Vaudevival: Old is the new New and Going Viral

By:Alex Marhefka

Vaudevival: Old is the new New

Not five minutes into the show, a performer was holding up a large card that read: "Vaudeville is dead." And it's a damn shame; I've never had half so good a time at a movie theater.

Even before the show started, the music was phenomenal. The band (The New Band, they were called) provided a really fun fusion of old-time, swing, hip-hop, and I-don't-know-what-else. As far as instrumentation goes, there was a banjo, a fiddle, an upright bass, and (get this) a beat-boxer. Aside from making everybody want to dance, The New Band's stylistic fusion played into one of the show's major themes: the appropriation of another culture's art form. As you may know, vaudeville — for all its rip-roarin' fun — bears the stigma of minstrelsy: an offensive lampooning performed by white people in blackface. Vaudevival was very much concerned with this stigma, and explored the extent to which art is "blameless," both retrospectively (particularly in an act called "A Myriad of Musings on Minstrelsy") and in the modern context of white hip-hop performers.

Many (most?) of the acts themselves were downright hilarious. In the first that comes to mind, a pair of performers imitated a dance from a movie that was projected onto a screen behind them. It began as a flawless imitation (except that they remained about five feet farther apart than the movie dancers, such that they never really danced together — a decision made, I'd guess, both with artistic intent and to leave the screen visible to the audience), but as the act progressed, the imitation fell to pieces and the dancers began checking the screen for guidance. It presented the audience with a thought-provoking tension — namely that between film and live performance — in an entertaining and nuanced way; I loved every minute of it.

Shortly before this act, however, there was a conversational skit, which, in my opinion, lacked the dance's subtlety. The skit was essentially a debate between an action movie-goer (who laughed at the idea of vaudeville as "art" and denounced it via minstrelsy) on one side and a proponent of vaudeville (who acknowledged that minstrelsy was wrong but didn't want to "throw out the baby with the bathwater") on the other. Given the title of the performance, it should be clear where our sympathies were meant to lie. I'm being a bit reductive, but my point is that this skit — and a few others that relied heavily on conversation and, at their worst, fact-dropping — felt a bit high-school. As good a job as the dances did of exploring and portraying the show's themes — of showing the audience something — it seemed somewhat condescending to also explain (or, to complete the cliché, to tell the audience) what the dances were all about.

But I'm criticizing an almost miniscule portion of the show — a show that changed gears so often my head was spinning (and my foot, I'd notice repeatedly, was tapping). There were impressive dances in a myriad of styles — everything from a proper Charleston to an improper Charleston to a hip-hop number — and they even threw in a scientific magic trick for good measure. All truth be told, Vaudevival was a seriously good time.

Going Viral

We left our shoes at the door. As we entered, each of us received a little colorful ticket with a symbol on it. (Mine was yellow with a "1" or a "-" — who knows? But I saw a "0" and an "X" as well.) In a way, the performance had already started; we compared tickets and rubbed our socks on the floor, and many of us — who knew? — were talking to people who would be getting naked in a matter of minutes.

Something happened with the lights, and people from the audience began trickling out onto the stage. They walked up to a man dressed in black (he had the air of a security guard or a bouncer), stripped to their skivvies, handed the man a ticket, and exited. Both parties — the strippers and the bouncer — were expressionless throughout.

So here I am with my ticket, watching people strip and deposit their tickets like it's the hip thing to do. I remained seated (take that, you fleshy conformist pigs!) but I have to wonder whether anyone from the audience participated on a whim. It made for a pretty neat social experiment, if nothing else.

Eventually the dancing began. Much of the choreography involved falling and writhing, but the falling was visibly premeditated; the performers would crouch like frogs before diving flat onto their faces, and the writhing was decidedly nonchalant. Various audio samples blared overhead, often in humorous juxtaposition to one another. Here are the few I remember:

"I have nothing to say."

"A moment of silence." (The first time this played, the dancers all face-planted and remained motionless for, well, "a moment.")

"Sorry, I didn't get that."

That went on until the strippers from the start of the show emerged above the stage, now wearing white undershirts and singing like a ghostly choir. The dancers, apparently taking this as their cue, began assuming the postures of communal copulation. The whole thing made for an extremely potent atmospheric effect; there was something wonderfully unsettling about being in that room.

Finally, the dancers collapsed in a ring and the lights came on. This was my favorite part of the show. Someone from the audience got up, claimed her shoes, and left. No one was sure — particularly in light of the show's beginning — whether they were supposed to leave. As time passed, people began trickling out in larger and larger groups; and there was a kind of incredulous squirming that would happen before anyone resolved to leave. Or, as choreographer Nathan Andary said afterward, "they were dancing, too."