<< Fine Arts
26 • BAY AREA REPORTER • February 23-March 1, 2017
<<
Hippie Modernism
From page 17
Organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis with about 80 pieces added to pay homage to the movement’s Berkeley/San Francisco epicenter, its arrival coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Watch for a host of celebrations around town to reach saturation level in the coming months. It also comes at a political moment when people, hungry for the idealism, activism and progressive thinking of that era, are nostalgic for its rallying cries: the prizing of social justice, economic, racial and gender equality, environmental consciousness and, of course, free love. The curatorial premise is that the exhibition’s cultural artifacts –
geodesic domes, photographs of handmade houses and performance groups with agendas, the Whole Earth Catalogue, silkscreen prints protesting the Vietnam War, assorted nutty inventions – are expressions of potent, sometimes way-out intellectual ideas that infiltrated the art, architecture and design of the day. If only they had pulled it off. With few exceptions, the concept, however intriguing, and the tenor of the times aren’t communicated in the galleries, making this struggle for Utopia more sociology thesis than art exhibition, For a show that purports to be about resistance, it’s peculiarly bloodless, with little or none of the thrust and parry and roiling conflict that defined the time, gave it its disruptive energy, and made it the decade that just won’t die.
Courtesy BAMPFA
Scene from director Steven Arnold’s Luminous Procuress.
<<
Frankenstein
From page 17
The house was packed for the West Coast premiere of San Francisco Ballet’s spectacular Frankenstein (a co-production with London’s Royal Ballet). We paid our dues as the long first act filled in more story points than we needed, but by the third act the show had found its stride and moved to a powerful climax that left me with a strong sympathy for the outcast. I kept hearing the lines of Blake’s poem, “I’ll be like him, and he will then love me.” The whole audience, 3,000 people, rose to their feet and cheered like mad, loudest for Vitor Luiz, who’d played the monster. We all felt the pity of it, the loneliness of a person brought into the world and given no help with the big questions: “Who am I? Where am I? What’s going on? What should I do?” But these questions only emerged at the end, when he came into his own as a character. Along the way, the big question was, “O my God, what have I done?” Worst of all was when Victor Frankenstein realizes that yes, in his operating room he has brought a creature to life, but he’s never thought about his responsibilities. Mary Shelley’s story is 200 years old this year, and though it’s become a folk tale, it began life as the product of the most ardent liberal spirits of that age. Shelley was the daughter of polit-
ical revolutionaries, William Godwin and Mary Wallstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), and her fable has a solid intellectual foundation in the most progressive thought of that day. In fact, it’s completely up-to-date. Frankenstein deals with issues that bring the mind to a halt: When does life begin? What does it mean to be human? What are the responsibilities of human beings to each other, and of those who create life to the newly born? Of course, it’s also a fantasy of scientific experimenting gone too far. It could not be Frankenstein without an operating theater, students, a ferocious professor, and a Rube Goldberg contraption that’s hella fun to watch as the gases bubble, the electricity sparks. The galvanizing process that makes dead men’s limbs unite to animate a new person has a visual impact as big as that of Jurassic Park, and in the designs of John MacFarlane, this production has achieved it, especially in the desolation his fantastic backdrops evoke. We got a taste of the total-theater craftsmanship that the Royal Ballet is been famous for. They’ve always used the look of the show to set the tone for how you’re to understand it. The neo-Romantic music is by Lowell Liebermann, who’s learned from Prokofiev, Bellini and others how to tell a story, and when to slow down and dwell on emotions. The choreographer Liam Scarlett delivers in broad strokes a meditation
For those who were there or on the fringes, HM may resonate as a trip down memory lane, but younger visitors may justifiably wonder what all the fuss was about. The exhibition, a surprisingly strait-jacketed affair that’s not as provocative as it should be, won’t clue them in or turn them on. Still, there are incidental rewards, like getting lost in a beautiful collection of acid-trippy Bay Area psychedelic posters. With the flourishing of the local rock scene in the late 1960s, posters created by gifted artists became a cottage industry. Shops were exclusively devoted to selling them, and freelance vendors hawked them on the street. Their otherworldly, Freudian dreamscapes and neon colors promoted bands such as Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, the Chambers Brothers, and Vanilla Fudge, though the ostensible subject matter was hardly the point. The cavernous galleries on the main floor tend to swallow exhibits, leaving visitors to roam and perhaps stumble upon finds, like the zany, futuristic contraptions whose visionary inventors, one surmises, must have had a pharmacological assist. Haus-Rucker-Co, a Vienna-based design collective influenced by the space race and what then passed for high-tech, melded space-age gadgetry with psychedelic phantasm and doomsday predictions. Their “Mind Expander 2” (1968), a two-seater fabricated from black Plexiglas and equipped with a transparent fuchsia hood and a helmet with electronic gizmos attached, is tailor-made for a zonked-out magical mystery tour. “Electric Skin 1,” a Kool-Aid-pink jumpsuit with metallic appliqués that emits sparks when touched, and “Roomscaper” (1968), a tall, oblong, vinyl plastic tube that has a woman’s index-finger screen-printed on the outside, and is anchored in an illuminated base shaped like a flower pot, hail from the same brain trust. Cobbled together from IBM castoffs, plywood and circuitry, USCO’s “Triple Diffraction Hex” (1965) is housed in a box of the sort used for a traveling puppet theater, embossed with stars and numerals, and topped with a brass eagle. Wait for the three hexagons, fastened to the front, to rev up and whirl, accompanied by colored strobe lights; then repeat. The anarchic spirit of the late 1960s and early 70s, a period of self-reinvention when one could be
Courtesy of Debra Bauer
Angels of Light: Portrait of Debra Bauer and Rodney Price, early 1970s.
whatever one wanted to be with no rules, no class division, no judgment, found its apex – and an entertaining vehicle – in the Cockettes and Angels of Light. Established in 1969 in the Haight-Ashbury by George Harris (a.k.a. Hibiscus), the Cockettes specialized in gender-bending, “acid-drag” pageantry, a clarion call for sexual liberation fueled by a liberal infusion of LSD. Their playful insanity, outrageous costumes, glittery gold makeup, and hymns to glorious excess endeared them to raucous audiences attending their late-night performances at the Palace Theater. In 1971, Harris, along with other members, formed Angels of Light, a commune-based group that pooled resources for tacky spectaculars that envisioned a world they hoped would come to be. The antics of both troupes are documented in photographs displayed in “Creative Identity,” a too-small section that also contains a Lyla Montez costume with lace-crested tiara and plenty of tulle for the Angels’ 1974 production Whatusi in San Francisco. The cross-dressing Cockettes are prominently featured in the newly restored 16mm film Luminous Procuress (1971), directed by Salvador Dali protégé Steven Arnold. Shot in the Mission District, the story recounts the erotic adventures of
Erik Tomasson
San Francisco Ballet dancer Vitor Luiz in choreographer Liam Scarlett’s Frankenstein.
of what it is to be human. When he took his bow, Scarlett got the biggest roar of applause of the night. The best choreography comes in the poignant duets for Victor (Joseph Walsh) and his fiancé (Frances Chung). Again and again, she has to rescue him from despair. The thought of what he’s done paralyzes Victor, and he becomes stricken with remorse. She draws him out, and the dancing is made of her forcing him, gently, to partner her, to support her. The technique of the ballet becomes a conduit for powerful feeling as she makes him come out to meet her and gives his life back to him.
t
The last act is a single ballroom scene. Dancing at their wedding, with wonderful, sweeping dances for the corps de ballet, it is really a picture of Victor’s mind, with fascinating interventions of people who’ve died already, and by the real monster who’s still alive and seeking contact with him. The more powerfully he’s rejected, the more viciously he retaliates. After Victor pulls out his Derringer and shoots himself, nobody is left alive onstage but the monster he created, who’s now got nobody left in this world who knows him. It’s hard to judge the piece upon only one sighting. The transitions
two naive hippie dudes who happen upon a mystical mansion, where they enter a transformational realm ruled by Pandora, the procuress of the title (think Virgil in Dante’s Divine Comedy) who acts as their guide, introducing them to a garden of delights unconstrained by gender or desire. It has its world premiere as part of Cinema and Counterculture (1964-74), an adjunct film series that successfully captures some of the chaos, euphoria and political turmoil of the decade. The program includes Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, a view of the American counterculture from abroad, shot in Death Valley and LA with a pair of young, desperately beautiful, alienated lovers at its center – the photogenic male lead had recently been released from prison – as well as portraits of various Black Panthers, and Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park, a faux, cinema verite depiction of the U.S. veering into totalitarian rule, a prospect less far-fetched than it once seemed. (Through May 21.)t Luminous Procuress screens April 21, 7:30 p.m., followed by an onstage conversation between former BAMPFA film curator Steve Seid and Rumi Missabu, an original member of the Cockettes. Info: bampfa.org.
from storytelling to dancing are awkward and puzzling. The whole thing needs editing. Scarlett is young at this, and has overflowed with ideas, some of which aren’t necessary. In particular, the Act I brothel scene, where the med students go blow off steam, adds nothing except wonderful opportunities for the corps dancers to dance. Victor’s friend (Angelo Greco) is peculiarly silly, and nobody gives him any respect. Why? Still, these problems do not matter much, and the parts that are good are very good indeed. The best thing is that the dancers have given themselves to the project completely. They are profoundly invested, and seem to have been dancing these roles all their lives. All deserve praise, especially the child dancer Max Behrman-Rosenberg, who plays Victor Frankenstein’s little brother, perfect in the role. The housekeeper (Anita Paciotti) and her daughter (Sasha de Sola) are a necessary part of the story, but the mother’s harshness never feels fully explained. Among the fellow students, barmaids, townsfolk, Sean Bennett, Diego Cruz, Isabella DeVivo, Benjamin Freemantle, Stephen Morse, Miles Thatcher, Henry Sidford, and Lonnie Weeks all stood out, especially Francisco Mungamba. The dancers made the show, as so often they do. What a great ensemblerepertory company they are.t