PRISONMS: A Performance in Review
March 04, 2005

Ostensibly, the main reason to live in downtown Toronto is for its cultural richness. This was certainly the main reason why I jumped at the chance to go see live performance art at the Du Maurier Centre with three of my good friends. Also, I got the ticket for free.

I must concede that I would never be able to find a ‘cultural event’ of this sort in, say, rural Manitoba (unless I laced the local ground water with huge doses of LSD). Yet I can provide comfort to thee, O thou teeming millions who make thy home in the cultural wasteland of the suburbs, or the bleak countryside, or those of you who live right here in the T-Dot but didn’t manage to get comp tickets to this event, by giving ‘PrisonMS’ an unmitigated two thumbs down. Allow me to cleanse you of your cultural envy by recounting the event with the white-hot fury of my disdain.

First, a quote from the Director’s Notes in the program booklet:

The title PRISONMS is a combination of the words PRISON and PRISM. I created this word in an effort to evoke a feeling of isolation, however suggesting the development of other possibilities. A prism, like some crystals, although physically hard and confined, breaks up light into the colours of the rainbow sending it off in various new directions.

For those of you stricken with terror at the thought of reading a review of a show that can already be seen to harbor disturbingly pretentious aspirations – even a review as mercilessly scathing as this one is going to be – I shall provide a boiled-down mini-review in seven words, cunningly hyphenated to look like an even more cursory five:

High-school coffee-house gone horribly wrong.

I give only one caveat before I pass sentence on this artistic debacle, and it is that no performers’ reputations will be harmed in the making of this review. I witnessed nothing but technical proficiency and personal excellence from the dancer, singer, and instrumentalists involved in the bold venture that was ‘PrisonMS’. Even when the beautiful ballerino Mr. Boorne seemed to be channeling the restless spirit of an unsuccessful auditionee for that 70s TV show, ‘Fame.’ Even when the soulful singer, Ms. Baird, uttered gutteral grunts, squeals and clicks in a brave try at phonetically rendering the not-so-poetic phrases “@%3*c17#+%@” and “%$%c&xyzz” (quoted directly from the libretto for ‘New People’ by Michael Colgrass). Even when the clarinetists wailed air into their reeds, recreating the sound of a small child learning to play the recorder in an abbatoir. Even then, the artists themselves were not to blame.

I have every confidence that the artists were doing exactly what they’re supposed to do: take direction from their respective choreographers, composers, directors, etc. So it is those people, the planners and creators, diabolical conspirators all! upon whose shoulders I place the blame. And with it, my white-hot furious disdain. I’m talking to you, Valerie Kuinka, Artistic and Stage Director. You promised me your show would move me “to a place of peace, beauty and hope” through “music combined with dance, computer-generated imagery and the spoken word”. You totally lied.

“The amazing digital environment” we were so tantalizingly promised in the program turned out to be an 8×10 projection screen that occasionally sported images that appear to have been manufactured in Microsoft Power Point. The flying toaster screen saver involved the same level of technological innovation that it took to generate this video. It wasn’t even an evolving program; just a two-second heavily pixelated video clip of a New York street scene, repeated on a loop and stretched onto the sides of geometric shapes that danced around the screen in a spastic fashion. Later, there was an extremely familiar looking bunch of geometric shapes (one might even say, the same) except now they were wearing a new, purple-toned circuit-board skin. One of my kindest thoughts during the evening was that perhaps the projectionist had experienced an extreme nic-fit and popped ‘Tron’ into the camcorder before going outside for a nice, long smoke.

When we first entered the theater, there was what I will term an ‘amuse-yeux’ on this screen, to whet our visual appetite for the show to come. Like a movie trailer, only in no way captivating. My descriptive powers wane before this apparition, but I’ll use the words conveniently provided for me by the video ‘artist’ herself, Karin Ocker. In what I’d gauge to be 80-point Arial, she had a series of illuminating yet cryptic phrases superimposed over a shifting sand background that might have been ripped from a beta-test of ‘Mario Dune Buggy Racing.’

Here are some of her phrases: “…a journey that is flat… and goes nowhere… through the imaginery [sic]” I’m afraid I couldn’t contain myself at this point. I turned to my friend and fellow English major, Alyssa, and whispered “The word ‘imaginery’ is a combination of the word imaginary and the letter ‘e’. I created this word by placing an ‘e’ where no ‘e’ had previously existed.” We laughed more than perhaps we should at a simple spelling error, but in retrospect that cruel laughter was the most enriching thing the show gave me, so whatever. I take entertainment where I find it.

The other, taller screen on stage right doubled as a shield to conceal the piano trio and as a projection field for symbols that were supposed to resonate with the music and dance performances on the stage below. These ‘resonant symbols’ amounted to three shitty black and white graphics that looked like they had been photocopied from a grade ten science textbook. The image they threw on up in there during the sixth piece, “Technical Deposition of the Virus Power,” was a picture of a large molecule called a buckyball, aka C60, the third major form of pure carbon. Now, I may be blind, but I know when someone hasn’t done their science homework. Carbon is not a virus. My message to you, Mr. or Ms. Visual Graphics Coordinator? Learn! Achieve!

I find myself without the energy or the heart to relate in detail the myriad smaller, nibbling disturbances of the program. Like the ‘Tommy’ moment where all the actors are temporarily and without explanation engrossed in a game of pinball. Or the ‘freaky children’ sketch where little girls play ring around the rosy behind a shadow screen while high-pitched, distorted children’s laughter is piped onto the stage. Or the mere uttering of the lyrics, “Baby’s eyes are chocolate / That melt when I’m bad / Baby’s mouth’s a plum / That sings when I’m sad… I’ll remember baby’s laughter / In prison till I’m dead / And after”. Baby oughta be singin’ for me, ‘cause I may remember those words till I’m dead and after, and that’s sad. I can only assume that at this point, baby’s eyes are liquid fondue, as this was some of Mr. Colgrass’s better poetry from the show.

The evening roster was divided neatly in two on the paper, printed on facing pages. This posed the clear inference of a break in the performance, mimicking the break in pagination. As my friends and I observed the artists bulldozing onwards into what appeared to be the second act of material, an icy chill settled over our hearts – there was to be no intermission. Later, it seemed obvious that from a directorial standpoint there was much merit in ‘imprisoning’ the audience, to lend credence to the theme of the show. In the heat of the moment, however, only one explanation for such cruelty sprang to mind. ‘Fuckers! They know if we see daylight, no way in hell we’re ever coming back!’

After all this venomous railing against the injustice of two precious hours of my life being stolen from me, never to be returned, I will leave you with a parting thought: Considering how clichéd and stereotypical all of this interpretive dance and screeching, off-tempo music and black-turtleneck-beatnik-poetry-recital seemed to us, has performance art developed its own set of rules and expectations? Has it become a legitimate and defined genre? Is there a canon to be referenced and adhered to and possibly, undermined? And if so, did my friends and I miss the point entirely of “PrisonMS” as a masterfully ironic mockery of itself, a perfect post-post-modern performance, a subversion of the dominant paradigm?

Who knows. Regardless, I thought it sucked ass.