SOCK MONKEYS
With their newest pieces the Sock Monkeys hit the mark nearly as often as they miss, which isn’t bad. None of the three pieces presented–Fish Tales and Links Plays, performed live, and The Destination, a collaborative film with Blair Jensen–comes together as a whole, and the fragments within each piece range from banal to sublime. Overall, the simpler the image and the less effort that seems to go into its creation, the more effective the communication.
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Throughout, the performers are eminently watchable, however. Their work is characterized by an undeniable honesty. When they bump into each other, they mumble “Excuse me.” When they screw up even worse, they admit it. They never conceal that they’re out of breath most of the time, but neither do they wear their exhaustion on their sleeves, trying to impress us with the physical demands of their work. As a friend of mine said during their last concert at Columbia College, they are easy performers to like. This effortless charm is perhaps the Sock Monkeys’ greatest strength, for it helps make an audience comfortable watching highly idiosyncratic and ambiguous work that might otherwise be off-putting.
