Not Even a Hip Shot: ‘The Dream-Casting’
Wow. So this is still going on, and I’d just like to say: I want some of what he’s smoking.
That is all.
UPDATE, 11:45 p.m. – So just to revisit: I’m not going to write a full review, because I’m not sure quite where to start.
This was one of the most out-there things I’ve seen yet at Fringe; can’t say it was good, not sure I want to say it was bad, exactly. (It had the distinct whiff of the Radical Faerie about it, and everybody needs a little Faerie dust once in a while.) So let’s leave it at mad — and perhaps spectacularly ill-advised, in a town as buttoned-up as this one.
Of the 18 audience members who came, 12 of us survived until the end. Which was convenient, because it meant no one was left out when lead performer Huilo Marvavilla produced a dozen yellow roses and went about bestowing them upon the patrons.
The projections were intriguingly psychedelic, the soundscape much the same; the puppets, whether smallish or enormous, were wonderfully well-crafted.
But the puppetry itself was amateurish and unfocused, the dancing likewise, and the whole thing thoroughly incoherent. Act 2, an improvised and largely undecipherable puppet conversation titled “Tea With Duality,” was possibly the single most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever seen on a stage.
Finally, if I were called upon to offer one technical suggestion, it would be this: If you know that, during the course of your trippy hourlong multimedia paean to peace, you will be donning a giant papier-mache puppet-head and dancing about the darkened performance space, you might think twice about building a spider-web of purple yarn throughout said space before the puppet-head dance.
That way, there will be less stumbling.
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12:23 am
What do you get when you put three guys, some peyote, and a mess of papier-mache together. The Dream-Casting! I was really looking forward to this one- sort of the kind of Bread-and-Puppet Theatre “events” that I was raised on. What I got, instead, besides the aforementioned yellow rose (which might or might not be symbolically linked to Texas- who could tell?) was a lot of very big masks, the best of which looked like some sort of Mayan gods, the worst looking like what a kindergartener might make, some highly uncoordinated dancing, a puppet show with a clearly improvised and incoherent script, some sort of aliens/mystical beings, interesting but uncategorizable music overdubbed with spoken words so reverbed that they were indecipherable, an array of strange images, and a plea to help create a unified dream out of the disparate images from our own dreams. I am glad that my wife wasn’t sitting next to me, or I might not have been able to keep from laughing, especially when the giant, luminous-legged spider tempted me with his purple yarn.
6:50 pm
wow
i like the fringe of this show, it was dreamy, very different from all the pro-shops in the dc wanna be fringe. i think this guy is on it, he really gets the idea behind a living installation, a dreamscape. its tough for conservative DC types and republicans to think spatial time. this theatre is fantastic and Im going to tell everyone i know to go see it.. the puppets were typical of mexico, the style organic. i thought the hand held puppet drag queens were a riot. the spider creepy, this guy knows his symbolism, and i guess the jab at the current button-lipped society of DC had better wake up,
because when Obama arrives, there will be more super cool back roads art of this style ….
thank you teatro jaguar luna!
12:22 am
Hey, c’mon Trey and Michael. Open up the right hemispheres of your brains. Y’all are over intellectualizing this. Even if all you say is true, you’ve missed the point. You have to experience this show and when you do, its faults fade. This is a gut-level performance, the most so of any Fringe show I’ve seen. That’s an achievement in itself. Don’t just watch and listen. Absorb.