On stage I see two giant white cushion-looking issues, and assume the performers will lounge on them sooner or later in the course of the present. But halfway by means of All Time Stop Now the music halts and within the silence these objects come to life. They fill with air, reworking into large white inflatable hand-like sculptures. The smaller one takes form whereas two of the performers circle, serving to its tube digits unfurl. Farther upstage the enormous one begins to take form…a for much longer endeavor. Helping this huge one emerge are two performers who appear like they could be carrying large plastic components in some kind of dystopian future manufacturing unit run by sentient machines. Upon unfolding, it has grown to the dimensions of a big maple tree, virtually touching the sunshine grid hanging from the lofted theater ceiling. I consider that second in time when my feed was filled with dance memes that includes the business utility of this know-how, the foolish inflatable dancing man discovered exterior of fuel stations. These inflatables are monumental and trippy, referencing human fingers however monstrous of their floppy machine pushed motion. There isn’t any soundtrack for this second within the experimental opera All Time Stop Now, written and directed by Los Angeles primarily based artist Anna Luisa Petrisko. The solely sounds are the whirring of the followers filling the inflatables with air, the delicate shuffles and scrapes made by the performers serving to the objects activate, and the murmurs of the viewers as they take on this unusual panorama. This quiet second delivered to thoughts John Cage’s piece “4’33,” a composition the place a performer sits at a piano and performs the silent composition by not taking part in something in any respect. This second on the mainstage at On the Boards wasn’t utterly silent but it surely was a stark distinction to the musically saturated indie pop soundscape that was the main target of the remainder of the providing.
Photo by Bruce Tom.
Full of psychedelic reside feed projections of the dancers in movement, the choreography jogs my memory of gestures from sacred ceremonies in addition to the flat bitmap-like motion of characters in retro video video games like Zelda. Almost all the pieces feels deliberately two dimensional and graphic, evoking pictures of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Keith Haring work. This makes the looks of the inflatables a weighty interruption pulling us into the three dimensions of the area we are literally in. Otherwise the efficiency seems like a drawing that involves life. The costumes, that includes glyphs that resembled squiggles, dots and contours, are constructed in a method that performs with the flatness of the physique. Large patterned coats add stiffness to areas that may normally bend, just like the elbows. The set and costumes may have been impressed by the Jazz print disposable cups from the Nineteen Nineties. A common 90s nostalgia permeates this opera, making me consider a pre-iPhone world wherein having a house laptop was a luxurious and a dial up modem was wanted to slowly entry the World Wide Web. A nostalgia for a extra idealistic time for know-how that would assist make our lives simpler and join us to a world neighborhood.
The music was candy and barely sinister in its fixed optimism. Josephine Shetty’s (aka indie music artist Kohinoorgasm) voice stood out to me on this manufacturing, the readability and alluring ephemeral tone of this artist’s voice matches the futuristic candy-colored Saved By the Bell world. A solo from Peter Hernandez was additionally a spotlight. Hernandez’s distinctive crashing wave of a voice introduced a lovely angst crammed texture into the combination, hinting on the grief mendacity beneath the floor of this soothing musicality. The titles of the songs comprise the poetry of the piece: Peace is a House, Willingness to Try, Play with Time…this work meditates on connection, time and relationship to know-how and the atmosphere.
Photo by Bruce Tom.
All Time Stop Now is rooted within the after results of the pandemic shutdown on our sense of time and dimensionality. The look of the mysterious white inflatables later was in stark distinction to the 2-D high quality of the remainder of this very colourful present filled with psychedelic reside feed projections and music video segments with Zoom-like aesthetics. My favourite: a candy home occasion documentary video that includes a big group of pals chilling and singing karaoke for the tune “Peace is a House”. In one other music video part, the enormous display is break up into 4 quadrants, the 4 performers’ heads in a Zoom-like grid, cult-like as they stare into the digicam sporting purple sequined outfits. As this recording is projected the true life performers stroll onto the stage sporting the identical costumes from the video. They lie down in a circle resting their heads on one another and watch with the viewers. This creates a wrinkle in time as we see them lively and enlarged on display and resting and true to dimension within the current second. The music that accompanies this scene is a somber lullaby meditating on the idea of time itself.
This total work demonstrates concord, shifting collectively and resting collectively as meditative methods that may assist us cope with our dystopian actuality. Only 4 performers are onstage however multitudes of dancers are created by means of reside feed video, the dancers multiplied and folded in on one another by means of using projection mapping. The “real” folks transfer earlier than me, however the dance is in seeing how they’re knowingly making pathway decisions and shapes particularly for the mapping know-how and its mandala like results. I consider how a lot the expertise of the shutdown in the course of the pandemic rewired my mind as I trance out on the plush kaleidoscope patterns created on the massive display on this cavernous area with a crowd of individuals.
Photo by Bruce Tom.
Once the inflatables have been gone, I missed them. Even within the midst of the soothing mutant pop sounds and visuals I yearned for the vitality of actual folks shifting actual objects in entrance of me, the sound of residing toes strolling throughout the stage, the respiration sounds of the performers. Perhaps these inflatable fingers are a monument to the craving for contact that was magnified by the shutdown of 2020. The projections are a monument to our savior…reside video streaming!! Zoom is nice when now we have to make use of it however I wish to be scooped up by these tentacle G-d fingers and brought up into the heavens of the theater’s ceiling. The lack of contact throughout isolation had us cozied up in digital area collectively. Yet we have been nonetheless alone (or in small pods) and tripped out…contact starved…unsure what was totally dimensional, what was flat, what was actual, what was unreal. My creativeness remembers this period as supremely weird, spending hours on video convention utility grids for work and socializing, attempting to learn delicate emotional cues inside codecs which can be principally company video video games for adults. This opera experiments with the liminal area between the digital, in particular person, and a 3rd unknown and maybe religious factor. There is an idealism that feels genuine however at a distance. The grief is discovered within the angst crammed harmonies of the quartet and the weirdly silent summary inflatables. There is hope within the smiling faces of the performers as they sing that every one shall be okay ultimately…even when nothing is okay proper now…even when we aren’t certain what we’re taking a look at or what we’re feeling about all of it. The try to cease time gained’t work however these spell casters know that. We can’t cease time however we will maintain on to hope that we will authentically join with the valuable time that’s given to us.
All Time Stop Now by Anna Luisa Petrisko performed at On the Boards December 2023.