Rollover
Postmodernism comes in many flavors, but one hallmark is rough-and-ready appropriation of the techniques of one kind of art for making a different kind of art. Atlas/Axis appropriates the structural forms of classical and modern dance, such as theme and variation and ABA form; dance in turn borrowed these forms from classical music. The overall structure of Rollover, which Atlas/Axis (Ames Hall and Ken Thompson) performed at Link’s Hall, is ABA: an idea introduced in the beginning returns at the end with a greater depth of meaning. In the opening, stage lights come up on a man (Hall) typing furiously at a computer, while a hand holding a sheaf of papers emerges from a dark corner and passes over his head. The man holding the sheaf of papers (Thompson) then takes stacks of books from a closet and hurls them into the other corner of the stage. These mysterious moments seem to establish the theme of computers versus books.
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Hall and Thompson love campy roles and the divas who play them. After the theme-and-repetition section has played itself out, each man in turn strips the dozen coats off the other man; the newly freed man has a moment of clarity that, as it turns out, is a campy, diva-esque moment. For Thompson, it’s Shelley Winters’s death scene in The Poseidon Adventure; for Hall, it’s Lassie rescuing her master Timmy–told from Lassie’s point of view. Both moments are over the top emotionally, but so domestic and TV-tamed that they’re wonderfully tacky.
