The Road To Mecca by Athol Fugard

The Road to Mecca is a play by contemporary playwright Athol Fugard, with a story based loosely on the life of artist Helen Martins. We saw the Seattle Rep's production of the show, directed by Leigh Silverman and starring Marya Sea Kaminski, Dee Maaske, and Terry Edward Moore. The play was originally produced in 1984, and was adapted into a film in 1992.

The real Helen Martins lived from 1897 - 1976 and was the creator of the Owl House, known today as a national landmark in South Africa. She woke one day to her singular vision of turning her home and yard into a sort of Mecca away from Mecca, and spent the rest of her life up until her death working on it. Especially the inside of her home made great use of the play of light, using ground glass, mirrors, and other reflective surfaces and objects to catch and reflect the light in different ways.

The action of the play takes place all on a single night, very late in Helen's life, when her good friend Elsa, a 20something schoolteacher living far away in the big city, arrives for an unexpected and brief visit to her dear friend in the dusty and desolate desert for some very important and pressing reasons, which we learn more and more about as the play progresses. As the evening moves on we discover Helen has been having troubles with the rest of her small-town community, and that her friend Marius (town pastor and no friend of Elsa's) is due for a visit later that evening where Helen will be faced to make a very important decision about her living conditions.

For a story that takes place completely in one room involving just three characters and several compressed hours of action, this play is immensely rich. It has very much what I think of as a traditional essence of theater quality about it in that it is all about the actors and the story, and would have been be almost as engaging a theatre experience were it taking place only on a bare stage with three plain chairs and a the most basic lighting effects. Fugard has pared things down to provide us with just the most essential defining moments in the lives of the three characters, which leave us knowing an entire lifetime's worth of living, philosophy, and personal growth for all three. The effect was riveting throughout, and would never have worked were it not for the wonderful acting of the expertly-tuned cast.

This isn't to say the set design and lighting had no effect. With the primary subject of Helen's life being her artistically rendered living quarters, which came alive in the cast of candlelight, the play was made immensely richer having the visual references to enhance the actor's dwelling place. We didn't need to imagine the magic that Elsa was speaking of when she described how glorious Helen's work looked, because the set and lighting showed that beautifully themselves.

You can hear an excerpt of a radio adaptation of the play by LA Theatre Works here.

Chelfitsch: Five Days in March

Chelfitsh is an alternative theater group from Japan. The narrative of Five Days in March is a simple story of what was going on in lives of several 20-ish Japanese people during the US invasion of Iraq. The invasion is a backdrop to tales of coupling, music and protests. The script is Japanese with projected supertitles in English.

The key part of the performance is the theatricality of it. The performers dress and talk naturalisticaly and the set is almost completely bare. The store is told in repeating cycles with overlapping performers voicing the first-person narratives of the characters. The actors gesture and walk in partially movements repeated in cycles. Hard to describe in words: a performer drops his arm in a casual style, then lifts it and drops it again and again while talking.

I liked the show. The story was humorous and mildly titillating enough to hold interest. It was confusing to follow due to the changing performers and repeating narrative. This confusion surprisingly became enjoyable as it combined with the physical movement of the performers.

After the show I realized it reminded me of minimalistic theater movements I learned about in college. I had never seen such a show live and it seems like Chelfitsch is a contemporary follower of that. I enjoyed how Five Days in March focused strongly on movement and language and the memory of that stayed with me afterwards.

Balanchine's Jewels

Jewels is a ballet by the well-known choreographer George Balanchine. From the program:

"Balanchine's unique Jewels, made for New York City Ballet in 1967, is a three-act plotless ballet and the first of its kind."

Each "act", which in truth are more each like their own one-act piece, was created with a particular jewel in mind: Emeralds, Rubies, and Diamonds. While I can't remember exactly which one, I know we've seen at least one of these three acts on its own at some point over the past few years, as part of an evening of short pieces.

A little bit about Balanchine: Because both the current director Peter Boal (who was a student of Balanchine) and the previous long-time directors Kent Stowell and Francia Russell(who both danced for Balanchine) are strongly associated with this choreographer, a large number of the ballets Chad and I have seen at the PNB have been Balanchine works. He has defined much of what is now known as modern American ballet, and we have never seen a Balanchine work we did not like. As far as we've been able to tell, his ballets stand out from those of other choreographers primarily due to their strong musicality. That probably sounds strange to anyone who's never seen ballet, but in truth, alot of ballet does not have movement which goes right along with the music in the way that you expect something called "dance" to do. The other primary defining style for me is his obvious innovative experimentation with the ballet form, while still staying within the confines of what most of us traditionally think of when we think the word "ballet".

We got a unique opportunity for Jewels that we've never experienced before: we were invited to watch the dress rehearsal. Not only was this interesting because we got to see the dancers warm up onstage for their pieces before performing them (amusing especially for the incongruous combination of fancy dress costumes with leg warmers, warm-up pants, and sweatshirts), but it let us see the performance twice in the same week, each with a different set of principal dancers. I think seeing it this way changed the experience by deepening it. I believe I was able to pay much more attention to all the small details that I might not otherwise notice had I only seen the piece once.

One of those details that was very prominent in Emeralds was the unique use of arm movements. In traditional ballet, the arm movements are usually very specific and mostly seem to be there to put a finishing touch on the featured movement of the legs and body. But in Emeralds, the arm movements were themselves an important expressive part of the dance, and often seemed to be even more featured than the leg movements. The effect overall was very beautiful.

My personal favorite of the evening was Rubies, which has a Stravinsky score and is described in the program as "the American heart of Jewels." While it maintained all the essential ballet tradition in general, it was fun and obviously influenced by jazz style in the same manner Stravinsky's score was. While all of the costumes for Jewels (designed by Karinska, see my note below) are great, those for Rubies are especially interesting and fun, in many vibrant shades of red and a sort of modified flapper meets All-American Revue that really helped to draw attention and enhance the jazzy movements.

I liked Diamonds too, but not as much as the other two. This one was much more rooted in traditional ballet, and had alot of what seemed like very difficult technical dancing. There was quite a bit of spontaneous applause during and after the execution of alot of the crazy complicated spins and leaps involved during this act.

Factoid: Some very interesting history I learned from the program was about the costume designer Karinska, who was a longtime collaborator with Balanchine and is known as "one of the great dance costumers of the twentieth century." She was responsible for creating 9,000 costumes for the New York City Ballet, and even costumed 11 movies in the 40s and 50s, including Ingrid Bergman's Joan of Arc costume. Besides being a major influence on many other performing arts costumes of her era, she was responsible for two of the major costume design changes that have become standards in ballet today. One was the "powder-puff" tutu, which instead of the weird sticks-out-in-the-air pancake style that older ballets used, drapes softly onto the hips and bounces nicely when the dancers move.The other standard she created was the very modern-looking knee-length chiffon ballet dress.