CAN I HELP YOU?
Backstage
July 18, 2008
By Christopher Murray
LINK
"Alphonse, you are going to feel a big needle." Nine words blandly spoken but likely to strike terror in the heart of poor Alphonse — and a typical moment in the experimental collaborative Exploding Moment's new work.
Can I Help You? takes as its source material footage from an unnamed medical reality television program that focuses on patients admitted to a trauma center after various car accidents and mishaps. Five actors — Shea Elmore, Johnny Lops, Sharla Meese, Katherine Sullivan, and Katherine Wessling — painstakingly directed by Catharine Dill, re-enact different snippets of footage in a deliberately deconstructed manner. A transcriber upstage sits keying in the shoots, ostensibly for editing purposes, while varying perspectives are presented in the foreground.
Sometimes the actors gather around and meticulously pantomime a procedure in an operating theatre; additional sequences mimic medical personnel narrating surgeries or commenting on a patient's prognosis. Yet other moments are more clearly theatrical expressions, as when actors playing a doctor and patient engage in a pas de deux of pain to the "music" of a newly admitted patient crying out, or when closed-circuit video shows sides of meat being poked to replicate the often graphic shots of operations shown on television.
This postmodern presentation of the cable-ubiquitous images of real-life distress is often captivating in its technical sophistication, but the work's greater purpose is to reveal often unintentionally ironic shifts in perspective and purpose, in this case among medical staff, patients, and videographers.
The subject matter couldn't be more dramatic or, oddly enough, banal. Life and death moments alternate with the snide, self-protective sang-froid of nurses in cutesy scrubs and the often callous utilitarianism of a TV crew performing a surgery of its own to get the footage needed for a program.
The iris of the piece keeps opening wider, however, with increasing and disturbing poignancy as it reveals more of the backstory of some patients, particularly one Lisa Campbell, played with devastating bovine candor by Meese. Hospitalized after a car accident that might be concealing another, more sinister trauma, Lisa is drunk and belligerent when first admitted, howling in pain, then coy and self-congratulating days later as she prepares to be released back to the stresses of single motherhood and intones, at a cameraman's suggestion, "I will never drink alcohol again." Such complicated albeit incomplete stories rely on the viewer to connect the dots and make interpretations and elevates Can I Help You? from an obsessively detailed theatrical experiment into a moving short story in which the audience is seduced into the role and responsibility of narrator.
CAN I HELP YOU?
Flavorpill
July 20, 2008
By John Peacock
LINK
In Can I Help You?, theatre group Exploding Moment has created a fascinating new dramatic structure, and the results are completely chilling. Two actors sit at the back of the stage, narrating and editing video footage of a new reality-TV show set in an emergency room; elsewhere, three other actors act out the footage, complete with pauses and rewinds. The nightmarish show integrates actual video as well, creating a living web of instantaneous media and analysis. Rarely does the incorporation of technology feel this seamless; it's well worth the L train trip to farthest Bushwick
WHAT I LIKE ABOUT BREASTS
Village Voice
by Alexis Soloski
Dec. 18-24, 2002 Vol XLVII No. 51
WHAT I LIKE ABOUT
BREASTS: Neither an addendum to Gloria Steinem’s famous essy nor a dramatization of the latest issue of Maxim, this pomo production takes French surrealist Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Breasts of Tiresius as its model. (Don’t remember breasts on the Tiresius of Oedipus or Antigone? It seems that when the seer interrupted two snakes copulating, they turned him into a woman for awhile. Hate it when that happens.)
Catharine Dill directs. Williamsburg Art & Historical Center, 135 Broadway, Bklyn, 718-499-7570, through Sun.
WHAT I LIKE ABOUT BREASTS
The New York Observer
By Alexandra Jacobs
Dec. 18, 2002
Before The Vagina Monologues,there were those naughty Surrealists…Tonight, trustafarian Williamsburg sits for What I Like About Breasts, a performance project based on a Guillame Apollinaire drama, The Breasts of Tiresius. “It’s sort of his paean to the people of France to make love and not war,” says director Catharine Dill, 39, who has styled props for Oprah magazine. “I saw the production elements as a great challenge: A woman gets rid of her breasts onstage and becomes a man; the man has 50,000 children.” Nothing Oprah couldn’t handle…
Williamsburg Art and Historical Center, 135 Broadway, Brooklyn, 8 pm, 718-499-7570
ONE LESS SENSE (a Red Dive event co-directed by Catharine Dill)
Village Voice
"A Senseless Act"
by Alexis Soloski
April 25th, 2000 12:00 AM
You stand poised on the stairwell's bottom step, arranging your velveteen blindfold. Once sightless—barring those lysergic patterns you get inside closed eyes—you feel a hand grasp your arm. You shuffle tentatively where the hand guides you until a downward pressure tells you to stop. Then a different set of fingers places your hands on the shoulders of the person in front of you. Others file in behind. Hey, it's a blind conga line.
The conceptual, performance, and, um, visual artists behind Red Dive's One Less Sense (CSV) aim to create "site-specific, multi-sensory art events." The recipient of the first Bessie award for installation and new media, Red Dive is a sprightly four-year-old collective of five women artists. And while One Less Sense throws '90s postmodernism, '70s happenings, and junior high haunted houses into the aesthetic blender—and employs the work of male artists—it's unavoidably girlie. That's not at all a bad thing.
From the fuzzy furries to feel, to the soprano singing a Cat Stevens song, to the guiding hands, to the soothing voice asking, "Would you like a taste?"—the effect is overwhelmingly female. The participant is subject to very little conflict or confrontation—the piece mostly proceeds one sense at a time—and the emphasis is on togetherness. Tours of 10 or 12 people depart every 20 minutes, and you might want to check out your compatriots pre-blindfold. You'll soon be walking, crawling, singing, even exhaling with them. "Breathe," says a voice. "Now listen to your neighbor's breath."
Despite some casualness in the setup and some imprecision in the vocal commands, the piece as a whole succeeds. You do find yourself focusing on oft ignored senses, thrilling to a sound or smell. And just wait'll you feel the fruit wall.
