Objects in Motion The Building Stage
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In the usual way of festivals, each of the programs is scattershot, and—except in the “Intimate Program,” featuring small-scale puppet pieces the audience gathers around to see—with many long set changes between acts, forward momentum is in short supply. If Objects in Motion teaches anything, it’s that people can craft all kinds of ingenious, beautiful things without knowing how to build a performance out of them.
The pieces range in length from 3 to 30 minutes, and their relative success spans a broad spectrum. Where Montgomery drew on Melville’s epic narrative to imbue an overcoat with significance, some festival participants seem content simply to trot out their junk and have us look at it for a bit. As Time Goes By—part of the “Intimate Program”—consists of Allison Daniel building up and knocking down small mounds of mud for five minutes. Others tie their stuff to indulgent, rambling texts. In Niagara, the performance trio B-LO go on at length about the exploitation of Native Americans and Niagara Falls while exhibiting various figurines and snapping digital photographs of them—all to make obvious points. Still others seem to have been booked into the wrong festival entirely. The members of the Rough House attempt to tell a story using marionettes of oversize mice—but their puppetry skills are limited to bouncing the critters lifelessly up and down, as though someone had handed them the puppets five minutes before the show.
The festival’s true standout is Sid Yiddish’s Suite for Furby on Shofar in D Minor, an inspired bit of effrontery. Dressed in a traditional Muslim tunic and kufi, Yiddish arranges 11 Furbys on a table. As the little toy robots start talking to each other, he circles them several times while playing various instruments: an electronic keyboard, a child’s xylophone, a shofar, a slide whistle. Offstage a guitar, cello, and snare trio noodle away, although Yiddish occasionally cuts them off to lament that the Furbys aren’t talking as much as he’d like. Yiddish presents an arresting figure, and his ad hoc musical composition would make Fluxus provocateur George Maciunas proud.
