JAZZMO
Made up of six “scenes” improvised to music (each about ten minutes long), JazzMo features an ensemble of young, agile, and athletic actors who express themselves entirely through movement set to contemporary jazz (Keith Jarrett, Bass Desires, Jace Ira Blue, etc). They run, they leap, they spin, they kick; following the beat, they move across the stage, alone or in groups of two or three, all the while creating intriguing stage pictures. (Imagine a rock video performed live.) What these actors never do is recite a line, or improvise a story, or build a scene with a beginning, middle, or end. What would you call it?
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JazzMo’s roots are in theater; it evolved from improvisation exercises developed by cocreator James Ostholthoff in the early 70s to encourage spontaneity in his student actors. But what started as theater looks a whole lot like dance 18 years later. Certainly anyone seeing the show without the benefit of the Director’s Co-op’s press materials will never dream they are watching anything but dance. Still the show’s directors, Ostholthoff and John Jenkins, insist that JazzMo is an improvisational movement piece for the theater.”
Part of JazzMo’s fascination may well be an implied message that perhaps we, too, might be allowed to join the tribe. That kind of message can be very seductive in a society that keeps coming up with new ways to reinforce loneliness, fear, and quiet desperation (also known as cocooning). More than one audience member after the show joked about wanting to join the actors on the stage. It was impossible not to be caught up in the show’s infectious energy. “People like to watch freedom,” John Jenkins told me after the show.
However, this is just a minor complaint. At a time when avant-garde is often a code word for bad, we need successful work like JazzMo, if only to show an increasingly lethargic and stodgy public that not all of the best theater lies behind us, and that sometimes experimental works can be at least as entertaining as this year’s Broadway revival.
