A Fine Weekend for Culture in LA … REDCAT for Example

GELFAND’S WORLD-It was a fine weekend for culture in LA, what with the LA Times Book Fair at USC and a remarkable performance at REDCAT by a group from Rotterdam called Hotel Modern. The Book Fair is worthy of separate treatment, particularly for its many panels and discussions, so we'll hold that for a later time. The REDCAT performance was so radically different, yet unconsciously derived from material that was created here in Los Angeles almost a hundred years ago, that it is worthy of both praise and discussion. 

REDCAT is the experimental theater that is attached to the Walt Disney Concert Hall (it's downhill and around the corner from the main auditorium). REDCAT specializes in non-specializing, in the sense that it does all kinds of dance, film, theater, and avant garde material. It is also associated with CalArts, a major arts-education institution, which may explain why it holds prices down, not only for students, but also for the general public. 

Hotel Modern is an odd name for a group that does a kind of performance art using video, stick figures, piles of dirt, and flame throwers. They took on the First World War in a production aptly titled The Great War. The day of this particular performance, April 19, 2015, was oddly auspicious because it was the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's funeral procession through Washington D.C., as well as being a day in the centennial of the Great War itself. 

You can get some feel for how the performance comes across by looking at this short excerpt on Vimeo. Note: It's a bit noisy, since it represents a battle scene. 

The audience, as it enters the auditorium, sees a playing surface featuring separate miniature sets. One of them is a long table to our right, covered with dirt. It will be the scene of several battles. Another is a transparent box off to our left, which will feature more pastoral treatments. Up front, there is a sound bay and a separate space for the narrator. Out of these spare elements, the cast of 4 will recreate major events of the First World War, which will be picked up on video cameras and projected onto a screen. 

One of the defining features of Hotel Modern is that the audience gets to see the cast creating the effects. In the scene linked in the above paragraph, you can see snips of this happening, interspersed with the battle scene shown on the main screen. 

Aside: It's been my experience that in screenings of old films, new audience members will sometimes react inappropriately to the style, because it takes a few minutes to get used to the way that things used to be done. What was an appropriate style of the time may come across to the modern viewer as florid overacting, so a few audience members will laugh at a scene that is supposed to be emotionally serious. 

So it was for a few minutes at the beginning of The Great War. We can see human hands descending into the dirt and building the scene tree by tree, and soldier by soldier. At one point, the hands insert the working end of a broom into the soil. You can see the wooden base, which is then covered with dirt. What we are left with is a convincing rendition of a forest. Some people laughed inappropriately, presumably because we're more used to special effects that don't show the people holding the strings and planting the trees. 

Those who chuckled at the beginning eventually got it, and became engrossed in the story while accepting its method of construction. 

The genesis of this show is itself something of a curiosity. WWI was the defining event for the rest of the 20th century, and continues to have effects to this day. It is the subject of whole libraries full of studies and fictions and vital records. Yet Hotel Modern did not start with the intent of commemorating the war. It begin with Herman Helle, a visual designer who started essentially by playing with dirt and miniature props, and discovering that something could be created in the realm of performance. He received support from others who became the c ast, including Pauline Kalker and Arlene Hoornweg. Out of this collaboration and work with composer and sound designer Arthur Sauer, came The Great War. 

The style we saw at REDCAT has been described as live animation, because the projected scenes are created in real time, right before your eyes. When the battlefield is drenched with rain, you can see Helle sprinkling the miniature set with a watering can. 

The storyline is wrapped around a collection of letters written by a French soldier named Prosper, who survived the war and actually continued his postwar life in the Foreign Legion. The words seemed familiar, until we realized that they were the French version of All Quiet on the Western Front, which is a fictional portrayal of the life of a German soldier during the same conflict. 

What of the earlier remark that Los Angeles has a role in the creation of something such as The Great War? 

The immediate postwar period was the heyday of the silent film era. One promising newcomer was Rudolph Valentino. He was featured in a film depicting the tragedy of the war, called The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, shot in part on Fairfax. Another postwar film was The Big Parade, shot in part at Griffith Park and at MGM. A few years later, Von Stroheim's immortal The Wedding March was filmed in part in Silverlake (along with some Vienna scenes). 

The Europeans of course had their own film industries, but the American contribution to the memory of the war was important. The cultural history of an event of this magnitude takes on a life of its own. We have volumes and volumes of histories and fictions, but what people see on late night television is equally important in terms of the way we remember things that happened before we were born. Now, with Hotel Modern's The Great War, we have a dramatic rendition that speaks to the horrors and the monotonies. But this rendition is itself part of a long cultural memory that has been built up out of classroom teaching, books, and films. 

One part of the performance worked on the audience to full effect. The narrator, reading from the letters, described how the soldiers stopped going into no-man's-land to collect their dead, because it had become too dangerous. They no longer even went out to rescue the wounded, at least much of the time. One soldier was caught between the opposing armies with his leg blown off, bleeding to death, and crying out continually, "Shoot me. Shoot me." 

We have read these kinds of accounts, but seeing the scene (even if it was an intentionally out of focus figurine of a soldier) and hearing the dramatic narration, obviously shook up the audience. It was a bit of reality that was hard to take. 

After the performance, the audience was invited to come on stage to see the sets and talk to the cast. Most of us took them up on the offer. 

Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected]