Given how much is going on, everyone creates their own festival, and mine this year has been ... pretty damn minimal. Between work, schedule conflicts, and sheer exhaustion from a recent trip, I have missed every single day of Infringement 08 until Saturday. For a while I thought the most radical thing I could possibly do would be to see NOTHING whatsoever this time around. Not for lack of interest (far from it!), but just because that's where things seemed to be taking me. But I finally caved in and eased my way in this afternoon with a trip to
A Piece of Earth..., Ella Joseph's video installation in her home. (It runs Sunday, too, and she tells me it will still be up through September, so if you miss it during the festival, you can still check it out later in the month.) My friends and I arrived at an off moment in the 10-minute looping video, and we were baffled for a while, but we soon started making out images--birds, cattle, a body on the beach hovering over the trash bags floating in space.
I had to race home to prepare more envelopes for
Self-Infringement (turns out the box in the Rust Belt window was empty) and get stuff together for
Shakespeare in the Parking Space. By the time I finished those two tasks and drove from Tonawanda to Rust Belt, I realized I'd missed every single one of the shows I'd spent an earlier hour writing down, so I had a great conversation with Kristi outside the bookstore (comparing notes with her is one of my favorite Infringement rituals) until a whoppin' shower forced us inside. I bought a few books then headed BACK home for a nap. Then it was off to a wedding reception in North Buffalo (the nerve! scheduling a wedding during the most happenin' 11 days of the summer!), then to the street outside Lagniappes for Shakespeare. Smaller crowd this year, fewer readers, but still a lot of fun. At the end of it, 3 women in cheerleader outfits emerged from Nietzsche's next door to beseech us all to come inside for their show. These were (half of)
"Skitch's Bitches," who reminded me of that posse of Japanese teenagers who followed Gwen Stefani everywhere for a year or two. I was slightly sad to learn that there really WAS a (male) Skitch, who was sequestered in one of the stageside balconies creating artworks based on audience cues gathered by the Bitches while various bands played. Caught
Lowlander, a trio from West Virginia with a pronounced fondness for late 70s pop punk. Lots of Ramones covers, played pretty much as well as or better than the Ramones themselves did 'em.
From there it was off to The Venue Formerly Known as Kitchen Distribution for
Subversive Theatre's ...and they put handcuffs on the flowers. Subversive's stuff can always be counted on to be a festival highlight, and the staging is always pretty great. This year was no exception--there's nothing quite like piling into the basement of a factory on the Lower West Side at 11 p.m. But I gotta be honest: while the environmental staging was effective, the cast was impressive, and the shadow-play elements were cool, the script itself left me flat. It was immediately clear that there are distinct parallels between this tale of political prisoners in Franco's Spain and contemporary phenomena like Abu Ghirab and Guantanamo, but that point didn't require an hour and a half. I get it: fascism bad, prison = soul-draining, dehumanizing nightmare. No question there. Now tell me something I don't already know. (Actually, there's a monologue in which one character has a vision of gay marriage--this in 1969--that now seems oddly prescient, and I enjoyed the opening metaphor of the then-recent lunar landing. After that, not so much.) The script is an interesting historical document and I'm glad I saw the performance, but I found myself looking at my watch a lot--something I'd never done in any previous Subversive show. Still, it was a perfect "infringement moment," as Kristi put it.
Resting now, before a day in which I'll attempt to make up for lost time.
