CHOREOGRAPHERS SAMPLER
Tongue of Fire also comments on male-female relations–though it might be more accurate to say it literally stages the battle of the sexes. The group responsible for it, Long Bone (formerly Tarantula Moon), is made up of one woman, Shu Shubat, who plays guitar, and three men, Winston Damon, Tony Di Martino, and Olli Seay, who play percussion. They don’t so much play for the audience as at each other, boys against the girl. The texts that they eventually scream back and forth have been printed, for the audience’s enhanced pleasure and comprehension, on big red valentine hearts handed out with the programs. The slogans include: “I’ll be guilty till ya give me the word,” and “What makes me so dangerous since you moved in is I know where you live.”
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Shubat comes out first. With her long auburn hair done up, she looks like a country-western singer, her electric guitar strapped around her neck and her song a bitter lament about love. She also parodies some sadly cliched rock-star choreography, hunching her shoulders with the big beats, for example. At one point she tries something fancy, stepping into the space between her shoulder and the guitar–but her arms, legs, the guitar, and its strap get all tangled up. This forces her to play scrunched over for a while, until finally she just falls down; then her playing really goes to hell.
It doesn’t seem very sophisticated, but I liked Tongue of Fire partly because it was loud. It put its music in my heart in the same way that drum-and-bugle corps did when I was a kid. Then I liked the way the members of Long Bone transformed themselves. Damon, his face contorted, was an inspired dancer as well as drummer, the kind of person who has perfect rhythm the way other musicians have perfect pitch. Seay and Di Martino look more like accountants than musicians–they’re a little chunky, they wear their hair short, and Seay has glasses–but any initial impression of staidness was dispelled by their powerful, buoyant, funny performances (Seay’s especially). Shubat has an angelic, smooth, rosy face, but as she walked unblinkingly toward us, she seemed so demonic I felt afraid. When the four of them took their bows, they looked completely bewildered. I believe they were still in the state of trance they’d induced.
Douglas Wood’s Jackson Park-Howard juxtaposes a woman dancing in a flowing white gown (Emily Stein), a guy reading a newspaper (Wood), slides of the el and of news stories about Noriega, and a recording of Isolde’s “Liebestod” aria from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. There’s a lot to look at–too much–during this self-indulgent exercise, but nothing develops.
