Confused multimedia Medea
There are countless way to unfold the potently tragic tale of Euripides’ “Medea,” the spurned wife who wreaks vengeance on her betraying husband, Jason, by murdering both her rival and her own children. The version that opened Tuesday, May 15, at ODC Theater piles on the Walking Distance Dance Festival: Nkisi Nkondi: 8 p.m. Friday, May 18. Rashaun Mitchell, Shoko Hikage, Silas Riener, Phillip Greenlief and Claudia La Rocca: 6:30 p.m. Belinda McGuire: 8 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, May 19-20. $20 ODC Theater, 3153 17th St., S.F. 415863-9834. www.odc. dance/tickets narrative and dramatic techniques in a misbegotten multichannel mashup that says more about itself than it does about the story it purportedly undertakes.
Presented as a film with live music — and no live dance — writer-directorchoreographer Yara Travieso’s “La Medea” was a curi-
ous hybrid opener for ODC’s seventh Walking Distance Dance Festival. Audiences can expect live action, from the Congolese Kiandanda Dance Theater, American Canadian solo dancer Belinda McGuire and others on the remainder of the Walking Distance bill. The festival, which features “artists who create dance in an expanded field,” continues through Sunday, May 20.
Filmed in environmental fashion in Brooklyn in 2017, Travieso’s “Medea” is self-consciously low tech and high. Bare-bones design and costumes and simple masks are played off against handheld camera footage of both the performers and a nominally interactive audience milling about the warehouse space.
A miked narrator butts in now and then with “Medea” history and commentary, and allegedly spontaneous questions and remarks, shown onscreen like text messages or canned Facebook posts, from viewers supposedly streaming the proceedings live. The cameras also track the performers offstage, into dressing rooms and onto a balcony, where a brief protest about Medea’s banishment breaks out.
“Let her stay!” chants the cast, which tries to enlist a game if puzzledlooking audience in the moment. The onlookers seem more content when they get to dance a little.
The 75-minute film wants to have it all ways, with four performers playing Medea, some feverish vamping, lots of close-ups, a nightclub atmosphere, an eclectic and often sludgy score and lyrics (by Sam Crawford), and assorted meta moves and feints. Mirrors and video add to the prevailing sense of visual and dramatic disarray. The dialogue is delivered in a mix of English and Spanish.
At ODC, the complications were further complicated by the onstage presence of Jason and the Argonauts, the fivemember band that also appears in the film. The live musicians lip- and finger-synced along with themselves, as it were. It was adeptly done, but the theater-thumping beat and singing only served to make the “Medea” movie and its contortions seem even more remote.
“Who is Medea?” Travieso’s piece keeps asking, seeking “the woman behind the myth.” Even with four different and often intense performers playing her, the question is never explored very deeply. Two physically compelling African dancers (Rena Butler and Tiffany Mellard) get most of the screen time, spinning, grimacing, pawing at their hair and bodies and peering deeply into the camera to enact the drama. But aside from the murders, which come across in griefstreaked frenzies, Travieso’s choreography and direction largely squander the performers’ assets. Some indifferent flamenco breaks out at one point, to minimal effect.
Crawford’s Latininfused music has its moments, among a fair amount of wheel-spinning. His intermittently rhyming lyrics range from Medea’s streetlingo bluntness (“King Creon don’t want my kind around”) to her poetic effusions (“Cast my sorrow into the wide salt sea”).
Near the end, “La Medea” serves up a kind of philosophical shrug that captured the fleeting, transitory sense of the evening all too well: “It’s a sad old world sometimes, and then it’s over.”