Drums on the Dam Review - 21/05/08

Energy and enthusiasm fails to find anything but a shallow expression

Youthful enthusiasm, bright eyes and plenty of vacuous performances marked the performance, last night, of Drums on the Dam, by New York University students at the ICA. The story, written in the style of a fable-like Chinese tale of corruption, political malaise and cut corners in the building of dams to protect a city from the flooding river, was evocative of (though thankfully did not directly reference) recent events in Myanmar and China. The river floods and the dam bursts and the impoverished are sacrificed to protect the richer city dwellers and the ruling classes. Ultimately everyone dies and it's all very tragic.

    The setting of a recently flooded grade school was interesting and brought a good foothold for the dramaturgy of the piece. Perhaps lacking a coherent sense of connection to the place in which it claimed to be set, the stage served as a multitude of contexts, with a somewhat distancing effect. The staged mess was cleared at the outset and never quite made the full circle that might have been somewhat more satisfying.

    What was clear was that the performers were more comfortably actors than puppeteers. Their use of more traditional, if not melodramatic, acting techniques was nicely offset by the soft-toy puppets that were manipulated with varying degrees of skill. There was, perhaps, too much movement by most of the actors, suggesting they wanted us to look more at them than the objects they were supposed to be communicating through. The dual focus of the puppet/actor was an interesting device, one that pushed the audience to choose where they wanted to put their focus. As such you could chose which layer you wished to engage with, or sit back and allow all the many layers to wash over you - a sort of invited phenomenological viewing.

    Many of the performative techniques - use of live drumming, presentation of each scene with a short non-charactered tableaux, stylized shaping of limbs for certain characters - were reminiscent of Beijing Opera and had a certain degree pop-traditional Chinese infusion. The techniques themselves did not add much to one's understanding or enjoyment of the show, though they did, for those so inclined, provide a bit of intellectual reward - those who spotted the references would no doubt have enjoyed them, for that reason alone. This was characteristic of what is, no doubt, a well-researched and intellectualised play. As such, much emotional honesty was lost in flair and spectacle.

     The arch of the performances, moving from actors manipulating puppets, to actors holding soft toys (reminiscent of the children who might have been in the flooded grade school) revealed the fatal flaw of this production. As actors with puppets these performers were very watchable, they kept us transfixed and added an excellent level of humour on many occasions. As actors, simply acting, the shallowness of their portrayals was striking. The play petered out with no full stop, no sense of completion. It staggered over the line, unable to hold itself up with the poor quality of the acting. The fact that this quality, or lack there of, had been hidden until then was testament to the power of objects to intrigue and keep audiences interested.

    The piece was comfortably postmodern. Before the performance we were read to by Kevin Kulkhe (actor, director and teacher at NYU) a very self-aware speech which was written to be read rather than heard. His main point, and a valid and interesting one at that, was that in order to provoke, a theatre artist must seek a genuine expression of something important to them, rather than try to shock or put their audiences through an arduous experience. This good advice to young theatre makers - who mainly populated his audience - was not followed by the students he both teaches and directed in this production. They were following the ever-more set and standard methods of friendly alternative theatre. As such, when the visual and character comedy turned to tragedy (as it was inevitably going to do) there was nothing to hold it up. The referencing of the traditional form gave some space for melodrama - how can one have Beijing Opera without melodrama and stylization? - but the point is that the form only became interesting when it was invested with something different - the puppets - and when that was taken away we were left with a poor version of the tradition, so the foundations of the tragedy were taken away, and it all disintegrated.

We were seeing acting-by-numbers in a show that was postmodern-by-numbers - perhaps appropriate for a play set in a grade school. The frail and hollow façade of the performance fell apart just like the shoddy and ill-founded dams of the play's title.

Always a shame when youthful energy and fresh faces turn out to be little more.

- James Grogan

Drums on the Dam was performed as part of The Accidental Festival, which continues until Saturday 24th May at the ICA. The Observatory will be reviewing several shows from the festival in the coming days.