A Wild, Weird "Spaghetti Co." at NW Film Forum

Alice Gosti and Devin McDermott in "Spaghetti Co." (Photo: Tim Summers)

Near the beginning of Alice Gosti's Spaghetti Co. (Something just happened at 1:19 p.m.) a big bowl of pasta with red sauce is just that...a big bowl of pasta with red sauce, probably very tempting if you showed up to the Northwest Film Forum prior to dinner--it's part of the Forum's "Live at the Forum" performance series and ends with an 8 p.m. show tonight, December 18.

But by the end, the food has transubstantiated: the pasta is a doughy yeastiness in the air, a slippery cushion on the floor, the red sauce a gouache over the canvas of the body. While the people in the front row have had occasion to use their protective trash bags, the people in the second row are primed to duck the occasional rogue strand that heads their way.

The three striking young women (Alice Gosti, Laara Garcia, Devin McDermott) gathered so decorously around the table--bright red lipstick, fingernails, toenails--have buried their faces in their plates, poured wine in torrents, grabbed handfuls of pasta from the serving bowl, and worried at huge bites like dogs with a bone. Their chic little white dresses (by Mark Ferrin) are stained, and they have pasta in their hair and between their toes. While it sounds like Gallagher, it's surprisingly deliberate in pace, and nuanced, illuminating both the beauty and comedy to pasta unfurling in flight through the air, while capturing facet after facet of the social matrix that spans the table. 

"Spaghetti Co." (Photo: Tim Summers)

If pressed to come up with a theme for the show, it'd be that, the gradual admixture of people and food until the new reality is permeated almost equally with both. What you see and hear is a combination of pantomime (silent but very active dinner table tableaux), mostly interpretive dance, and music from a the Johnny Astro band (two guitars, a bassist, and drums perched on a riser, who add Badalamenti-surf intermezzos to the evening).

Gosti's work is itself a mixture of the surreal and observational--there are moments that heighten a sense of giddy submersion of consciousness to eating (huge, grinning mouthfuls) and moments that despite their extremity (trampling out the pasta) feel weirdly like something you know from life. The piece is strongest when the table is a fourth member of the trio (at one point it bisects Gosti and McDermott who are lying underneath it, so that they look like Giant Doctor from Scrubs); when the trio break away for dance interludes, a bit of the tension and momentum dissipate because the table is where all the action is.

That said, McDermott's knees-tied stutter step deconstructs her dance into a habitual, compulsive form; when she drags her hand across her cheek from behind her head, it looks like an alien, red claw. Laara Garcia's straining, locked-ankle pose created a pair of feet that curled and grasped with sentient desire. 

It's hard to say what this adds up to; Gosti isn't that interested in putting you in a position of judgment. If these women are feral and combative, they are also thoughtful and giving. If they eat and drink too much, they also eat and drink too little. I had to think for a while about why I felt the show reached completion--the scenes are tidal, repetitive, cumulative. Finally I realized it was that sense of the pasta transubstantiation, when it's been ground (by teeth, feet, hands) back into an elemental paste that contains the taste of family, home, belonging.