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Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Respect the Boss: A Belated Report From Last Saturday Night

posted by on August 29 at 13:35 PM

People are drunk and nobody can decide who’s the boss. “Tony Danza?” asks somebody on the sidewalk in front of a three-story industrial building in Belltown. Inside, theater company Implied Violence is throwing a rock ‘n’ roll fundraiser called Respect the Boss. “No! Not Tony Danza,” the guy guarding the door shouts. “Angela and Samantha was the boss.”

In a hallway on the second floor, two stations of televisions, with four screens each, play R. Kelly’s hiphopera Trapped In the Closet, including the new episodes.

Past the televisions is a big, empty room with a bar, some bunk beds, and Jherek Bischoff (of the Dead Science) accompanying himself on guitar and drums with a looping machine.

Homemade piñatas hang in a corner—one is a brown globe with a picture of R. Kelly, another is a pink globe with a knife sticking out, dribbles of red paint, and a sign: “Honeymoon.” Implied Violence member Mandie O’Connell says one of the piñatas contains a prescription for Plan B. When asked why the evening’s schedule has so many conflicting events—many bands, a piñata smashing, some performances—she answers: “Pick the boss; respect the boss.”

Downstairs, on the first floor, is a room in which you could park several delivery trucks. The band TacocaT plays loud, happy songs about PMS and urinary tract infections while inebriates jostle and dance and an angry man in a button-up shirt keeps asking who set off the fire extinguisher on the third floor. People shrug. He, clearly, is not the boss.

Implied Violence began in 2003 as some dancers, musicians, and theater students who hated all the theater they saw. The company has performed difficult plays (4:48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane, Die Wandlung by early German Expressionist Ernst Toller). They smash together newspaper stories, small talk, and advertising clichés with live music, repetitive gestures and language, butoh, boxing, vaudeville, hiphop, and, sometimes, feathers and goo. Implied Violence loves rigor and codes and seems to have infinite admiration for Gertrude Stein and the Wu-Tang Clan.

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The party gets chaotic—tomatoes and dahlias are thrown, people make out in dusty hallways, a pack of men and one woman shout out Wu-Tang lyrics. During the “avant comedy” set, two men read entries from the diary of a 13-year-old girl named Tiffany while two other men fight playfully in towards the back of the crowd. The pugilists are smiling but serious, smacking each other loudly. Are they performers? Just horsing around? Nobody can decide.

(Stay tuned for Kelly O’s Respect the Boss edition of “How Was It?”, coming tomorrow.)

RSS icon Comments

1

um everyone knows that mona is the boss.

Posted by and | August 29, 2007 3:37 PM
2

What the hell was all that $#%! was about?

Posted by yucca flower | August 29, 2007 5:17 PM
3

Jeebuz, how many people did they expect to show up for this fundraiser?

And, how many in fact did?

Posted by COMTE | August 29, 2007 6:48 PM
4

Well, they raisd 3,200$ so I feel like it had to have been a success.

Looks like- I.V. is the boss....GIVE RESPECT.

Posted by Guy Incognito | September 1, 2007 12:38 PM
5

Heh! Heh! Love the Slog. "What's your favorite? "The pinata's because they are filled with people's dreams and people get to smash them.." "What do they win?" "Their dreams."

Posted by warm leatherette | September 7, 2007 12:56 AM

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