Peter Carpenter "My Fellow Americans"
An evening-length dance theater work by Peter Carpenter. My Fellow Americans explores the shifting identity of Ronald Reagan from the perspective of the “special interest groups” that his rhetoric and policies consistently admonished. Thursday & Friday performances: October 8, 9, 15, & 16 at 7:30pm Visit http://petercarpenterperformance.com for details.
Choreography: Peter Carpenter
Performers: Peter Carpenter, Lisa Gonzales, Suzy Grant, Atalee Judy and Donnell Williams. My Fellow Americans promises to be a work of targeted, potent, and ultimately devastating juxtapositions.
At stake is a targeted historical revision designed to interrogate the discrepancy between his optimistic political speeches and the negating effects his policies had on the Americans who deviated from his conception of morality. These juxtapositions are conceived in terms of madness: The madness of AIDS-induced dementia, the madness of Alzheimer’s at the end of Reagan’s life, the madness of the thousands of institutionalized Americans turned out onto the street to become the largest wave of homelessness since the Great Depression during Reagan’s presidency, the madness of Cold War paranoia, and the madness of a thousand points of light. My Fellow Americans received financial support for its creation from the Chicago Dancemakers Forum, The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs Dance Bridge Program, and a Columbia College Chicago Faculty Development Grant.
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Peter Carpenter "My Fellow Americans"
Many scenes in Peter Carpenter's "My Fellow Americans" are as barren and dusty as the Santa Fe Trail. In fact, dancer Atalee Judy, enacting a series of cliched gunfight deaths from old Westerns, even fakes an echo as she makes the sound of a pistol's shot through clenched teeth like a boy playing Cowboys and Indians during the Eisenhower era. The paradox of this new dance theater work, as in all of Carpenter's pieces I've seen, is how the simplicity of its surface contains such a densely-packed mass of codes, references, suggestions and arguments. Becoming absorbed by the dances he makes is like reaching nonchalantly for a block of styrofoam to find out it weighs as much as an anvil.
Judy clues us in from the get-go, marching up to the front row to deliver a brief rundown of the elements of theatrical framing (Carpenter is concert dance's Charlie Kaufman), which segues into an a capella rendition of Tommy Womack and the Jambodians' "I Miss Ronald Reagan" that's first resistant, then gleefully submissive, to the song's twisted showbiz flair. Other frames are left for us to discover for ourselves, thankfully, par for Carpenter's course of assuming an audience's intelligence and engagement. The aforementioned medley of movie gunfights - many in hysterically-funny slo-mo - coyly teases out its jokes in a stunning crossfade with what might have been going on in Ronald Reagan's head as the Hollywood soldier suddenly found himself leader of the free world.
"My Fellow Americans" does not leave its politics to mystery, but certainly owns them outright: Lisa Gonzales' Schadenfreude-drenched monologue on Reagan's descent into Alzheimer's Disease acknowledges full-bodied the anger many still feel at the former President's reluctance to address the AIDS crisis. It's an order of magnitude more powerful than even the nastiest stabs at George W. Bush's dimwittedness; a lot of this 90-minute piece is born of true and profound pain and Carpenter does not mince around trying to hide it.
The gulf between politicians' and Hollywood's fantasies and the nightmares they're loath to address in public is the canyon through which Carpenter's cast hikes, looking for a way out of the legacy of Reagan's agenda not just as champions of more accepting alternatives but as humans in an emotional bear trap, existing on the business end of policies hostile to their values. Everyone involved in this production is on the same page about what it aims to accomplish, which gives its five performers (Carpenter, Gonzales and Judy in addition to an excellent Suzy Grant and Donnell Williams) the heft of a freight train. Williams sings, also a capella, Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" like he's carving its lyrics into his arm during detention. "There are plenty of ways you can hurt a man/and bring him to the ground" becomes a eulogy for over a million Americans, "But I'm ready, yes I'm ready for you/I'm standing on my own two feet" an impassioned declaration of resilience and survival. They're all chameleons, though: Williams sings these lines just minutes after a solo in patent platform stilettos and a rubber Reagan mask. Tonal shifts, though subtle, come quick.
A solo Carpenter dances in a single cowboy boot feels like the pit of this work, the seed from which it grew. I've seen it a couple times a la carte and certainly responded to it, but in context here its images - fragile, collapsing salutes, gasps for breath, the slicing arm swings of an "angel of death" - are indelible.
That there's humor at all in this show may be hard to believe, but it runs throughout and is buffed to a shine. Reciting lines from Reagan's First Inaugural Address, Gonzales takes cues from an imaginary Cyrano de Bergerac reminiscent of Miranda July's "The Co-Star" - she's side-splitting - and Grant's mugging during recordings of some of the late president's more indulgent corny jokes is just as devastating. Some moments, like a slow dance to Gershwin, reflect a plea for the maintenance of simple humanity, even if paired with violently-contrasting imagery almost out of frame. I could go on but I think I've made my point: "My Fellow Americans" is a superbly-executed, brilliantly-constructed piece of dance theater that, after a summer postponement, is finally being seen. Go.
