Theater of the Absurd

While we were out and about this weekend, Tom and I stumbled over a little gallery in St Paul that had these lovely bronze Humpty Dumpty statues sitting on a wall. They were so droll and cute! I loved them! And? While walking back and forth staring up at the little guys (they're about 2 ft tall) I managed to trip over nothing and fall. Yes, Swami went ass over tea kettle right in front of Humpty Dumpty!

Tom was hysterical. "Get up! Get up!!" he said while kind of prancing around me, but I just wanted to lay there for a minute and take inventory because I felt a bit stunned. I'm sure the passing cars thought we were extreme idiots but I don't care. And I managed to get up without the aid of any King's horses or any King's men. Just a helping hand from Tom.



Look at these guys! Aren't they glorious? I so want to go back and buy one, even if I have to build a fence for it!



Speaking of theater, one of the shows Tom and I saw this past week was a recreation of Fritz Lange's 1927 B & W silent movie masterpiece Metropolis. I have seen that movie before (parts of it are lost & forever missing) and tried to appreciate it, since it is one of the classics of early cinema and was totally futuristic and extravagant for it's time. But I never really felt like it was that special. I just couldn't get into it.

Well, this production was exceptional! The movie was projected onto a special semi-transparent screen, so depending on how or if the back-of-screen lighting was engaged you could see some activity behind the screen image too. So while the movie was playing various actors, dancers and performance artists did their thing--sometimes in front of the screen and sometimes seen dimly from behind. There were aerialists, people climbing Chinese Poles, people hanging from the ceiling, people doing odd tasks - all this done mostly during the scenes of the 1927 Worker's Class doing their jobs. And not directly in front of the screen, but on the edges and then moving beyond the edges so the effect was to explode the visuals right off the projection screen! It's hard to describe, but it was so well done! It always enhanced the original movie, never distracted. When the most dramatic scenes of the movie were playing the 21st century "extras" disappeared so as not to distract.

Best of all was the music. Electropolis (a local, fully electrified band) put together a rendition of Lange's original 1927 score that just took your breath away! It was fully electrified of course, so the sound quality itself just rocked. But the interpretation? Powerful, sexy, ominous, and live. The liveness of the music made the score immediate & meaningful. It was so much better than listening to some tinny, canned musical track.

Now I love this movie! I can appreciate the power of the story. Finally. It was wonderful!

And some asides:
--German actors of that era always look like gay Nazis to me. I'm not sure if that's because they were the models for Hollywood when our cinemas began to portray evil, conflicted Nazis - or if that is how German people's body postures and body language were back then. Could also be the heavy-handed eye make-up men of the silent era wore.
--Tom maintains that this was not an avant garde experience because nobody got naked. I say it was avant garde because whenever people in black body stockings and bare feet run across a stage in the dark while holding sheets of plastic you are allowed to stamp the production with that label. He just wanted to see naked people is all.