Truth and Tinsel
One test of a true artist is the cutting room floor — in the outtakes, where you see how they work, and what they’re aiming for. Outtakes are the raw material for a deep and funny dive into he world of performance, about to disappear from view at the tiny Tank theater in midtown Manhattan. Creator-director Soomi Kim and choreographer Laura Peterson mime the male ego as they lip-synch the rejected matter of recording sessions by some very big names in the music industry, while dancing around and through two huge tangles of plastic tape. One is tinsel, and the other something like seaweed or mylar audiotape. This is the cutting room floor of the recording business, the trash that goes down in the archives, or gets swept up and thrown away.
And it’s a gold mine. Just listen as a big-name singer explains why he and his long-time collaborator — an even bigger name — are going their separate ways. Their closeness and mutual respect was never so unctuously faked. Then listen to an excruciating monologue by the same guy, careful not to blow his trademark cool as he excoriates a producer for questioning the way he phrased a lyric. Not satisfied with dressing down the control room, he then insults his own song, with exquisite “distaste.”
Listen as a famous disk jockey with a voice smooth as butter flings a shitstorm at his entire staff, over the sequencing of songs and patter in his hit parade. Who hired these f#@&ing idiots? (You did, sir.)
Just when you think this is all about men behaving badly, we hear a Beatle from beyond the grave, a meditation on peace and mutual love. Then a superstar female vocalist, recording one take after another, fretting over musical details, complaining about the chords. Then getting it right, letting it go.
This show will test your powers of discerning. It does not ring a bell when the tone shifts — it’s up to you to detect irony, sincerity, professionalism, perfectionism, genius or bullshit. The dancers help out. In the end they are pulling individual strands of tape from the pile, laying them out in a radiating circle, then gathering and holding the whole bunch high. This is the primordial mass of art, the weeds we have to wade through. A famous poet once told a young poet not to throw anything away. A bad poem, he said, is the larval form of a good poem.
This is a smart and entertaining show, but probably fated to die in larval form. Its unauthorized content would be anathema to Broadway, a horror to Hollywood. It’s not just non-commercial but anti-commercial, self-incriminating, self-immolating. So quick, get online to the Tank for tickets. Testing2 closes December 15.
