Hip Shot: ‘7(x1) Samurai’
7(x1) Samurai
The Shop at Fort Fringe
Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 19 @ 8 PM
Sunday, July 20 @ 2:15 PM
Thursday, July 24 @ 10 PM
Saturday, July 26 @ 1 PM
Sunday, July 27 @ 7 PM
They say: “Kurosawa’s epic tale of victimized peasants, marauding bandits, and samurai warriors - retold at breakneck pace, through movement, by one exhausted and ridiculous actor. With accompanying gibberish and vocal sound effects.”
Trey’s take: Best 45 minutes of my Fringe so far. Don’t be intimidated by the Kurosawa name-check — or by the fact that this guy’s a highly trained mime.
Solo artist David Gaines tarts up the tale of The Seven Samurai with decidedly American pop-culture tropes ranging from action-flick fight sequences to Looney Tunes cartoons — I think there’s even a nod in the direction of the Samurai homage The Magnificent Seven — using those instantly recognizable vocabularies to help tell the story almost entirely without words.
And Gaines is as deft as anyone I’ve ever seen at the efficient definition of character: A gesture, a posture, a shambling shrug, or a katana-sheathing shhhhwwwt sound, and you see the archer, the sleepy swordsman, the giant or the klutzy apprentice samurai. By the time the show culminates in an epic one-man rendition of a full-tilt defend-the-village free-for-all, the illusion is total: One guy, a couple of masks, and a white backdrop, and a roiling battle against the landscape of feudal Japan has unfolded in your mind’s eye.
See it if: You grok that, far from being an outdated discipline to sneer at, the rich nonverbal language that is mime informs contemporary entertainments from Broadway’s Lion King to Pixar’s Wall-E.
Skip it if: You’ve got better things to do than be charmed by a witty concept and a first-rate performer.
Tags: comedy, David Gaines, mime, samurai
July 15th, 2008 at 10:16 am
[...] Fringe is the small, simple solo show. Perhaps they are even the bread-and-butter of Fringe, these 7×1 Samurais and McSwiggins Pubs and Mothers of Inventions, compared to the flaming desserts and exotic liquors [...]
July 18th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
[...] 7(x1) Samurai Trey Graham says: See it if: You grok that, far from being an outdated discipline to sneer at, [...]
July 21st, 2008 at 12:36 am
David Gaines is the hardest working performer at the Fringe.
July 21st, 2008 at 11:48 am
Purchase your tickets in advance, bring cold water with you, and plan on using your program as a fan because this wonderful venue is selling out regularly (SRO as well) and it hasn’t got much air conditioning. All physical discomforts, however, melted away when David Gaines took the stage and began his wonderful performance. See it!
July 21st, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Mr. Gaines lives up to all (very high) expectations in this feat of stamina and imagination. It’s just him and the stage, and he leaves it all out there. I can’t help but picture him practicing this thing over and over in his living room, bumping into the coffee table, stubbing his toe on the ottoman, breaking a vase or two. Whatever decorative casualties may have occurred, they were well worth it. This is spectacular.
July 25th, 2008 at 11:17 am
Most theatre is about people doing things that are, in themselves, not that amazing. The art comes from the coordination of the whole range of un-impressive elements: turning on and off the lights in a pretty way, organizing the speeches to make a story, reading the lines to make a character. Mr. Gaines’ work is something altogether different. It’s a man walking into a room, it could be any room, and making it light up, disappear, and change shape all by himself. This is virtuoso performance above and beyond anything I’ve seen in years, at the fringe or anywhere else.
July 25th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
[...] even talk” suggests, almost entirely wordless, but like the similarly giddy 7(x1) Samurai it’s chock-full of incident. Nearly unrecognizable in his high-waisted, greasy-haired nerd [...]
July 28th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
[...] best drama, the zombie-rock shocker Diamond Dead as best musical, and David Gaines’s sublime 7(x1) Samurai as best solo [...]
July 28th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
[...] 7(x1) Samurai: [...]