SOS - Big Art Group

So last weekend, in a fit of devil may care spending we went to the theatre. Unlike going to a broadway play, the symphony or the opera, CalArts' Red Cat is an affordable venture if you are willing to see stuff that is off the beaten track. I, for one, am obviously off the beaten track, so I've enjoyed everything I've seen at Red Cat, while I have spent money on Broadway tickets and been totally grossed out. I remember being appalled at seeing a revival of the Music Man - the content of the play was reprehensible and the direction was something to the effect of let's try and be as bland as possible for the IOWANS who are VISITING our FAIR CITY who would not be able to understand anything sophisticated and who will be wowed(!) by a little breaking the third wall by having a marching band go up the aisle.
So for a mere 30 bucks we saw Caden Manson's group perform SOS. It was a loud play with many video screens that were edited on the fly with the actors performing in front of small video cameras and changing scenes were created by holding up postcards for backdrops. There were three lines of action - one was Logan's Run with Plushies, another was Valley Girl Consumer Competition and the third was Bader-Meinhoff America's Top Model. In the end all of the actors encased themselves in balloon armor and had a fight.
At one point the contestants in Bader-Meinhoff America's Top Model were having a car chase. One actor held cards of streets up to a camera. Another actor held cut outs of a car hood, roof and windshield up to another camera. Two Actors stood in front of a camera - while another one (in the car behind) was in front of a fourth. Edited together it looked like there were two people careening in a car through the streets of a city with another person in hot pursuit behind them. The plushies - See here for a definition - were actors dressed in plush-outfits representing a raccoon, bunny, deer and wolf (I knew something was up when there was a carnivore amongst the ranks, quite frankly, that was a bit that you could see was coming from miles off) with a camera strapped on a pole in front of them and a flashlight that they could use to illuminate their faces. It was always dark during these scenes and the way to see the actors was to follow their flashlight faces or to watch the video screens which could only see the actors who had their flashlights on. Very fun.
Last weekend we also went to the Hammer to see Nine Lives work of 9 LA based artists. It was fun to see Jeffrey Valance's work again - I dimly remember him from nine thousand years ago and it's nice to see him alive and kicking, but the work I thought was totally standout in the exhibit was a series of large scale photos (I wouldn't be able to fit one in my house - don't have a wall big enough) about motion and stillness. They were black and white photos, exquisitely printed of a moving cat - where the exposure was long so that the cat was a blur, except for one where the cat was sitting curled up and still. Gorgeous work, really gorgeous.