Tuesday

MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE/THEATER @ REDCAT

Filed under Art, Events

In the decade dominated by the digital screen large and small, nothing can still match the immediacy and energy of the live event. To quote one of my students at the end of her first experience of experimental visual theater “This is a lot more exciting than YouTube!” And the next month brings three very different works to Los Angeles that are visually complex, physically and emotionally demanding and intellectually challenging, that range from poetic to political, visceral, raucous, and erotic.

The first is the long-awaited Los Angeles premiere of Alpert Award-winning choreographer and visual artist Ralph Lemon’s multimedia epic HOW CAN YOU STAY IN THE HOUSE ALL DAY AND NOT GO ANYWHERE? opening Wednesday, November 10, 2010 and running through Sunday, November 14, 2010.

Described by Lemon as a “speculative fiction epic,” the production bridges the personal and the universal, draws from myths and realities, and reminds us, as Lemon says, of “the special, ordinary, and inspiring human commonality of how one lives a life.” It was proclaimed by New York Times’ dance critic Claudia LaRocca as the one show you simply must see this fall.

The central image in How Can You Stay… is a homemade spaceship built from scrap metal and wood. Commissioned as part of Lemon’s eight-year friendship and creative collaboration with Walter Carter, a former Mississippi Delta sharecropper who was born at the turn of the 20th century and died this year at 102, the craft functions as a poignant metaphor. Juxtaposing images and memories of Walter and his family with fearless dancing by Lemon’s six-member company, the production intertwines live performance, film and visual art, including references to Andrei Tarkovsky’s landmark 1972 sci-fi film Solaris, to explore the ambiguous line between art and life, the human connection, loss and the elusive but ever-compelling possibility of grace. Continue…