In Japan, androids are already being incorporated into daily life. There's a hotel staffed primarily by robots (some of which look like humans, but many of which are intended to create a fun--if a bit creepy--experience, like the dinosaur who handles check-ins). There's an android newscaster and a bot manning the information desk at a department store. There's even an android "girlfriend" (which I don't want to think about). Click here to learn more about these human facsimiles.



Medical advances have also affected our emotional lives. Anti-depressants that boost serotonin levels in our brains have become ubiquitous. Drug regimens that combat bipolar disease and personality disorders are available as well.

"All is Not Forgotten" by Wendy Walker thrusts us into a world in which traumatic memories can be erased. Jenny Kramer is a high school student who has been brutally raped. She is taken to the hospital where her parents are told about a drug that might eliminate her memories of the rape. The sooner it's administered, the more effective the memory repression. They elect to give Jenny "the treatment." Who wouldn't want to spare their child this agony?

While the treatment does prevent Jenny from remembering the details of the rape, it doesn't eliminate her body's knowledge that something bad has happened to it. And while she pretends that all is well, her emotional state is altered as well. Eventually--perhaps inevitably--she cries out for help.

Dylan Baker

The premise provides a unique platform from which Walker explores the emotional lives of Jenny, her parents, and Sean, another recipient of the treatment. And the story takes lots of twists and turns as the police seek to find the rapist.

My reaction to "All is Not Forgotten" was certainly affected--in a positive way--by actor Dylan Baker's narration. (If you've seen Baker on "The Good Wife" or "The Americans," you'll understand what I mean.) My attention never lagged as I wondered how things would turn out for Jenny. And Walker definitely achieved her presumed goal of making the reader consider the ethics and merits of eliminating traumatic memories rather than coming to terms with them.

The audio book included an interesting interview with the author. Among other things, Walker shared that the idea for "All is Not Forgotten" came from a 2010 article about memory science. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that veterans treated with morphine during resuscitation or trauma care were less likely to develop PTSD than those who weren't.  (To read more about this discovery, click here.)  Research on the topic continues.






 

A Simplistic Look at East Berlin

 Remember the line "Don't know much about history..." from Sam Cooke's "What a Wonderful World"?  Well, that's kind of how I felt being in Berlin. Of course, we all know about World War II and the Holocaust. But the whole Berlin Wall/Cold War thing was a bit sketchy. Read on for a few things I learned while in Berlin.

While the United States/United Kingdom and Russia were uneasy allies against Hitler during WWII, the superpowers didn't waste any time staking out their claims to the hearts and minds of Germans (especially Berliners) after the War.  Pursuant to the 1944 London Protocol, Germany's borders reverted to those in effect before the War. (Austria and the Sudeton region of Czechoslovakia had been annexed by Hitler.) Germany was then divided into three occupation zones. Berlin itself was divided into East Berlin (controlled by Russia) and West Berlin (controlled by the US, UK and France). Whether you were subjected to Soviet rule or ruled in a democratic manner was dictated solely by where you happened to make your home, with families split willy nilly. 

With Wendi and local entrepreneurs at Checkpoint Charlie

By 1949, it had become clear that the Western Allies and Russia had irreconcilable world views. Russia established the German Democratic Republic, with East Berlin as its capital. Checkpoint Charlie and Checkpoint Bravo were established by the Allied Forces to process military units and as places to display a show of military force. (Today enterprising enterpreneurs at the Checkpoint Charlie site offer paid photo opps to jet-lagged tourists.)

Prior to the Berlin Wall being built, more than 3.5 million East Germans escaped to the West. Fed up with losing so many people, the Berlin Wall was constructed in 1961. East Germany officially called it "The Anti-Fascist Protective Wall." (Yes, the Western Allies were characterized as fascists.) The West Berlin government nicknamed it the "Wall of Shame."

The Wall was a lot more than a single barrier.

While I thought of the Wall as just a concrete barrier, there were actually multiple obstacles. The additional hurdles included an anti-vehicle trench, an illuminated control strip, control towers, dog patrols, tank barriers and an electrified signal fence. These additional impediments explain why the Strelzyk and Wetzel families attempted their escape using a hot air balloon, which we saw at the DDR Museum. (The movie "Night Crossing" with John Hurt and Beau Bridges tells their story and is available on Netflix.) 
 

Wendi at a GDR ticket machine

Our visit to the DDR Museum provided some other interesting information about life in East Germany. Following the construction of the Wall, U-Bahn and S-Bahn metro stops in East Berlin were closed and became known as "ghost stations."  (The tunnels remained open, so East Germans could hear the trains traveling to locations inaccessible to them.)

Public transportation did continue to exist in East Berlin, though. In 1966 fare collectors were were eliminated from the system. Passengers were required to purchase a ticket before heading onto the bus or train. But the machine was designed in a way that enabled passengers to get a ticket without actually making payment. The theory was that "social control by other passengers would guarantee honesty."  That didn't work so well, though, and "collective fare dodging" became a sport.

To this day, there are no fare collectors in Berlin. Bus drivers barely took a look at Wendi's and my passes (and we could have gotten on through the rear door of the bus in any event). The subway stops are wholly unmonitored.

 

We learned some other interesting tidbits at the DDR Museum as well. In order to train East German children at a young age about social education, they had collective potty breaks using a "potty bench." All the children had to remain seated until everyone had done their business.

East German toys

Children were prepared for battle from a young age. Rather than play toss with a ball, they were given wooden hand grenades. They also counted tanks and soldiers as part of their basic math education.  

And so concludes my series of posts about our visit to Berlin. If you've gotten the sense that I loved this city, you're right. Its history is powerful and made me realize--once again--how lucky I am to have been born in the United States. And the art is amazing. We didn't even have time to explore Museum Island, home to five museums with a focus on antiquities. Nor were many of the contemporary art galleries open when we were there.  A return trip to Berlin is definitely in my future.