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LA Weekly
PICK OF THE WEEK!

On opposing sides of an expansive performance space, one line of women and one of men, dressed in early-20th-century Western apparel, slowly approach each other in gloom — starting, halting and starting again to the strains of almost familiar music. Immediately, a sense of antagonism between the sexes fuses with an equally powerful scent of the erotic — themes August Strindberg confronted throughout his life as a playwright, novelist and lover/hater of women. Strindberg’s writings are the inspiration for this astonishing work of performance art in which director-choreographer Tina Kronis mellifluously animates 16 accomplished performers through a rapidly transforming series of stylized human tableaux, ranging from tragic to bawdy to the outlandishly absurd. Strindberg’s texts as arranged by Richard Alger provide emotional clues but never establish a narrative through-line — the words blend with an exquisitely eclectic soundtrack that moves seamlessly between big-band music and heavily rhythmic contemporary sounds. Themes of obsession run throughout — whether fixations on the proper way to do the smallest things in life, or compulsions to engage in the most grotesque behaviors. Not a moment is wasted in what seems to be a masterpiece, with nary a visual nor aural flaw.

-- Tom Provenzano
©2003 L.A. Weekly

Backstage West

When Tina Kronis refers to Strange Beliefs co-creator Richard Alger as a "text amalgamator," you can tell we've left Neil Simon territory far behind. While their latest production begins with Swedish playwright August Strindberg as its leaping-off point, this is not likely to be your show if you're looking for biography, hagiography, or a vivid discussion of Miss Julie, for that matter.

The uniquely non-linear approach Kronis and Alger bring to their productions leaves audiences thrilled and nonplussed. Their previous outing, Cirque Picnique, which began with William Inge's Picnic and then went wandering far afield into Betty Crocker recipes and HUAC hearings, left the audience members the night I attended looking at one another trying to figure out if it was over or if the raised house lights were simply another unexpected element of the production. When I rather abashedly admitted this to Kronis, she assured me that it was perfectly OK as the piece wasn't, in fact, over. It's never over. Kronis and Alger don't set out to deliver a nice, neatly wrapped package to the audience. What they strive for is the unique, the memorable, the resonant.

Strindberg caught the attention of the co-creators because he was, some say, one of the first truly modern playwrights, others saying he was either 50 years behind the times or 100 years ahead of them. It's not just his writing, but also his life that intrigued. He was interested in alchemy and mysticism (the strange beliefs of the title) and also had a disconcerting habit of marrying strong women and then trying to turn them into his mother. Thus the production will feature chemistry texts, personal correspondence, and reviews of Strindberg's plays in the mix, along with God only knows what else.

As the pair explained it, the process always begins with the text and then just follows as one thing leads to another. The result is a massive "keep pile" which Kronis and Alger whittle away at until they have a workable amount of material. The text is then lifted completely out of context to render it idea- and gender-neutral and then rearranged according to rhythms and juxtapositions that please the creators. From this arrangement spring images and a whole movement vocabulary, derived from Kronis' training in dance, mime, clowning, and at the Moscow Art Theatre. The way an actor negotiates space, Kronis said she finds, can change everything. To her, choreography and direction are inseparable: It is through the physical that the emotional can be discovered, the body is the story.

By the time the work goes into rehearsal, Kronis and Alger may not yet know exactly what the production will be, but they have a definite map so that if they get lost they'll at least know where they got lost from. Text might yet be rearranged, and actors will be assigned according to what they can bring to the piece. As the actors are frequently the same from show to show (this one includes Aldrich Allen, Shirley Anderson, Melina Bielefelt, Tom Chalmers, Jake Eberle, Aaron Francis, Crystal Keith, Corey Klemow, Majken Larsson, Julie A. Lockhart, Peter Mattsson, David LM McIntyre, Michelle Philippe, Pogo Saito, Kim Weild, and John Wuchte), the creators said they will occasionally add a scene to take advantage of a particular performer's strengths in a way that will add to the flow of the production. Kronis, noting the damp, panicked look I take on when faced with complexity, likened the process to raising a sheep: You have this big ungainly sheep and the sheep generates useful wool, which is removed and separated and carded and spun, and there's no way when looking at the source material to know what you'll end up with. The actors end up being the final threads, she explained, each unique in color and texture, woven together to form an artistically pleasing whole, a singular piece of fabric.

If I can now belabor this metaphor beyond all reason, the dyers will be working in earth tones and the cutters will be working under orders from the costumers at Gunsmoke. Kronis and Alger want to give the piece a Wild West flavor as a way of exploring the maverick quality of the madcap Swede. As Strindberg was born the year of the Gold Rush and died the year the Titanic went down (1849-1912), his life was contemporary with that surprisingly short period we think of as the gunslinging, every-man-his-own-law Old West. It's not just the mores but also the physicality of the frontier culture toward which Kronis gravitates.

If you've never seen the work of Kronis and Alger, be prepared to see something utterly original. Pre-conceived notions will need to be left at the door, as Kronis is out to "resonate with someone on some level but not in a conditioned trope." If the lack of a coherent story makes you uncomfortable, that's fine. The creators only wants that each audience member makes a personal connection to whatever parts float by that capture the viewer. It makes its demands, but if you're going after something worth doing, Kronis said, "Don't take the easiest path, take the hardest."

-- Wenzel Jones
©2003 Backstage West

LA Times

An extreme view of Strindberg
August Strindberg goes through the absurdist blender in "Strange Beliefs," cutting a wide, weird swath at Sacred Fools Theatre. The latest offering by Theatre Movement Bazaar is a smoothly mounted, impenetrable deconstruction of Sweden's dour playwright.

Theatre Movement Bazaar is the brainchild of Sacred Fools artists-in-residence Tina Kronis and Richard Alger. Their work fuses movement, sound, words and design into a deliberately odd conceptual ethos.

Previous shows include "dumbshOw" (Russian authors) and "Cirque Picnique" (William Inge and the McCarthy hearings). Now comes "Strange Beliefs."

It occurs in a futuristic, chartreuse-walled health spa, augmented by wooden benches and observation cubicles. As sludgy house music pours forth, the duskily clad ensemble haltingly enters from either side, women opposite men.

They split off into random groupings that slowly evolve into a synoptic series of poses, phrases and portentous encounters. These transpire against an eclectic soundtrack of looped snippets ranging from Irving Berlin to "Swan Lake," with everybody circling the theater by the conclusion.

Kronis' sure direction affords her zany cast nonstop opportunities for display, which all 16 certainly seize. However, the cracked deadpan surface can't disguise a lack of textual coherence, and the links to Strindberg are best left to thesis candidates.

There is obvious creative intent and some genuine humor here; fans of academic theater may well be enraptured. Audiences unaccustomed to unsubstantiated bizarreness, however, may just be baffled.

ReviewPlays.com

Talk about Strange.  Strange Beliefs, the new play by Richard Alger and Tina Kronis is credited as being suggested by the writings of August Strindberg, the Swedish born author of the late 1800’s.   Strindberg was an avid writer, and experimented with different ideas and concepts including the occult, dreams and death. 

In the short foreword to “A Dream Play”, Strindberg explained his intention with the play:

"In this dream play, the author has, as in his former dream play, “To Damascus”, attempted to imitate the inconsequent yet transparently logical shape of a dream.  Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality , the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations.

The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, disperse, assemble.  But one consciousness rules over them all, that of the dreamer; for him there are no secrets, no scruples, no laws. He neither acquits nor condemns, but merely relates; and, just as a dream is more often painful than happy, so an undertone of melancholy and of pity for all mortal beings accompanies this flickering tale."

Fast forward to the Sacred Fools, and Strange Beliefs and if you’ve read Strindberg, you’ll see how bits and pieces of his ideas fit it all over, in this completely surreal presentation that keeps you nailed to the seat every minute.

 

Time and space seem absent from the sixteen players who frequent the stage, sometimes two at a time, sometimes four, and once in a while more.   The eight men and eight women are divided in subgroups, and each time a group appears, they are preoccupied with their particular theme, sometimes prancing, sometimes doing dance, often walking in deliberate skewed steps, and when they have their say, they disappear and a different group comes on.  It’s a little like a theme with variations, and each variable gets more bent than the one before.

The playbill states that this is “non-narrative physical comedy of the absurd”.  That is so NOT true!.  Don’t get us wrong – it is non-narrative, in that there is no plot that has a beginning, middle or end.  It is physical, since there is a lot of movement – dancing, bodies in transit here and there.  It’s the absurd that we quarrel with.  This is so far beyond the envelope that it begins to make sense!   If you watch and listen carefully, you see there is a great deal of truth being acted here . . . even if it is camouflaged under the guise of absurdity.

The actors are completely into their character – whatever that character is, and we willingly let our beliefs and sense of logic go along for the ride, which they provide more than willingly.  

Sit back, and let the flow of the actions and movement take you into their strange world, and before long, you’ll see it’s not all that strange and bizarre.  In fact, it’s the world outside the theatre that will seem different after the performance.  When you meet people, you’ll wonder where they got their strange beliefs.

-- Jose Ruiz
©2003 ReviewPlays.com

Backstage West

The latest work of theatre makers Tina Kronis and Richard Alger pulls together a text collage inspired by the life and works of August Strindberg for its "non-linear, non-narrative physical comedy of the absurd." Because movement is the primary language of the piece, an encyclopedic knowledge of the Swedish playwright/poet/novelist/painter presumably is not required of the audience (though being without one, I can't believe it wouldn't help). Rather, the viewer's enjoyment depends, perhaps too heavily, on the imaginative quirks that he or she brings to the performance. Whether one is struck funny by an abrupt reference to all-you-can-eat cheese, intrigued by an absurd socioeconomic treatise on shoes, or captured by a peculiar phrase or rhythm or gesture is a highly personal matter. Personally, I laughed out loud a few times and was fully engrossed a few times by this series of stylized, minutely choreographed vignettes. On the whole, however, I wanted more resonance, less abstraction, and perhaps what the conceivers had no intention of providing: more of a feeling it was all adding up to something.

Though it contains loud echoes of Strindberg--his fearless invention, paranoia, interest in alchemy, his misogyny and anxiety about social class--the piece seems not to be about Strindberg. Instead, text amalgamator/assistant director Alger lets the words take on a life of their own. The piece loosely explores artistic experimentation and its attendant pathos, hiccuping with seemingly random emotion and confession, and weighted by rigid social codes and procedures. Director/choreographer Kronis underlines the humor, urgency, whimsy of the words with movements that range from various dance styles to an array of twitches, which a fine 16-person ensemble executes with few missteps. One can't help but note the strength of the collaboration, how the words and movements buoy each other without ever competing. Kronis and Alger are also responsible for the set and lighting, which use multiple spaces, clean lines, and shadows to create striking, painterly effects.

As artful as these effects are, however, they are not always remarkable enough to keep us engaged without the benefit of linearity or accumulation. When they are, the reasons are as mysterious as when they aren't. For instance, The Concierge (Aldrich Allen)--who spins on his chair while doing a series of subtle movements, pauses with his hand in the air as if holding a tray, then delivers a speech on the art of bathing--had me rapt. Same goes for The Chefs (Shirley Anderson and Corey Klemow) who introduce themselves with a terribly urgent dialogue on the solid, liquid, and gas states of soup. In such images, one sees the potential of this work to defy the need for sense and context and place us solidly, innocently in the moment.

-- Anne Kelly-Saxenmeyer
©2003 Backstage West