In terms of their programming, Northwest Film Forum has been looking beyond film for some time now. During Halloween they opened up their doors to Satori Group's Spookhaus 3: Spook There It Is!. When Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut filibustered for common sense gun control legislation last month, NWFF streamed the event on one of their screens and invited the public to come watch in a communal environment. On Saturday, the cinema hosted PALMS, a multi-disciplinary performance that combined dance choreographed by Paige Barnes, poetry read by Vanessa DeWolf, and music by Paurl Walsh. The show was a wild spectacle full of cliches.
The event was totally sold out, so I took a seat in the back of the cinema. While waiting for other people to file in, bowel-busting electronic music filled the room as I stared at Corrie Befort and John DeShazo's set. They'd removed the movie screen completely and constructed a three-tiered platform for the performers. It looked like a room-sized Rothko that could change colors.
On the bottom tier, Nadia Losonsky in a white jumpsuit wriggled worm-like in place. In the cramped-looking middle tier, KJ Dye reflected Losonsky's wriggling movements, only she was wearing black. At the tippy top, DeWolf lounged among packing material arranged to look like clouds, and she occasionally read from a long poem full of fragmented lines that included phrases like "in the cold moonlight." Walsh sang a chorus that included the phrases, "She's a bird inside./ A minor bird," and something like, "We've made the sweet concoction before." The whole thing was a deconstructed and reconstructed and messy story of a bad break-up that involved a deer turning into a woman.
Over the course of the next hour and a half, there was a 30-second period of time wherein DeWolf basically screamed the ingredients for a cake. That was a powerful, fresh, not humorless, moment of awesomeness. The rest of the performance felt too familiar. The recurrent imagery of palms/moonlight/birds etc. in the lyrics and in the poem was presented in a way that didn't really acknowledge those images as cliche, especially in the context of poems/songs about relationships. I could hear a case for DeWolf's woman/deer comparison as a feminist reclamation of the old woman/deer trope in poetry, wherein courtship is framed as a hunter/prey situation, but the comparison was put forth so earnestly that it was hard to see it as anything other than a re-inscription of an old dynamic. The choreography often resembled variations on yoga poses + deer moves and only intensified the self-serious tone of a lot of the poetry.
It's impossible to find much fault with the dancers, though. Both Losonsky and Dye put in incredibly physical performances in a piece that demanded 1.5 hours of constant movement.
Though this performance didn't really do it for me, I look forward to seeing other weirdo non-film arts stuff happening at NWFF.
