Rite, Resurrected: fourlarks’ Triumphant ‘katabasis’ (The NoPro Review)
The show comes back after historic fires shut down the original Getty Villa 2018 production
“Oh fateful thread, what lies ahead, path of the dead, we will be traveling…”
Those aren’t the lyrics that begin fourlarks’ katabasis, but they do a good job of describing the premise of the show. Drawing from a well of antiquity and the Getty Villa’s Underworld: Imagining the Afterlife exhibit, katabasis casts its audience as initiates into a mystery cult set to learn the secrets of the underworld. On their journey down (katabasis means descent, and in this context descent into the underworld), the members of the cult reenact some of the most enduring sequences from Greek and Roman myth evoking the Fates, Charon, Cerberus, and Tantalus.
That journey winds around and through the gardens of the Getty Villa. For those unfamiliar with the Getty Villa, it’s a huge museum modeled after a Roman country house with stunning gardens, it’s own amphitheater, and pieces of interesting architecture. In short, it’s a space that any creator would love to craft something for, if perhaps a bit intimidating given the scale of the thing.
Thankfully and impressively, fourlarks expertly mapped their show on to those gardens and Roman-styled buildings. They use the wide open spaces (something rarely afforded to immersive theatre) to frame scenes and increase dimension, they position the audience to watch scenes below, above, and in between them, and they capture the magic of the fountains around the Villa (read: they climb in them). It’s a high water mark for site-specific theater, not just because of how they use such a unique venue, but in the way their staging choices enhance the meaning and feeling of the show by using what the site provides.
The actual show is something of a processional concert while the cast perform excerpts from the myths, sometimes in a literal sense and sometimes in an abstract sense. That undersells what the excellent performers are doing though. Throughout the evening, each of the talented cast trade duties playing (multiple!) instruments, singing, and performing, emphasizing the true ensemble nature of the show. The music is folk-ish, but regularly shifts styles to better accompany a scene, provide contrast against the action, or take advantage of the group’s wide range of musical abilities. If there’s one complaint here, and it’s a small one, it’s that the lyrics are hard to distinguish at times, but that’s also just the price of admission for live music.
The early goings of the show stick to the folk-forward music and a mostly meditative, melancholic tone, but by the time the audience has to pass by Cerberus to gain further passage to the underworld, katabasis has other things on its mind. As jazzier elements make their way into the composition, the show makes a swerve into near comedy as Cerberus alternates between chanting about rules and regulations, menacing those trying to progress further, and generally being a giant three-headed dog. (Sadly, jazzy bureaucratic Cerberus’ song is not on the soundtrack, nor are two other standout pieces.)
Free to hone in on the character focused myths from that point on, and through with the warm up, katabasis catches fire. A haunting song from Lethe, an operatic comedy featuring Tantalus, an angry anxiety-ridden telling of the Danaids’ story, a song for Sisyphus soaked in dramatic irony; each of the songs brings something new to the mix and demonstrates the sheer artistry of the piece through the marriage of song, space, and performance.
And that blend is what makes the whole piece work so well. The show begins with a literal descent down into the grounds of the Getty Villa, pausing to ponder the Fates from two stories up, and then wandering through the different scenes and stories of the Greek afterlife before closing out with Persephone. Her story is one of continual katabasis and anabasis, descent and ascent, over and over again. The final moments of the show are a perfect confluence of performance, space, writing, and direction as the audience climbs a long set of stairs past the performers to return to the starting point. It simultaneously completes the loop and primes everyone to begin it again. That beat brings everything together while also recontextualizing everything that came before.
katabasis becomes something bigger with that move. By echoing those cycles of descent and ascent in the actual movements of the audience, it draws on the cycles of birth, death, and rebirth that we see in the course of lives, seasons, even, the passing of individual days.
It’s simple and elegant. It manages to say something wordlessly, to let the audience participate in it, to get the full force of something that wouldn’t exist outside of this show being performed in this location.
“Rejoice and travel on…”
katabasis played for one weekend only at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades. A partial version of the soundtrack is available online.
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