Tuesday, January 18, 2011

"Yes, Prime Minister" and Resolution! 2010

I've got two shows to quickly cover so here goes:

Last week I saw Yes, Prime Minister with the USC study abroad kids playing at the Gielgud Theatre. The comedy is based on the 1980s satirical TV show of the same name. As the title suggests the storyline depicts the Prime Minister and his staff. There's a big oil line deal on the table, a request for an underage prostitute, global warming, bribing the BBC and economic doom all in one night. Over the course of the play the PM, called Jim Hacker, gets hilariously more and more desperate and frantic as things seem to farcically spiral out of control.

Knowing nothing about the TV show or the comedy, I went in with absolutely no expectations. Hitting humourously on the anxieties of 24 hour news, the global economic downturn and governmental responsibility this play infused with superb comedic timing offers a chance to laugh at our current condition. Although the text lags a bit here and there, the committed presence of all the actors keeps the comedy rolling along. Although I, nor my fellow Trojans, didn't get all of the British references, I was thoroughly entertained. 

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Resolution! 2011

Last night I went with my flatmate to see a dance show with one of the dance choreographed by her friend. The Place has a dance festival of new work by up-and-coming dancers called Resolution! 2011.
There were three performances. the first called "[ex]posed" by 90 Degree Rotations was a beautiful piece by 6 dancers who fell rhythmically in and out of sync. There's a lot of potential in this young company and all of the dancers were quite strong. The overall piece, however, needed to flow more. For a relatively short set there were black outs and changes. I suggest figuring out how to have pieces of a whole weave seamlessly together.

The second set by Katerina Paramana called "Metrology" I would heavily argue was not dance, but rather a performance art piece. The conceit was to use 34 object. Why? I don't know. It felt like a graduate experiment, so I wasn't surprised when I saw it was a part of Paramana's PhD studies. The two performers had good stage presence and the actions were clear and committed. Although there were some delightfully clever elements the conceit soon became tired and I knew exactly how things were going to play out.

The third set (which was the one choreographed by my flatmate's friend, Anna Buonomo) was clearly the saying "save the best for last." This piece called "F5VE" featuring the Bricolage Dance movement chronicles 5 distinct characters and utilises each dancers unique style whilst they all blend and converge, building up to a beautifully messy frenetic energy. A well-planned and choreographed piece as the tempo slowly built up with the music and dancing complementing the energy of the movement.

The most interesting part of the evening for me though was having my lovely and smart Italian flatmate who is studying in the MA Computer Science programme keep asking "what was the message?" A genuine question that soon became our theme for the night as I poked and prodded the question in terms of larger issues of semiotics and audience reception. "What do you think the message was?" I would ask with the smile. "Well, what was the story?" she would ask. "Why does there have to be a story?" I'd ask in return. "I don't understand what they were doing." "Well, the message sent, isn't always the message received. And that's ok." Haha, you know you're getting a masters in performance studies when you turn every performance viewing experience into a contemplation and conversation about the semiotics of performance and the enigmatic spectator-performer relationship of performance.

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