Ritual Clowns
Kinetic Delta Cor
The ritual they enact is a variation on Del Close’s long-form chestnut, the Harold, in which actors improvise on the basis of an audience suggestion for 30 to 60 minutes, creating scenes that may involve the whole cast or only two or three performers. In Grace’s ritual, the “audience” suggestion is a videotaped selection from that night’s news. A ragtag assortment of television sets are arranged along the back wall of the Improv-Olympic’s new second-story space, some black-and-white, some color, some on their sides, others with tubes so bad they deliver only ghostly out-of-focus images. The chosen news clip is played simultaneously on all these sets while the performers turn their backs on the audience and watch–and there’s something striking about this image, as if the actors were not just watching but actually worshiping the glowing blue tubes. Yet despite all the multimedia pretensions of this work, which Grace insists is performance and not theater, it fails to say much that’s new about the media.
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In Lazarus-Go-Round the Kinetic Delta Cor served up a considerably less noisy, if also less ambitious, multimedia performance. Combining monologues, dance, and live and recorded music, these eight enigmatic, unfocused, but thankfully short pieces break no new ground in performance art. Nor does director Terri Reardon or her partner, musician Jeremy Ruthrauff, have anything particularly earth-shattering to say.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo/Edward Donahue.
