Z Space | lies like truth

Some quick thoughts about a few cultural activities I got up to this weekend…

1)Liz Caruana is a fabulous art and commercial photographer in the Bay Area. Friday night saw the launch of Caruana’s new collection of photographs in book and gallery exhibition form at Carte Blanche Gallery in The Mission. The series, The Bay: Creators of Style, lis at the intersection of Caruana’s work as an art and commercial photographer in its depiction of portraits of Â Bay Area fashion designers. The images are glossy, vivid and unabashedly pose-y. It’s hard to tell whether they’re advertising or art in some ways. I think they kind of succeed as both.

2) Eddie Izzard was in town for a few days working on some new material at Z Space. His management asked critics to refrain from reviewing the British comedian’s work-in-progress which I think is fair enough and I am simply happy to have had a chance to experience Izzard’s meandering-sharp sense of humor in such an intimate setting. What I will say, though, is that I wish I had known that Izzard was doing a set in French while in town. As a French speaker, I would have loved to have been there on Thursday night with the Francophone audience of 150 people. But I didn’t find out about it until the day I was already scheduled to see Izzard perform, the Friday, so sadly missed out. I gather that the comedian only took up French fairly recently, perhaps two or three years ago. To be able to pull off 90 minutes of standup comedy in a language which is new to you and to even begin to know what people in another culture would find funny is a remarkable feat. It’s almost beyond belief really. Then again, doing exceptionally challenging things is becoming a bit of a habit for Izzard. In 2009, he ran 43 marathonsÂ in 51 days for charityÂ in spite of having no prior history of long-distance running.Â I would love to interview Izzard about his polyglotal adventures in comedy and I gather he’s about to start a big world tour with lots of French dates in it in the coming months. Perhaps I’ll have to catch him in a few places. Finally, I heard a rumor that Izzard might also be hatching a plan to perform standup in Japanese and German. Crikey.

3) With its new production of Waiting for Godot, The Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley is taking a slightly different approach to the standard post-show “talk back” formula that so many theatres practice across the land. According to the program notes, these new-format “Points of View Q&A” sessions are supposed to begin by inviting “two guests with different points of view to discuss what they thought of the play.” I was invited to attend the matinee performance yesterday and serve as one of these guests.Â I sat up on stage with director Jasson Minadakis, dramaturg, Margot Melcon, and assistant director, Logan Ellis. So rather than there being two guests, there were three company insiders and me. We had a nice enough conversation about the play, but there were no opposing points of view to be had really. When I answered the first question, I was met by an “I completely agree!” from the assistant director. I’d be curious to see if the effect is different when there actually are two guests with different viewpoints involved. I should say, however, that the Marin Theatre’s production is quite well done. Minadakis doesn’t play it for laughs, really, though the physical comedy between Mark Anderson Phillips’ sulky Estragon and Mark Bedard’s thoughtful, optimistic Vladimir blossoms in act two. What I loved about this production is the way in which Didi and Gogo seem to be so close to each other. Their connection is deeply human and borne not simply out of need but quite a lot of love and respect. I found the whole thing to be quite life-affirming. And I don’t get to say that too often about productions of Beckett plays.

Hereâ€™s a bit about some of what I did at the weekend:

1) Hope Mohr Dance presents The Unsayable at Z Space: At the start of Friday eveningâ€™s performance, choreographer Hope Mohr walked on stage and made a tidy little speech about her new work based on a collaboration with war veterans. The fact that the speech sounded exactly like the pitch a non-profit arts organization writes to get funding from a foundation for a project pretty much sums up the experience of seeing the work presented that evening. The piece, which included dancers performing alongside vets, checked off all the boxes in terms of what grant-makers are looking for (artistic collaboration with underserved community members, in-depth workshop process, public presentation of outcomes etc etc). But the result was largely joyless and lacking in artistic merit. If one of the objects of the piece was to create some kind of understanding between the vets and the artists, the opposite revealed itself in the performance — the gulf remained vast, as the vets couldnâ€™t dance and the dancers didnâ€™t demonstrate in any tangible way what their relationship with the vets meant. The choreography was trite and the piece said nothing thoughtful or new about the experience and aftermath of war for those who are on the front lines. I expect that some good came out of the process of the two groups working closely together. But why this sort of work needs to be presented before a paying public audience mystifies me: It should remain a workshop process to serve community-building and/or therapeutic ends.

2) Slide at Stanford Lively Arts: The Grammy Award-winning sextet Eighth Blackbird brought its collaboration with experimental performer Rinde Eckert and guitarist Steve Mackey to the Stanford campus on Saturday evening. Slide, a co-commission between Stanford Lively Arts and the Ojai Festival (where the work was premiered in 2009) sounds like it was as confused an artistic experiment at its premiere as it is today. (I am extrapolating this from the San Francisco Classical Voice article I read by a writer who had monitored the development of the work since its earliest iteration and explained that it had been tweaked since 2009.) The background materials indicate that the work is based on a series of scientific experiments conducted a few years ago that tested the way in which an individualâ€™s view of the world is based on his or her preconceptions. The concept isnâ€™t very revelatory really. By the time Malcolm Gladwell had mined the notion in his book Blink, it was already taken for granted. Still, I made very little sense of the quasi-theatrical piece. I loved the music, which veered between muscular electronic guitar riffs an delicate lines for classical chamber ensemble. And Eckert, who used both his well-developed head voice and brassy baritone, is always fun to watch, though Iâ€™ve watched him amble around the stage executing shambling, effete dance steps in one too many productions at this point.

3) Two plays by Lynn Nottage: I caught Ruined at Berkeley Rep and a production of Fabulation at Fort Mason by the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre Company. To find out what I think about these productions, please visit The Bay Citizen tomorrow, where my piece about both will appear.

Weekend Warriorings

Weekend Roundup: Unsayable, Slide, Ruined, Fabulation