Review Rundown: Histories & Origins

We’ve been eagerly anticipating word from London about Origin, from A Right/Left Project — the Stephen Dobbie and Colin Nightingale collaboration, and from NYC about Brouhaha’s The Vicky Archives.

The short version: pretty good. But you’re not here for that. You’re here for the long version. Well that’s below, and there’s more where that came from as the Crew is brewing up some standalone features that you’ll be seeing later this week.
— NJN

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Exagoge — Untitled Theater Company No 61
La MaMa, NYC; $35, Until May 12th

Exagoge is a combination opera, play, and Passover seder that bravely dives headfirst into issues of Jewish experience and relations with other cultures. Starting from ancient fragments of Ezekial the Tragedian’s play (also Exagoge), the Untitled Theater Company No 61 examines the seder ritual and what it means to welcome strangers.

The immersive part of the performance is the seder: you participate in prayers and eat foods from the ceremony. The narrative premise is that an opera composer, Zeke, brings his non-practicing Muslim girlfriend Aliya home to his family’s holiday without warning his father. The show switches between the father conducting the seder amidst the drama of Aliya and Zeke fighting about why she has been invited, and scenes of Zeke’s opera, a liberal reinterpretation of the Exagoge and story of Exodus. The opera involves puppets that represent the burning bush, the miracles, and other mystical elements.

The operatic portions were the strongest part. Telling the Moses story in opera was wise; it allowed the relatively simple plot to carry a lot of emotional power and the performers (notably the one playing Moses) were capable of a lot of emotional complexity through the music, voice and acting. The puppets too were great, beautiful even up close and well-puppeteered.

But the piece was let down a bit by the contemporary narrative. The seder was an interesting experience, but the story of Zeke and Aliya didn’t work. Zeke is somewhat obliviously callous about religious belief in the name of art, which allows Aliya to be righteously offended that he might use ideas of other cultures offensively. The father is the only really interesting character: a devout scholar of Judaism carrying clear issues with Islam, but willing to connect to Aliya and recognize his own mistakes. Given the history of the Exagoge and the potency of this question of how people of different religions relate, I would have liked much better if Zeke could have been given a less cartoonish wrong position and we really could have seen the complexity of the debate between old and new beliefs as powerfully in the play as in the opera.

Exagoge just doesn’t deliver on its potential theme as well as it could. But I still want to commend Untitled Theater for some engaging experimental material with a very prescient topic. I just want the work to be brave enough to be even riskier.

— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent

Origin- A Right/Left Project
£10, World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens, London, UK; Run concluded

When it comes to pre-show briefings, one does get a thrill from “be aware of the bodies on the floor.”

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Upon entering Origin, you are in near darkness. Yoga mats with pillows and chairs are placed on the floor around an unlit black box. Small colourful lamps mark the spaces in between the mats.

So I lie down on a mat and let my eyes adjust as I listen to the ambient music of Toby Young. Occasionally a harshness appears in the music, and the red of the lamps flicker to blue, or there is a trill of bird song.

By the ten minute mark, I felt I had a grasp of the experience. So far, so relaxing. Then the whispering started.

As various members of the creative team said afterwards “this isn’t a spa treatment.” Thanks to Ben Donoghue’s lighting design, secrets are revealed in an object I have been staring at for a quarter of an hour.

It is as interesting to watch the reactions of my fellow audience members as they rise from their beds and, half lit in the blue light, whisper “What IS that? Is it real?”

Origin is a piece of durational installation art created by Right/Left, a team well versed in creation for immersive experiences. Artists Stephen Dobbie worked as Sound Designer and Colin Nightingale as Creative Producer & Audience Experience Curator on Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City, while Composer Toby Young has worked as a Music Supervisor and Composer for Punchdrunk.

The project was developed in conversation with the scientific team at Wakehurst, Kew Garden’s wild botanic garden in Sussex, home of the Millennium Seed Bank.

The creative team describes this work as exploring the cycle of life and our human connection with nature. Sci-fi nerd that I am, I read the whispering voices and dark monoliths as something closer to the galactic than the natural. But the artists are keen for audiences to come away with their own reading and emotional response to the work.

The recommendation for viewing is about thirty to forty minutes but I watched for twenty minutes, until the experience restarted.

The creative team anticipates taking the experience to other venues and I hope they do. It is a pleasure to go to a sound and light installation where the rumble of the outside world doesn’t pierce the veil.

— Thomas Jancis, London Correspondent

The Vicky Archives — Brouhaha
The Tank, NYC; $40, Until May 18th

A great thing about seeing smaller shows is that the ingenuity of the pieces can be amazing. The Vicky Archives shows what you can do with very limited space and resources when you’re clever. Brouhaha’s triumph here is making a small, nondescript theater into an expansive setting, all in the service of a well-performed and fresh story.

In the show, you are visitors to the Vicky Archives watching a cohort of trainees prepare to record their personal memories in order to achieve enlightenment, in the manner of the archive’s mystical founder who told her story for 10 days straight and reached inner peace. The show has tracks where the audience splits to follow different members of the cohort and learn about their histories and training. The whole project is cult-y and dubious, but the piece itself swings between comic and troubling at different points before resolving to a single conclusion. Interaction is minimal, but you have a lot of chances to be in small rooms with the performers and to touch parts of the archive.

Overall, I found the piece engaging. The two performers I followed, including the director of the archive, were terrific and the story did a good job exploring why we remember things and how those memories are shaped by our experience. Sparse non-diegetic moments of dance occasionally popped up and the experience refreshingly veered into the absurd at times. More than anything, I was impressed by how Brouhaha transformed the space. The Tank is not a large theater, but with polished staging, smart use of back rooms, and tight navigation of the audience, I felt I was in a real setting with lots of hidden spaces. The piece never felt crowded and I couldn’t believe with such a small footprint, other audience members were having completely different experiences from me.

Not everything about the show was as strong. The ending dropped the ball a bit for me by getting too direct, and I don’t think all the paths were as strong as mine. But where The Vicky Archives did work, it was solid. I don’t always expect that much from shows at known small venues, but Brouhaha brought a good story with a terrific setting, some great performances, and a masterful sense of how to produce immersive. It’s worth seeing for that alone — just to witness how skilled designers can make magic out of so little.

— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent

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