Dance performance, circus, grand opera, movie, concert or light show? Whether all or none of the above, you can be sure that when Degenerate Art Ensemble is in the house, spectacle, mystique and pageantry will ensue.
DAE crept up on me slowly, having evolved out of the Young Composers Collective in the mid-90s to begin to include elaborate costumes, surreal stage sets, and Butoh-influenced dance – likely largely due to the influence of Haruko Nishimura, who works overtime as dancer, vocalist, choreographer and artistic director.
Signs in the theater lobby note that DAE is “a company artistically led by an immigrant and born out of a desire to understand the inner famine that leads to unkindness,” while the program notes indicate that the work is an attempt of “honoring our animal senses and rebalancing feminine and masculine forces” in order to promote healing. Its latest offer, Anima Mundi, includes a story about a monk, mysterious fox sightings, two different monsters, and a dress in which any 17th century prima donna would be proud to prance down the runway. There are consistent arboreal motifs and motifs of doubling. So did DAE succeed in carrying out its intended mission statements? For me, the plethora of elements didn’t create a storyline as much appear and disappear in what could either be deliberate open-endedness or a collection of events with a too-elusive meaning. But perhaps I was looking too hard. In the past, I’ve simply let DAE’s seductive and tantalizing sounds and visions wash over me like a kind of parade.
What stood out for me most this time were the visual effects. The stage was set up with a series of progressively receding ceiling-high archways on which to show projections, and large round drum-shaped screens were wheeled on and offstage on which to show more. In center stage was a tiny tent-like house. At the start of the show, birdsong and nature sounds segued into “working” music, and the silhouette of a person working in the tent expanded into dozens of projections of people in tiny tents working all across the arches. This was only one of the many mesmerizing examples of creative videography, including morphing sepia textures, doubling shadow play on the round screens, the round screens as giant car tires, trees on the arches appearing to bend, and swaying and then upward-flying light globes projected onto trees to accompany a haunting song about moths “smudging the light with paper wings.”
In what should have been the finale, but was instead placed about two-thirds of the way through, Haruko moves in and out of the house, opening its two doors, moving in various ways on its table and floor, and sometimes seeming to magically merge with the structure. This would have almost been fascinating enough in and of itself, but the process was also accompanied by a slew of quickly metamorphosing and kaleidoscoping projections directly on the house, including a triptych of green, gold and blue shadow puppet imagery, a cave painting, a monster in a box, a butterfly wing illusion, a black and white filigree pattern, a percolating paisley pattern, and finally a projected series of white birds that “flew” out onto the arches.
You may not fully understand every part of how DAE rolls, but one thing’s pretty sure: you won’t forget it.
