The main theme of the 2016 International Festival of Arts & Ideas seemed to be the intersection of live performance and live music.
Instead, it’s even livelier, landing on the intersection of art and reality.
At the festival, which began June 10 and wraps up Sunday, June 25, books and stories have been presented multi-dimensionally. Culture and gender differences have been openly explored. There have been frequent breakdowns of the fourth wall, mind-warping moments when skilled performers drop theatrical pretense and appear to communicate directly with the audience, only to revert back to scripted precision.
>>Ann Bogart’s SITI Company’s staging of Julia Wolfe’s song cycle “Steel Hammer” (which ran June 16-18) featured six musicians from the Bang on a Can All-Stars ensemble, a culturally diverse six-person acting ensemble (led by a righteous Eric Berryman as the mythic steel-driving John Henry), four African-American playwrights (Kia Corthron, Will Power, Carl Hancock Rux and Regina Taylor, who added scripted scenes to the multi-disciplinary performance) and three women singing in high harmonies. Given the abstract nature of the work as a whole, the long scripted bits that consisted mainly of historical exposition seemed extraneous and unnecessary. The more character-based contributions were stronger, but not as strong as Wolfe’s score. SITI’s “Steel Hammer,” currently on a national tour, is most resonant when its six-person cast becomes an extension of the live music ensemble, adding to the already complex rhythms by dancing and clapping and body-slapping and running in circles until they reached a point of true physical exhaustion.
>>“The Bookbinder,” written and performed by Ralph McCubbin Howell of New Zealand’s Trick of the Light theater company, turned out to be one of the festival’s hottest tickets, filling the auditorium at the Yale Center for British Art for four performances June 17-19. This was an intimate, lean-in-close manipulation of words, shadows, puppets and especially books. A slightly scary story was brought to life through storytelling and an array of voices, but especially through a stack of intricate pop-up books.
>>The Chinese dancer and performance artist Yang Hao, in his solo pieces “Pied a Terre” and “Middle,” had a disarming way of seemingly stopping his performance to ask the audience directly for their opinions, then turning those humble, very real-seeming moments into rehearsed, repetitive series of physical gestures. During the two-part show, Yang Hao (whose appearance at the festival was the result of a new arts initiative of the Yale-China Association) painted a box shape on the floor, stretched and rolled, undressed, danced, demonstrated martial arts and dressed as a woman to conduct an interview with his male self via pre-recorded video. It was a display of beauty, calm grace and provocative psychological mystery.
>>Even the family-friendly clown/mime duo Acrobuffos, in their wind-powered indoor “Air Play” show at the Yale University Theater (through June 25), had to contend with an impressive number of unpredictable elements. Bringing audience members, from tiny children to lumbering adults, onto the stage is common at theater circus events. What’s quirkier is that the main props of “Air Play” — balloons (including ones so large that the clowns could disappear inside them), long bolts of translucent cloth, and the air itself (mainly blown by a circle of electric fans) — are so delicate, so fragile, so light as air. You feel you’re witnessing divine natural occurrences rather than carefully devised circus stunts.
>>The “realest” of all the reality-tinged theatrics at Arts & Ideas is unquestionably “The Money,” a performance piece by the English company Kaleider. The project sets a specific task for audience members who’ve elected to sit around a large table in the library room of the Quinnipiack Club: decide what to do with the money raised from their own admission fees. The “performance” I saw on Wednesday afternoon was, I hope, one of the weaker examples of where this provocative concept could lead. The “Benefactors” got immediately bogged down in procedural issues and needless “back-up plans,” which led laboriously to the money being given right back to the Arts & Ideas festival. Sometimes reality-based drama is boring and annoying.
>>And sometimes truth-based theater can be gloriously strange. “Square Root of Three Sisters,” a world-premiere collaboration between Russian theater director Dmitry Krymov, faculty members from the Yale School of Drama and Yale Theater Studies programs, student directors and designers, and actors who have just graduated from the School of Drama, opened Wednesday and is being presented at the Iseman Theater, 1164 Chapel Street in New Haven, through June 25. The play is an intense, ingenious deconstruction of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” though one of the main characters in it is the writer Trigorin, from a different Chekhov drama, “The Seagull.” The production is an excellent example of contemporary theater artists attempting to come to terms with legacies, histories and texts that can either hamper or inspire their creative process. Led by the extraordinary young actor Aubie Merrylees as Trigorin, “Square Root of Three Sisters” veers chaotically from grand cultural cliches to intimate emotional upheavals.
>>What really drives “Square Root of Three Sisters” is how the acting ensembles interact as real people, using their own names and creating the performance organically, starting with the laying of the stage floor and the building of sets out of cardboard. Some awesome technical effects eventually occur, but this tornado of culture clashes, comic cut-ups, tear-strewn breakdowns and startling juxtaposition is guided by a whirlwind of human energy that carries the audience along, at the risk of everyone’s minds exploding.
Like so many other shows at Arts & Ideas 2016, “Square Root of Three Sisters” has a live music element, where the Gershwin tune “Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me” is played on toy piano, accordion, slide whistle, guitar, rainstick, tambourine and an electric drill.
Yes, music hath charms at Arts & Ideas 2016. But it can’t come close to soothing the savagery of the fest’s many uninhibited, confrontational, physically intense and insidiously personal performers.
The International Festival of Arts & Ideas continues through June 25. Details of remaining performances are at artidea.org.
