‘Rio Records’ Is All Over The Map (The NoPro Review)

I remember the first time an immersive experience opened my eyes to my city. It was 2015, and the night’s events had led me on a journey from the steps of a church in Los Feliz past a photography club in downtown Los Angeles to a colorful graffitied tunnel illuminated by the headlights of oncoming cars. I was swallowed by the tunnel, the roar of traffic nearly drowning out the music pulsing in my earbuds, a silhouetted man ahead lifting a hand to reveal the icon inscribed on his palm; and I became aware, for the first time in my five years of residence, that this was Los Angeles. That the city was more than a static background: it had a pulse, a temperament. Over the years, a collection of local immersive experiences has amplified that feeling: from hotels to speakeasies to street corners to ballrooms, Los Angeles has risen up as an immersive character in its own right.

Lately, I’ve been missing that sense of place. As immersive theatre has migrated online, it’s become harder to link pieces to their locations, to experience them as the product of a city’s cultural character. So when I heard that non-profit River LA and experiential entertainment studio 13Exp were teaming up to create a remote experience built around the LA River, I was eager — hungry, even — for my eyes once more to be opened.

A collaboration drawing on the work of over 70 artists, Rio Records is an 80-minute online experience with pre-recorded and live elements that celebrates both the river and, more generally, the history and artistry of Los Angeles. Composed of over 700 minutes of content, it can be revisited more than once, allowing guests to return and explore different tracks. The work is intended not only to help fund and raise awareness of River LA’s efforts to revitalize the river, but also to showcase a diverse array of local voices.

Based on the description, I hoped that it would be exactly what I craved.

(Spoilers follow.)

The experience begins with a livestream from the home office of “Dr. Alison Vincent,” a lively PhD grad who wrote her dissertation on the LA River. She’s found a mysterious series of items along the river — an album, a tonic bottle, a drawing — all signed by someone called “V”. Now, she invites us to help her explore the stories behind the items — tracing them through the past, present, and future.

The online user interface is simple: we click around the maps and drawings we encounter to view video clips, live performances, and occasional phone numbers. A few of these choices redirect us, narrowing the scope of our explorations to specific locations. Since no two audience members will click the same collection of links or have quite the same phone conversations, we will all end up traveling unique paths — branching, crossing, and rejoining like the channels of a river. Some will investigate the history of the tonic bottle; others, drawings. I choose to investigate Rio Records, an album by the fictional Bette Vale.

What follows is a mosaic of images, poems, history lessons, skits, and phone calls, taking place first in the past, then the present.

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In the past, I listen to Bette Vale paint a picture of vibrant Central Avenue culture: the outpouring of Black expression, the richness of art that is not designed for white consumption. I eavesdrop on intimate conversations between Black artists in the 1950s and 60s: their frustration at being told to “tone down” the political activism in their art, their processing of the Watts Rebellion. In one particularly moving moment, Bette asserts that lurking beneath her murky river is “a leviathan of rage.” I watch Bette crafting a love song; I watch a chalk drawing being sketched, a raised and shackled Black fist. I sway along to original music. A picture of a time and place is beginning to form.

It’s in the present that things grow shapeless, disjointed. I watch a young non-binary student handle the news that their classes have all been moved online due to COVID; I watch a couple bicker as they walk along the concrete riverbed, their features obscured by a heavy black-and-white sketch filter. Someone sits on a skateboard and stares out over what I presume is the LA River. Allusions are made to queer theory, and polyamory, and what appears to be a suicide, but these references are often intentionally vague, never seeming to shape themselves into a larger clearer picture. The fault may be mine: I wonder if I am too oblivious to detect the larger web of connections being presumably woven.

While I’m eager to experience local culture, even if it’s metaphorically — a spirit, a mood — it becomes increasingly difficult to tell what these clips have to do with either the river or the cultural heart of Los Angeles itself. The closely-framed imagery looks as if it could have been filmed anywhere; the cultural references devolve into brief allusions that assume I will fill in the blanks for them. Some clips seem to be intentionally unpolished, employing video filters so aggressive that I can’t always make out what I’m seeing. And I frequently have a hard time catching what’s being said, as the background music swells and drowns out the artists’ voices. These loud stylistic choices leave me disoriented, off-balance.

The experience culminates in the future, a world where the river has already begun to be adapted and revitalized in single acre increments. Now, we are asked to share our vision for such a future. The difficulty is that we’ve been given almost no information about it. Have fears about the consequences of “green gentrification” come true? Someone mentions the “water poetry” plot upriver making “so much money”…who, exactly, is profiting? More time is devoted to ritually breathing in unison, praising one another, and generally vibing with nature than to addressing the hands-on specifics that would bring this hypothetical world to life. As we bid goodbye to the future and to the experience itself, I’m left with more questions than I started with.

It is possible that the answers to my questions are embedded in other tracks. River LA and 13Exp do hope that audience members will return to experience new paths, possibly accessing a more complete picture of the fictional world and its inhabitants. Having only attended once, I can’t say whether the narrative/stylistic/geographical incoherence I perceived was simply the luck of the draw based on my particular clicks.

That said, I don’t see myself returning for more. While I admire the sprawling scope of the show’s subject matter, the path I experienced felt less than coherent: in musing on everything, it said nothing.

Let’s hope that, as the show adapts and evolves in response to its audience, it narrows down exactly what it wants to explore. For now, this particular love letter to Los Angeles is perhaps best left unopened.

Rio Records continues through February 7. General admission tickets are $40.

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