Silk Worm as Dionysus, center, with Belinda He, left, and Karla Quintero as two Bacchae. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.
Image description: A very dark theater space with black background and black marley. Three performers are on stage - one standing in the center dressed all in white, holding a microphone. Two performers flank the center artist, kneeling and facing back with heads turned towards the center person. Their hands are up applauding.
In Bacchae Before the Reveal is in the Subtext
By Garth Grimball
How interesting is it to watch others party? The fun in revelry is the absence of ego as you get down, boogie, praise, or exhale deeply. Being outside, watching the party, it’s easy to feel like Jay Gatsby staring through a window waiting for the party to become something or someone. Ego held strong. Depending on how much you enjoy watching others party will determine your response to Hope Mohr Dance’s Bacchae Before. Mohr and Maxe Crandall co-direct this dance theater adaptation of Anne Carson’s Bakkhai, a translation of the Euripides play.
Performed by Belinda He, Wiley Naman Strasser, Karla Quintero, and Silk Worm, Bacchae Before opens with all four in low-key orgy mode—groans and heavy petting—and uses the mode as transition between most scenes. Euripides’ Bacchae dramatizes the conflict between Pentheus, king of Thebes, and Dionysus, a newish god flexing their power, over influence on the female citizens of the kingdom and the power of faith writ large. Carson updated the language to better reflect the humor of the tragedy in our modern tongue. Mohr and Crandall use the text as a foundation to build a loose narrative around the tragedy of gender reveal parties. The adaptation is largely a performance of Carson’s text with scenes by Crandall interspersed.
Silk Worm and Strasser do double duty as Dionysus and Pentheus and a contemporary hetero couple expecting a baby. They slide easily between mythic authority and Instagram banality. He and Quintero are the Greek chorus dancing and assisting throughout. The pair have one extended dance break. They ratchet up the energy with unison choreography of weighted centers and thrown limbs. Otherwise their dancing is a direct extension of the text. The stage is bare except for the characters and clusters of props. The props become more than costumes or scenery as the narrative switches between Carson’s and Crandall’s texts. Fondled or thrown aside like a quick joke, the objects are signifiers of class, gender, and temporality.
Bacchae Before is dance-theater. The text defines the work but dance is given its due. Mohr and Crandall wisely have the actors do the most acting and the dancers do the most dancing. I wish that dance was used as a connective tissue between scenes and time periods beyond the aforementioned writhing and improv-ecstatic dance. The body and gender locate the concept yet the body isn’t given much to do conceptually.
The program makes a point of noting, “the moment of reveal is a cornerstone of classic tragedy.” This recognition, combined with gender reveal parties, leads one to believe a reveal would be forthcoming. Not so, at least in the narrative sense. The reveal in Bacchae Before is in the subtext not the text. Silk Worm as Dionysus asks rhetorically, “How do I look? Convincingly human?” The text is telling us a god is in human drag. The subtext points to the absurdity and violence of how much being “convincing” within a gender identity is predicated on external forces rather than internal truth.
Death of Pentheus. Object animation by Mike Chin. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.
Image description: Photo of a small plastic brown toy deer. Next to the deer is a pool of red spilled paint to simulate blood and a crushed pine cone in it. The surface is wide stripes of light pink, light yellow, and grey. The background of the photo is blurred with small toy trees.
The most arresting scene is object animation. Silk Worm reads the play’s climax directly from Carson’s text. Strasser, He, and Quintero approach a mise-en-scène laid out on a table downstage center. They turn on a camera with live feed projected on the theater’s back wall. The ensuing minutes see a tracking shot across a miniature landscape designed by Mike Chin. The landscape evolves with the narrative blending mundane objects with fantastical colors and contexts. This scene is a welcome disruption of the binary of performer-director and the trope of livestream within live theater. The cast animate the inanimate. The scene provides an intimacy deeper than the moments of ecstatic revelry. One medium becomes the chorus to another.
Euripides’ Bacchae ends with an exile. Bacchae Before ends with a projection listing all the anti-trans legislation enacted or proposed across the United States. A different kind of exile.
Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He hosts the Reference Desk podcast and is the co-director of Wax Poet(s) performance collective.
----------------
Comments