sundown salon / #04 nightmarathon hextravaganza / text

ABOUT NIGHTMARATHON
By Alex Segade

The orange and black flyer promised, “Horrific dramatics! Terrifying monster ballets! Nocturnal orations! Ghastly costumery! Shadowy sexual urges! Nightmarish rock ’n’ roll!”

The sky made its crepuscular fade to black for the length of the three-hour performance—a silent and excellent participant in the mise-en-scene. It is called Sundown Salon, after all, and the video documentation of the Nightmarathon shows the white fall sky turn to twilight blue, then velvet pitch, as the electric lights arranged throughout the garden become harsh and the painted faces of the performers glow in garish high contrast.
At 5:00 PM the play started with introductions: “How do you do, Lucretia Borgia?” “May I have another fried bat wing?” “Oh! Dorian Gray…!”
My Barbarian, the music-theater-performance conglomeration to which I belong, envisioned the Nightmarathon as a Grand-Guignol-Haunted-House-Monster-Mash. The event was divided into three parts: the play, the dance and the rock show. The half-hour play and quarter-of-an-hour dance were performed in a loop: just as one ended, the other began, repeating three times during the night. We were thinking of the scary dolls that pop out of medieval cuckoo clocks, a wind-up danse macabre.

The terraced garden became the primary playing area: decorated with cardboard tombstones (“R.I.P. LOVE”), a cast of eight “actors” in Edward Gorey-ish costumery performed the play, Picnic in the Ghostly Garden, from a script by Malik Gaines and myself. Freely associative in its regurgitation of horror-genre narratives, the play is a retelling of pulpy, melodramatic monster romances in breathless hyper-action. “Nocturnal orations” is an apt description of the onanistic acting style employed: highly declarative, awash in accents (no matter how bad!) to distinguish a performer’s changes of character (which were numerous and instantaneous), we faced the audience and gestured, gesticulated, emoted. The snaky narrative included the following characters: Edgar Allan Poe, Kaspar David Friedrich, Mary Shelley, Dorian Gray, Mumm-Ra the Ever-Living, Agatha Christie, HG Wells, HP Lovecraft, the Scarlet Empress, the Swamp Thing, Barnabas Collins, Angelique the Witch, Miss Switch, Anne Rice, Nostradamus, Rasputin, Medusa, Bram Stoker, Emily Brontë, Ivan the Terrible, Karl Marx and the Great Pumpkin.

The cast was cobbled together from available friendsWhile My Barbarian founders Jade Gordon, Malik Gaines and I have had some training and experience on stage, painter Kim Fisher and gadabout Imran Masood, for example, had not, and this engendered some interesting moments in front of the audience. Kim was supposed to play Emily Brontë, who warns Edgar Allan Poe that “The Moors are depleted,” and Wuthering Heights itself is threatened by environmental degradation. Kim never memorized the monologue. Feeding her the lines only seemed to confuse her. She would stop and return to parts that she had delivered and correct them. As the audience and the cast, particularly professional actress Jade, became uneasy, Kim broke from her stuttering trance and said, “C’mon!” I sense Kim didn’t care about Wuthering Heights, but she came alive, embarrassed and somewhat put-out when playing a sexually frustrated Medusa who puts snakes down Dorian Gray’s pants. In a weird reversal of the alienation effect as Brecht describes it, Kim acted as if the casting was a personal dig, but we were casting against type! At the time, she was working as a school teacher, so we wrote her the role of Miss Switch, teacher by day and witch by night, who confesses, in steady exclamation points, to being distracted by her students’ revealing outfits. Kim was comfortable here, and created an interesting set of gestures for a scene in which she defeats “The Evil Witch Computer” (brilliantly rendered by performance artist Jennifer Moon in stilted Robo-voice). Kim’s strained relationship with the characters she played was a study in the fallacy of performing the other.

Imran, on the other hand, never once said his lines right. “And I, Rasputin, the Mad Monk…” was the only thing he could remember under pressure, and when he sensed it was his turn, that is what he said, regardless of the scene. “Horrific dramatics,” indeed.

These public failures are intriguing, and perhaps one of the most engaging aspects of the piece was the tension between the overwrought dialogue’s pretentious, filigreed oratory and the difficulties faced by amateurs in parsing this language. As Malik and I wrote the script, we realized that the endless references, alliterative allusions and heaps of “vocabulary words” made the play a language game. And games are fun to watch because some people are good at them and some are not.

So, Karen Hallock (a trained actor and local politician) and her artist boyfriend Patterson Beckwith played Abigail Arcane and her monster boyfriend, the Swamp Thing. The couple was able to find some emotional connection to their preposterous roles and made a moving moment happen: after the Swamp Thing is napalmed, and then reborn, Abigail throws her arms around the regenerated vegetable man. With a tearful release, she exclaims, “Oh Swampy, I’m going to live with you forever in the steamy bayou and eat the psychotropic sweet potatoes that grow on your back!” It was a public display of affection.

Jade played Mary Shelley with a Jaggeresque British accent, and was wild-eyed in her tour-de-force recreation of Lara Parker’s Angelique from 60’s daytime soap Dark Shadows. But her primary focus was the dance section of the Nightmarathon, as she was director/choreographer and—star! Her cast included Derek Martin, Daniela Meeker and artist Megan Whitmarsh, who made the flat, cartoonish props for a series of tableaux vivant depicting typical wax-museum crimes such as the assassination of Lincoln, the Donner Party, Lizzie Borden and, much to my horror, O. J. Simpson. The tableaux melted away as the dance became more animated: rakish Derek, as Jack the Ripper, infiltrates a badminton match between the Witches of Eastwick, kills them, and is then killed by them as they rise from the grave. The dance, performed on the sloping lawn across from the terraced garden, became a high-energy Charleston, and the troupe zealously vamped and camped until they fell on the grass and rolled away, down the slope.

Wordless except for title cards bearing place names, the physical vocabulary of the Nightmarathon dance was stiff, hackneyed, frantic and, like the play it faced from across the patio, overloaded. Derek had a performance group called Mime Control, of which Jade was also a member, and theirs was the pursuit of misfired expressions, a clowning technique (anti-technique?) built from lameness and ineptitude resulting in blown gags and simple miscommunication — all wordless and frustrating, like charades with no code. Along the same lines, the sexual dynamic of the Nightmarathon dance was a sordid attempt at feminist redemption that, like the manic prancing that expressed it, ended up falling down, apart, away.
At 8:00 PM, the outdoor program was over and everyone, audience and performers, took a break and drank beer for an hour.

At 9:00 PM, musicians (among many other things) Andy Ouchi, Norwood Cheek and Amy Yao, joined Jade, Malik and me in the underground cavern “stage” and the rock show started. Everyone, including the audience — some of whom had been in the cast of the play and/or the dance — was exhausted and drunk, but also relieved. In the muddy half-light of the stucco cave, our boozy sextet plowed through all of the horror-themed songs we had written together over the years. “Ryan” is an incantation from the point of view of a police psychic describing a crime scene. “Secret Ceremony” is a call-and-response soul number in which a gay vampire seduces a man away from his living girlfriend. “Zombie, My Friend” tells a series of vignettes about undead acquaintances too shy to live and the title of “Dance You Witches, Dance” says it all. In the years since the Nightmarathon, we have not written many songs in this vein, perhaps because the Nightmarathon happened, and we were exorcised of our propensity for Goth metaphor.During one of our songs, I thought I was going to throw up, and dashed offstage to confront this nausea. I keeled over, took deep breaths, loosened my tie and returned to the microphone, shaken but committed to rocking. Perhaps that was the moment when the haunted house in my mind freed me of its clattering confines.

The video of this portion of the performance reveals the dangers of melting face paint, as our colorful make-up becomes a gray splatter of oil-slick sweat. The dark circles around the eyes turned to black tears on our cheeks as we belted an attempt to harmonize, but after performing non-stop for five hours, we had become undead ourselves. Those cold, stoney walls echoed a frightening music of madness, like the characters in HP Lovecraft stories, who, having seen the edge of space, spend the rest of their lives howling in Arkham Asylum, or, in some instances, like the characters in HP Lovecraft stories whose brains are removed from their bodies and sent in space-canisters to the planet Yog-Sothoth, aka, Pluto.
That is the power of performance.

The Nightmarathon was an en-pointe turning point in the life of My Barbarian’s project. Without going into too much detail, and too many mea culpas, we learned a lot of what not to do, and in doing those things, learned that some mistakes are quite lovely, if, like fire, they are tended carefully. While self-indulgent performance can be painful to watch, it seems to me that the only pain inflicted by our knowing exploration of self-indulgence was on our own bodies. Malik’s costume was an unbearable prison of bandages too hot for California in the fall; Jade slipped on the grass and rolled down the hill; I hit my head on a rock in one of my death scenes and, three times in a row, fell into a pond upon my exit. Thus, site-specificity gave way to site-responsiveness in our practice. And finally, we learned that for all the campy utterings and self-reflexive mutterings, the truly memorable moments are those rare gem reflections from the light of another world.

In the best scene from Picnic in the Ghostly Garden, Malik wrote of an encounter among mystery writer Agatha Christie (Jennifer Moon), Romantic painter Kaspar David Friedrich (me), and Thundercats cartoon villain, Mumm-Ra the Ever-Living (Malik). In the fading light of day, the mummy gestured at the geodesic dome and declared it a pyramid.

{My line was, “And thus, the Great Pumpkin slew the Czar, and ate all the Fabergé eggs!” After it’s delivery, from behind a big white Jack-o’-Lantern mask, I made my dramatic turn, and landed right in Fritz’s pool of lily pads. Some lessons are never learned.} [CAN WE KEEP THIS?]

**Alex Segade is a writer, performer, and video-maker with a background in Renaissance literature who has shown work at film festivals across the country and in galleries including American Fine Arts Co. in New York. Alex is a singer, songwriter, dancer in, and artistic director of, My Barbarian

**My Barbarian has made rock operas, folk plays, theatrical situations and musical videos for venues such as the UCLA Hammer Museum, De Appel in Amsterdam, Peres Projects in Berlin and Torpedo in Oslo. My Barbarian was included in the Performa 05 Biennial, the 2006 California Biennial and the 2007 Montreal Biennial. The group has been featured on BBC World’s “Destination Art”, KPCC and KXLU radio in Los Angeles, Plum TV in Aspen, Colorado, and on Air-Canada’s in-flight programming.

**Malik Gaines’ theater work has included a 2003 commission for the Mark Taper Forum. Malik also works as an editor and teacher and was the recipient of a 2003 Penny McCall Foundation Award for his writing and curatorial work. Malik sings, plays keyboards and other instruments and serves as musical director of, and dramaturge for, My Barbarian.