Yerba Buena Center for the Arts presents Predator Songstress featuring Degenerate Art Ensemble
2015-11-05
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum
701 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA
8:00 PM, Thursday, November 5, 2015

“Audiences will witness, engage, and contribute to performances, installations, and interviews prior to the show and during intermission. These contributions will inform the creation of songs, music, and more throughout the evening. ”

1. [7:16 PM] Let Me Sing Your Joy and Your Heartbreak, episode 1; ends 7:18 PM
2. [7:21 PM] episode 2; ends 7:23 PM
3. [7:27 PM] episode 3; ends 7:30 PM
4. [7:34 PM] episode 4; ends 7:37 PM
   This portion of the show continues, but we head inside to grab seats, as the auditorium has now opened up. We pierce the assembled throng, get scanned, and head for open seats in the middle of the fourth row. Score one for the early birds!

[The program offered nothing about the set list, and for the most part, the various sections segued seamlessly into one another, all of which is a long-winded preamble to forewarn the reader that the times and track-breaks given below are solely the product of my twitchy time-stamping fingers and my hyperactive imagination.]

[8:m PM lights down, announcements]

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    [set ends 8:45 PM or so… ID at 8:48 after finding a spot to sit and spy upon the setbreak happenings]

[9:m PM lights down, announcements]

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    [show ends 11:m PM]

Degenerate Art Ensemble

• Paris Hurley: performer;
• Elizabeth Jameson: video production design;
• Joshua Kohl: composer, conductor, performer, co-founder, co-director;
• Ian Lucero: video;
• Benjamin Marx: performer (Xavier);
• Leo Mayberry: video;
• Haruko “Crow” Nishimura: dancer, performer (Ximena), choreographer, co-director, co-founder;
• Douglass Ridings: performer;
• Okanomodé Soulchilde: performer;
• Ben Zamora: lighting design.

I arrive a few minutes past seven, after working a bit and whiling away the time at Starbucks, up the street. The event doesn't seem to be happening just yet, so. I take a quick pass through the open galleries – plenty of pieces to tickle my fancy! The general theme seems to be creating art from electronic cast offs. Always a good idea to begin with free materials if you're a starving artist, eh? A few of the works are very cool – just the thing for decorating a mad scientists hideout! One of the video pieces, showing the toxic topography of a Chinese mining village was quite enchanting: beautiful to contemplate, but poisonous to experience. Other installations… well, it's easier to tell that they were made from trash! Probably should have taken a few photographs, but at the time, the notion of stopping conflicted with my primary motivation – to zoom through before the happenings began. As I was descending to the lobby, entranced by the color-shifting array of sculptural lights arranged along the wall, I realized that part of the pre-show was in progress, as Haruko was singing to an arts patron in the lobby. Dang! Considering that the song was hypnotic and harmonious, it's entirely possible that I missed two or three episodes instead of starting late on the first. Very hard for me to say. Sitting and waiting inside the forum, the video director seems to be looping segments of pre-show recordings, but being a nonlinear presentation, that evidence is utterly dissatisfying as far as helping to answer my question.

The show is quite strange. Rather sci fi, sharing a dystopian vision of an alternate universe where pseudo-religious fear is used to control the populace, interpersonal sharing of feelings and opinions is forbidden, and your voice can be transformed into a powder by a bitter pill. Some additional visuals: songstresses chained by their hair to trees in a forest. A brother and a sister, hiding from 'the Harvesters.' Multiple crazy painted doors hanging in a hallway of possibility. One is selected, and the dream segues back into nightmare. A shamanic, antlered trickster goddess dancing and shape-shifting amidst swirls of smoke. The namesake predator songstress has no voice (taken by the pill), and moves like a mystical creature, lunging and reaching, curling and twisting like the smoke billowing across the stage. Very strange.

And now it is intermission. Many small activities happening. Several stations for testifying. A few typists transcribing oral recordings via manual typewriters onto parchment. An aide brings the parchment to the golden alien dude sitting in front of us, who reads it silently, then transcribes the testimonials by hand with a sharpie onto large scraps of paper. Quite odd! 9 PM and a quiet bell ushers us back into the forum, where the songstress is watching testimony videos…

After a connection interlude to show that the gold-swathed alien guy is some sort of assistant to the predator songstress, the dude begins to sing a few of the testimonials – presumably some of those we saw him transcribe during intermission. The video projections show people testifying, but silently – their voices taken too? – it's hard to know. As the event ravels forwards, we learn that Xavier may or may not have betrayed Ximena to the Harvesters, and that he may be playing both factions for his own gain. It's all very confusing. In a trial sequence, the brother and sister share via dance language, but in the denouement, Xavier is condemned to be executed for betraying the harvesters. Poor guy!

It would probably all make more sense if I could experience the work again. No doubt the repetition would strengthen important connections and help make everything clearer. Maybe it will be reprised in the future?

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