Monday, May 31, 2010

Sara Kraft's Hyperreal

Sara Kraft’s most recent production Hyperreal, premiered in San Francisco at the Yerba Buena Center for the Performing Arts, deeply explores the question of what is real versus what is imagined in our technologically driven, bigger is better culture through humorous anecdotes, movement, and various characterizations in a way that is intelligent and clever – for forty five minutes too long.

At a running time of nearly two hours, the work spends the first hour and fifteen minutes brilliantly questioning elements of reality, binaries of body and mind, and the impact of technology on physicality and human interactions. Her use of hilarious personal anecdotes not only entertained me, but raised many personal questions about the impact of our current cultural climate. But, as is the downfall for many choreographic works, copious editing was needed. The ideas and points which originally were clever and well stated quickly became after the first hour redundant and irritating.

The opening of the work revealed a young, highly physically trained dancer standing on top of a platform, lights shining up at her, her body replicating a store window mannequin. With her perfectly fit body, and simple nude cloth wrapped around it, she was clearly the representative for the ideal body. Sara Kraft enters the stage opposite the dancer, walking up onto her own platform with a large computer screen and camera, along with a fish bowl filled half way with water. In between the two women hangs a vast projection screen. As Kraft begins her opening monologue, I am immediately drawn into the physical application of the mind/body binary – the mannequin on the one side of the stage, slowly moving in and out of poses, and the mind on the other, using her computer and camera to tell personal stories and raise wide reaching questions. Kraft uses the stage space intelligently, further pushing her question of what is real by physically dividing the body, what is real, and the mind, where the imagination exists.

Perhaps the most engaging for me, though, was the introduction of a twenty nine year old man attempting to make an online dating profile. Sitting at a computer behind the projection screen, he energetically records dozens of messages, all shooting off in tangents from each other, attempting to describe himself as an eligible and desirable date. His acting and dedication to the character was stellar, using a highly comedic effect as he rambled on about his love of nature, being an animal person, and his role as the life of the party. His vignettes were by far the highlight of the work. What Kraft did well here was, again, use of stage space and technology; in placing the young man behind the screen, his face took over the projection screen, forcing the viewer to look first at his projected self before even noticing his actual self behind it, deepening the question of what we perceive as real.

The piece continues to bounce between these different stories, from Kraft’s personal memories, to the dating profile, to brightened lights on the mannequin figure. Kraft uses the stage space, as well as her choice of language and stories, to further her points. That is, she explores the manipulation of reality which she argues is currently happening in our technologically driven world. Telling stories of an old woman who needed a television, radio, and police scanner machine, forcing herself to stay home in order to make sure she never missed anything, or of her childhood experience of watching Jaws and trying to understand how a shark so real in her imagination could be fake, she leads the audience to her point that reality has become more disconnected to real life than imagination has.

Indeed, while she raises interesting and valid points throughout the beginning sections of the work, particularly affective because of her use of humor, these are the same points she continues to raise throughout the entirety of the work. In two hours of performance, I was presented with new ideas for perhaps the first half hour of work, than had the same points reiterated to me over and over again until I no longer cared.

Perhaps the most frustrating section of the work, though, was the ending. As the build up to a climax began to happen, about thirty minutes later than it should have, I was excited to see how Kraft would choice to bookmark her work. With Kraft yelling into a camera, and projections and lights flashing on the screen, the tension in the room began to build. Building and building, a climax of apprehension was reached – and then Kraft continued to yell and lights continued to flash. The ending, which could have been so successful, was pushed for five minutes too long. By the moment of conclusion, my eyes were on the ceiling of the performance space and I no longer had any interest in seeing how the work would end, I just wanted it to end.

Indeed, Kraft’s Hyperreal has true potential to be an exciting and evocative work, exploring fascinating and pertinent ideas that plague our culture everyday. These ideas are overshadowed, though, by her lack of desire to step back from her work and look at it with a critical eye. Had it been an hour shorter, I would be writing about nothing but the brilliance of Sara Kraft. My suggestion then? Go see this piece, but sit by an exit, so that you can leave while the work is still evocative, and not yet irritating.

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