More SomerVaudeVille Video from Geek Force Five

Chris Clark of Geek Force Five has put together an eight-minute and one-second video featuring a sampling of the acts that appeared at Theatre@First's production of SomerVaudeVille. An excerpt from my piece, "The Marmalope" starts about 4:40 into the video:

If you have seen Shelly MacAskill's video of the same piece, it is interesting to note how different camera angles create a very different effect when filming mime or dance, though as I stated in my previous entry, it is a matter of translating a three-dimensional art form (four-dimensional if one counts time as a dimension) into a two-(or three)-dimensional medium. The segment that Clark captured is certainly choreographed to be seen from the front of the stage as opposed to the side, while I think the earlier sequence when my legs, arms and torso are bent into a sculptural form for the marmalope (played by my right hand) to run about, works very nicely from the angle that MacAskill presented in her video.

Of course, this leaves me to wonder just how many people were taping the performance?

Also appearing in the video are Can Can Revolution, Uncle Shoe, Heisenberg's Mezzos, Justin Werfel, Gilana and her Hula Hips, and The Pluto Tapes.

Mime at SomerVaudeVille

Shelly MacAskill posted this video of my performance of "The Marmalope" at SomerVaudeVille to YouTube, with master of ceremonies, Rob Noyes giving introductions:


It's sometimes hard to translate the three-dimensional experience of a live performance into the two-dimensional experience of video, but it worked well. "The Marmalope" has been part of my repertoire for years but the experience of rehearsing the piece for SomerVaudeville over a couple of months allowed me to further refine it from its most basic idea. "The Marmalope" received its name sometime in the early months of 2005, when Jonathan Samson, while playing Il Dottore at the Svengali Cabaret was asked to identify my species, where upon he said "that is a marmalope." By the following week, an audience member had identified the creature played by my right hand as "a baby marmalope." My right hand has grown up since then.

One thing that made this performance special, is that I realized I had acheived a certain level of mastery in that in at a particular moment, the audience's sympathies were not projected on me personally, or on a character I was playing, but on a character played by my right hand even as the rest of my body was playing a character not particularly deserving of sympathy. No amount of technique can create that.

Ironically, the night following the performance in which I had achieved this small degree of mastery, I was in rehearsals for Chhandika's annual student concert and I was again a novice, albeit a sleep deprived novice. Though the similarities to mime are what attracted me to kathak, kathak is not mime.

Rif, a pianist with a very impressive display of facial hair, was kind enough to take these photographs of the "The Marmalope" from a somewhat different vantage point than that shown in the video.

As a bonus, Kitty Fox of Can Can Revolution and I staged a very brief skit to accompany Uncle Shoe's rendition of "Mistah Moonshine", a hit from 1912 by Charles S. Burnham and Adam Breede:

The moon was Shoe's idea-- I drew my inspiration from Jean-Louis Barrault's Jean-Gaspard "Baptiste" Deburau in Les Enfants du Paradis.

There are also photos of me hanging out backstage with the lovely Can Can Revolutionaries.

After the show, outside Johnny D's, my make-up not quite off yet:

May 28th: SomerVaudeVille @ Johnny D's

As well as everything else for which I am rehearsing (this being but one example) I'm currently preparing for SomerVaudeVille, presented by Theatre @ First, a Somerville based group with whom I haven't worked before. Most of the folk are new to me, but it has been a chance to renew acquaintances with fellow mime, Justin Werfel, whom I first met back in 2004 when I sat in with MIMEtype the MIT mime troupe, as well as with Matt Samolis (AKA Uncle Shoe.)

As Uncle Shoe, Matt is a banjo playing conservator of the American Tin Pan Alley repertoire. As Matt Samolis, he is a rather eclectic multi-instrumentalist. He and I have known each other for years and this time, decided to use the opportunity to collaborate. While one piece we rehearsed together had to be dropped due to time constraints (we will find a way to perform it elsewhere and elsewhen) we have something in mind for this show.

The other acts show include: Jessica Almeida, Ari Herbstman, Erica Schultz, The Pluto Tapes (Andy Hicks), Can-Can Revolution, Heisenberg's Mezzos (Andrea Humez, Erica Schultz, Jessica Raine, and Gilly Rosenthol), and Gilana and her Hula Hips (Gilly Rosenthol).

See SomerVaudeVille on May 28th, at Johnny D's Uptown at 17 Holland Street, Davis Square, Somerville. Show begins at 8:30pm.