This Week’s Performing Arts: Chad Goller-Sojourner, Ralph Lemon and More

Paul Taylor Dance Co.’s Taylor 2, this week at Meydenbauer (Photo: Tom Caravaglia)

This week, I’m moving my weekly performing arts column up to Monday (and yes, that’s in part because I didn’t get to it last week). But it’s more due to the fact that we’ve got some very interesting performing arts events that aren’t falling on the weekend this week, so I gotta catch ‘em somehow.

First up, by virtue of chronology, is NewsWrights United‘s Journalism: a.WAKE.ning, tonight at Theatre off Jackson (tickets $20). NewsWrights United is the company formed by Paul Mullin and a variety of other collaborators to produce last year’s It’s Not in the P-I and the upcoming The New New News. The company has revived the old idea of the “living newspaper” as a renewed form of documentary theatre they’re using to explore the changing media landscape and its broader impacts on community and democracy. Journalism: a.WAKE.ning is a fundraiser, reading, and panel discussion featuring everyone from Brendan Kiley to Monica Guzman to Dave Horsey (Michael van Baker wrote about this more over the weekend), a stellar line-up due as much to the popularity of the project as to the fact the news media, new or old, love the chance to talk about themselves. And on that note, let me add further that you should be interested in this play because yours truly makes a cameo (as a character in the play, not an actor) in The New New News, albeit in Tweet form. But they’ve assured me I’m properly credited with an “M” in my name.

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Second, we’ve got the Paul Taylor Dance Company out in Bellevue for one night only, Weds., Nov. 17, at the Meydenbauer Center (tickets $30-$49). I know it’s a hell of a drive, but keep in mind: Paul Taylor is one of the lions of American Modern dance. He’s in his eighties now and has six decades of choreography under his belt, no small amount of which pushed boundaries aesthetic, political, and sexual in their time. The company that will be appearing is the Taylor 2 Company, a rather clever idea that was launched in 1993 that reduced the number of dancers required to peform Taylor’s repertory works to facilitate cheaper and broader touring, so that more people would get to see the work.

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Third, there’s Chad Goller-Sojourner, who reprises his Sitting in Circles With Rich White Girls this weekend at the Rainier Valley Cultural Center Friday and Saturday (tickets $12-$14). Now, anyone who reads me regularly knows my longstanding ambivalence regarding the solo show. For every masterpiece I’ve had the joy of seeing, there’s three dozen navel-gazing, self-absorbed monologues in which occasionally first-rate actors offer up nuggets of ridiculous wisdom culled from their own lives and processed through a second-rate literary blender into third-rate prose.

Chad Goller-Sojourner in “Sitting in Circles With Rich White Girls”

That said, there are most definitely works which have touched me and impressed me deeply, and Chad’s Sitting in Circles is one of them. I did a feature on Chad when the show debuted a couple years ago which you can read here, but in short, Chad is simultaneously blessed and cursed with too much identity. He’s black but raised by a white family, a Christian homosexual, and a male bulimic. In fact, I think it’s that complete and total overdose of identity  that makes Sitting in Circles such a transcendent experience in a genre otherwise dominated by well-worn identity politics; that, and Chad’s poetic writing, infused both with a gentle humor and occasionally a religious fervor, rendering the gut-wrenching struggles and overwhelming contradictions of his life in a rich palette that leaves its mark on you in the best of all possible ways. I highly, highly recommend this show.

And fourth and finally, starting this Thursday, Ralph Lemon’s How Can You Stay in House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? comes to On the Boards (tickets $25). I caught this piece last month at BAM’s Next Wave Festival, and it’s one of the more fascinating and hard-to-define works I’ve seen in a while. While Lemon is, on the one hand, a highly respected dancer and choreographer, his reputation stems at least as much from producing highly collaborative, cross-disciplinary shows that stray well beyond dance and choreography. Over the course of his career, these have grown more and more ambitious. Though he originally had a company presenting work on a regular basis, he disbanded it several years ago to shift his focus from the finished product to concentrating on process and research. The Geography Trilogy, a series of three performance works with attendant books, films, and gallery installations that established him as a star on the national and international circuit, took a decade to complete.

In How Can You Stay Inside…, Lemon returns to some of the work from the Geography Trilogy, but in a rather complex fashion. Not too long ago, Lemon lost long-time partner to cancer, dancer Asako Takami, and the show is largely concerned with processing that life-changing event. Part of it centers on Walter Carter, a centenarian sharecropper Lemon had worked with previously, and whose longtime marriage (Walter’s wife was eighty) exists in sharp contrast to Lemon’s own tragically abbreviated relationship. In order to bridge the gap between such divurgent experiences, Lemon uses scenes from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, a science fiction movie that turns on whether to accept truth or fantasy over desire for a lost love.

The show unfolds in roughly two parts: in the first, Lemon simply sits on stage and narrates a film exploring most of these issues; in the second, Lemon departs and a series of movement and performative moments unfold. In one, a company of Lemon’s remarkable dancer-collaborators performs a semi-improvised breakdown of movement into its purest, most compulsive form. In another, the audience is subjected a seemingly endless lament. And then there’s some guffaw-inducing special effects.

Lemon’s work is divisive but his talent and intelligence is undeniable. How Can You Stay Inside All Day… unfolds with a deceptive bluntness, one which slowly reveals endless seemingly layers of subtlety as it peels back layer after layer in search of an elusive truth. That sounds vague and critic-speaky, but it’s true: for 20 minutes, Lemon subjects you to his attempt to push his dancers to find a transcendent movement free of form. I have to admit, it’s at once unbearably ridiculous and incredibly profound, and whatever else, Lemon deserves credit for daring to put that onstage. And don’t get me wrong–it’s the absolute best of the show.