Skeleton Flower: Degenerate Art Ensemble at On The Boards! Magic and Realism--Updated to Include Interview With Collective Co-Founder Joshua Kohl !

It's not every day that you get immediate feedback from one of the artists that you are writing about and its not every day that the person you get to talk to is as kind and charitable as Joshua Kohl one of the founding members of the Degenerate Art Ensemble, who reminded me that DAE was created as "a statement of freedom of expression rather than (as) a statement about a particular aesthetic."  The collective formed in 1999, was named and to a certain extent stands as a statement against the forces of fascism which once claimed all modern art to be "Degenerate Art."  The collective is a true group of artists working together to create performances that are rites and invitations to enter a transformative world of fantastically lush characters and environments.  

Kohl specifically asked me to mention their photographers, who are instrumental in the continued evolution of the ensemble--(specifically my dear friend, who I have known for years and who has introduced me to many amazing performance artists) Bruce Tom, as well as Steven Miller. According to Kohl, "They have both been photographing our work for many years. Bruce takes the live photos, Steven primarily takes the art portraits. Kohl adds, The images are another aspect or manifestation of the work. Part of it!"    

Let me start this review of Skeleton Flower, with a bit of a confession—despite my years of covering Seattle Art, for the Post Intelligencer, for Seattle Magazine and now for Seattle Arts and Beyond—I have only seen DAE a handful of times, but each time has been absolutely amazing and absolutely mesmerizing.  I always come away from every performance with a head full of inspiration that ultimately infiltrates my dreams and imagination and some have even inspired some elements of my own performance artwork. I must say that I am absolutely enthralled by their heady, dreamlike mixture of out-of-this world costuming, punk rock aesthetics and Butoh dance moves—but in all fairness, I am not as familiar with them and their work as I would like to be.

 

Skeleton Flower is an intersectional performance, loosely framed around three well-loved faerie tales—Fitcher’s Bird—by the Brothers Grimm, The Red Shoes and The Wild Swans by Hans Christian Anderson, held together by personal biography, and even the modernist, Japanese, foundational tales as retold in kitschy giant monsters like the Godzilla and Mothra movies of the 1970's and 60's. 

At Saturday’s performance, the event was intensely beautiful, including moments of almost overpowering magic, creating a text that despite moments of almost lyrical poetry was problematized by a need to over-explain and the decision to give us an unnecessary, neatly packaged narrative.  This desire, which included an ending that seemed to suggest closure and a healing dénouement that to me came out of nowhere, would ultimately go counter to the complexity of the human mind, the beautiful madness within the human heart--indeed, it would go against the abstract complexity that DAE’s own performance had set up until the final acts of Skeleton Flower!  The last act was almost an entirely new performance.  One with only a tangential connection to what had gone before.  Ultimately, what we get from Skeleton, however, is fully human and while flawed—is, of course, absolutely fine and part of the process that is involved in creating art that pushes its own boundaries.  

As part of On the Boards’ Fragmented Flow Festival, Skeleton Flower is wonderfully beautiful, goofy, dark and tragic all at the same time. The DAE collective, fronted by the lithe, spry, fragile, almost wistfully powerful and--at times--angry--tiny punk-rock goddess--Haruko "Crow" Nishimura becomes our “Alice” in this voyage, while Joshua Kohl handles the musical chores with a gentle and powerful control of the narrative that all depends upon it.  Behind the scenes, here, the Degenerate Art Ensemble have created a lush landscape, fusing autobiography, Kaiju, fairy tales and the language of pop self-help psychology, which works best when it let’s go and trusts its audience most.

The night’s performance, begins almost abstractly, even sleepily as random musical tones fill the air and build to the introduction of our protagonist, who begins her psychic adventure with only her own personal demons and us in tow.  What follows includes some of the most amazingly fun and lush imagery--there is amazing beauty here.  It is also here that Flowers is its strongest.  Especially through the costumes created by costume design team: Wyly Astley, Willow Fox and Elizabeth Jameson, whose work here is stunning, imaginative and dreamlike.  Any scene in this production that involves their wonderful costumes and the superimposing of video images over them speaks in a language that is simply put—larger than the sum of its parts.  

It is in the these moments, of almost dreamlike imagery where any overt narrative structure starts to break down that, ironically, Flower is its most realistic—its most powerful.  It is important to remember that life, even self-help is built up out of fragmented moments that in and of themselves don’t actually make any sense—it is only in the retelling that we are able to force them to make sense and thereby sew a costume of narrative over and out of them. That breakdown is further heightened by the wonderful, Butoh-driven abstraction of dance—the perceived simple purity of a body in motion—where Nishimura is just moving and where there is no obligation to over-explain—or indeed to explain at all.  Here, the language of magic reigns supreme.

Speaking of explanation--there were times however, in which I found myself as an audience member hoping that there would be no more words-and no more reiteration of the same words over and over again—or perhaps it was that these words were repeated only intermittently and nothing artistic was made of them--they existed in a half-complete, non-performative state!  Anybody who has read my reviews over the years, knows that I love Phillip Glass—so it couldn't be that exactly!  

Towards the end of the night I found myself wanting the story to end just a little bit early—I could feel the pull of the narrative trying to explain itself and like those old horror movies with multiple endings—I just wanted it to stop here and not tell us too much—which of course by the time that I had formulated that thought—it was already too late.  I wanted it to withhold just a little bit from us--to keep a few of its secrets--to not be too easy.  To not be too "Pop."

DAE performances over the years are by far some of the most purely enchanting things that Seattle has to offer, mixing Butoh's sense of reality, balletic movements and postmodern dance aesthetics creating something that by any measure is extremely magical—I am not questioning that, but sadly in Skeleton Flower, DAE ended up not trusting us enough, it ended up not giving its audience the benefit of the doubt and the entire second half with the exception of the wonderful costuming felt like someone had come to the artists and said—“This is all nice and all, but I just don’t get it.  What is going on here?”  

Because I had such problems with the ending, finding it to be an abrupt change in the tonality of the whole, perhaps even being a tad bit messy--and because I now found myself with the opportunity--I simply had to ask Joshua Kohl about it. This is what he had to say:

Joshua Kohl: More and more the pieces are iterative, have many different connected experiences. Like the voices in the second to last scene came from a ceremony held in the forest. The flower shaman is there to protect them and also to protect those in the audience who may share some of the trauma we are calling up. This piece tries to be at once fierce and gentle. We are opening a lot of painful experience for ourselves and others and feel very responsible for people’s well being.

(It is a) Safe space in a true way. One that challenges one’s way of relating to habit ancestry, fights back, honors rage, but also continues on to try ones best (yes messy as you say) to reintegrate after having burnt everything to the ground.

Xavier: One of the issues that I had with the final chapters of the performance was that there seems to be a tonal break, like going from a more abstract language to one that is more literal, more specific. Can you go into that a little bit?

Joshua Kohl: Yes it does. Rage is something important. Inevitable when we are faced with cruelty, unkindness, racism, abuse. The expression of rage is extremely important. But it is not the end. It is one ending. But hopefully not the last ending. But then there is the delicate process that comes after.

The last two scenes open the work up to include the voices of others. The voices were taken from our "Seed Ceremony" where people contributed stories of the greatest struggles that they faced in their lives. In a sense our very personal story ends there, and then we open out to include the stories of others. Reaching out universally. Joining together both defiantly and with mutual support to face our difficulties and pledge to move through to a communal sense of power. And to move into a place after rage of agency, autonomy and universality. That's how we think of it anyway. Of course as you said, we do hope that the audience has their entire own interpretation. This show was rather different for us. Because the core of its real life narrative was taken from Crow's life, it is much more specific and literal in many ways more than much of our past work.

Thank you, Joshua Kohl for taking the time to clear up a few things for me! You have definitely deepened my, and hopefully our readers' understanding of your process and of this performance in particular!

Coming back to the review of Skeleton Flower, one thing that one cannot in any way quibble about is their control of a vastly complex visual language.  Here, they are absolutely beyond reproach—and I can confess that I was so super-happy to be seeing their pointy-headed flower-dress in person after having seen it so long in photographs—it had become a kind of celebrity in my mind. Their ability to seamlessly meld video projection and costumes is always magnificent.  Ultimately, I still find within Skeleton Flower the feeling of several texts--at times working together and at other times at war with themselves and each other.  Like the joy of the free play of art being tempered by the need for a kind of literalism, literally fighting with the desire for abstraction—like artists fighting to wrest control from the restraints of the literal.  After speaking to Joshua Kohl, this point of view is somewhat tempered, but I still feel that the strengths of this performance are in those moments when the narrative begins to fall apart—into what I call a blasted or exploded narrative—where things are hanging by a thread and narrativity is not quite so strict—instead creating a liminal space and a presentation that is more abstract, semiotic and dreamlike—here magic is allowed to fill the void.  This is the performative sweet spot—but it takes letting go and letting the audience do some of the work—time is slower here—and most of all, it requires trust—trust in the audience and that we are smart enough to figure it all out!

As I was saying about DAE—my takeaway after any interaction with this wonderful, human and magical ensemble is that they really are one of the most beautiful things that Seattle has managed to give birth to—and that is saying quite a bit!