By: Jon Behm
I initially had reservations about seeing Catch 28 at the Bryant Lake Bowl. The performance art series originated in Bushwick, NY, which is dangerously close to the hipper-than-thou Williamsburg art scene. Luckily though, Sunday’s showing was more edgy than it was pretentious. Though the pieces featured were most definitely avant garde, the seriousness of the affair was kept in check by the evening’s hosts and Catch founders, Jeff Larson and Andrew Dinwiddie. The grinning pair set a relaxed tone for the evening with their off the cuff banter and approachable demeanors.
Catch itself is a series of dance, theater and video performances by various emerging artists handpicked by Larson and Dinwiddie. Each artist is given seven minutes to perform, and the results range from hilarious to grotesque. Sunday’s performance was a mix of locals and Brooklynites, designed to foster a sort of arts exchange between our two scenes.
Dinwiddie himself kicked off the evening with an evangelical rant, picked verbatim from an old Jimmy Swaggart record. Frighteningly accurate in his portrayal of the sweaty old bible thumper, Dinwiddie got quite a few laughs with Swaggart’s clueless rhetoric. While viewed through the lens of the Bryant Lake Bowl’s 20-something urban audience the rant was hilarious. However, the routine was far from a simple caustic impersonation – Dinwiddie’s sincerity, even if just an act, would probably be good enough to convince the lunatic fundamentalist fringe that he was one of their own.
Following the fire and brimstone were eleven acts, all different, and for the most part, unparalleled in strangeness. A local addition to the show, Erin Search-Wells presented a monologue on the relationship of different performances to each other in space and time, while a pair of dancers gyrated like zombies. The exposition was intriguing, though difficult to wrap one’s head around.
Kyle Pleasant recreated himself as “Big Edie” Beale in drag, lip-synching the bawdy broad’s
These were only some of the less bizarre pieces.
Perhaps one of the most far out performances I have seen was by the local dance troupe Mad King Thomas, and entitled: you are so beautiful you are so beautiful you are so beautiful. While I didn’t quite understand the premise of the show, at least I never really knew what was coming next. Beautiful involved women “in the future” dressed in sparkly tights, a dancer in a lion mask that performed a song that sounded quite a bit like a cat in heat, and a meteor that falls from the sky and has a baby ape inside. The Dadaist show was at turns mesmerizing and funny, and altogether mystifying.
Another dance performance, KR and Adri from Truck and Chair, by Anna Marie Shogren and Laura Grant was sort of like watching sign language on qualudes.
Perhaps tying for the most hilarious performances of the evening were Jeff Larson and Zach Steel’s film project Sucking Stones, and Neal Medlyn’s untitled song and dance explosion. Larson and Steel’s work brings the sucking stones sequence of Beckett’s Molloy to the screen. It is a monologue that centers around a man debating how to rotate stones from pocket to mouth, keeping their ratio the same while attempting not to leave a stone “unsucked.” From creating elaborate diagrams to sewing on additional pockets, the film’s protagonist goes to great lengths to realize his dream.
Medlyn’s performance, and my favorite of the evening, involved him singing over Prince’s Darling Nikki, stripping down to underwear and purple leg warmers, and ultimately placing a bunch of little plastic penises in a blender with milk and red dye, grinding them, and drinking the finished product. Is he
Though I am leaving out some performers here, suffice to say that they were all unique in their own way. In all this uniqueness, one sometimes wonders just how seriously the performances are meant to be taken. Many of the pieces seemed a bit tongue in cheek. I can’t help but wonder if some of the shows are elaborate jokes, esoteric satire, or if perhaps serious art by young people living in a world where irony is the guiding force for behavior.
Whatever the performer’s motives, I think at the very least Catch gives young artists a chance to get creative outside the rules of conventional art. Perhaps that, rather than simply the finished product, is where we can take the most value.
Many of Catch 28’s performers are also taking part in the dance performance Feed Forward, which will be featured at the
Location Info:
Bryant Lake Bowl
Artist Info: Catch!
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