We Don’t Need Walls Where We’re Going: 2019 Without Walls Festival Diary
San Diego’s Liberty Station became ground zero for groundbreaking work
The biennial Without Walls Festival descended on San Diego’s Liberty Station this past weekend, bringing artists from around the globe to perform work that ranged from large-scale kid-friendly games to intimate documentary pieces.
The La Jolla Playhouse produces the festival, and the balance of performances embrace the festival name — Without Walls — literally, with a strong focus on work that is outdoors in some fashion or another. Still, WOW remains one of the few theatre festivals that actively courts immersive and interactive work, and here at No Proscenium we’ve long relied on the festival as a way of hearing new voices from afar.
This year’s lineup included new work from Third Rail Projects (Then She Fell) and Optika Moderna (Waking La Llorona). What follows are our initial notes on what we saw at the Festival, with longer form thoughts on specific pieces to come anon.
Listed alphabetically.
As Far As My Fingertips Take Me
This one-on-one experience sold out quickly, but I was lucky enough to snag a no-show standby slot. I’m so glad I did.
In a gallery space sits a wall with an arm-sized hole in it. On the wall is what looks like a poem, and a post with a pair of headphones hanging from it. In front of the wall, a small platform with a chair.
Each participant is given simple instructions: roll up your sleeve, sit in the chair, put on the headphones and when the time comes: out your arm in the hole.
On the other side of the wall is a refugee, through the headphones you hear his story in prose and song. As it unfolds, he draws a representation of the tale on your arm.
Hours later, as I write this, I look down at that image. The memory of how it felt to have him draw it, and what I felt as I heard his story resonates. Details fade by the minute but the feeling — the feeling burrows in a little deeper with every passing breath.
That we force our brothers and sisters into such struggles, or stand by and let it all unfold makes me ill.
Australia’s Polyglot Theatre brought a playful, family focused improv adventure that involved cloth and foam “boats,” cardboard seabirds, and a whole lot of imagination. This piece was paced for the littlest of kids and parents who could use a break, all of whom looked like they were having fun. (I played for a couple of minutes, and then started to feel awkward as the only childless adult who wasn’t working the show.) Nevertheless, a nice reminder of the power of play, and how it’s integral to what we pursue here.
Not all of the vignettes that I got to see in this broad collection of short pieces set at the fictional Harris-Tingley High (played by the real life High Tech High) worked, but when they did: they really WORKED.
This production by Blindspot Collective draws on a massive cast of high school students to create around twenty slice of life scenes, the bulk of which were through a musical lens. A cast of around sixty talented actors and singers from Canyon Crest Academy took on multiple roles in the various scenes, and passing periods to create a show that brought the audience up to the edge of the glass to see what high school life is like now. Turns out it’s pretty much like how it always has been: just with wifi.
While the writing was uneven at times — I still have no idea what the final vignette was specifically about, even it it was sincerely performed — and the unmic’d singers weren’t always up to the task against the weight of pre-recorded backing tracks, the cast so fully committed to the bit that it was impossible not to be charmed by the end. Especially when the entire cast’s voices were lifted together in song, making it feel as if we were sitting inside a giant chorus. A truly magical moment, that.
Bumpy logistics at the start of this Begat Theater production kept me from ever settling into the languid pace of this show that follows the inner lives of four characters as their worlds intersect thanks to four objects which get passed off between the actors at key junctures.
Four groups of patrons are assigned to follow the objects while wearing headphones that pump the streams of consciousness of the characters into our own. If you’ve ever wanted to feel like you were inside a piece of French cinema, Hidden Stories is your ticket. If not, you may find yourself wandering in mind, as well as in body.
This riff on the myth of Icarus finds Third Rail Projects in their site responsive mode.
There’s a depth of precision to Third Rail’s choreography that few others dare match, and that’s on display here in abundance. With a posable artist’s mannequin occasionally standing in as Icarus, flight as a theme and jets soaring overhead — Liberty Station is in the airport’s takeoff path — the physical language of a ground crew is tempered by the dancers to have the limitations of the mannequin at points. At other times the roaring of jet engines — a constant feature of every show here — becomes part of the focus as our three performers track the plane in flight with touches of rapture, awe, and jealousy.
On the level of details the show sings, but what feels like a strong narrative start loses some thrust once it hits cruising altitude. The always gorgeous Third Rail choreography keeps the production aloft, and the work is integrated into the landscape smartly, but a tighter run time and sharper narrative lens would go a long way towards making this processional something great.
This piece from Optika Moderna deserves, and will get, a full write up of its own. Suffice it to say: David Israel Reynoso’s company doubles down on the lessons they learned in Waking La Llorona to bring us a tragic love story told from two perspectives. It’s a heartbreaking piece that works as an exemplar of what the immersive form can be.
A piece of documentary dance theatre, PDA tells the story of three relationships, performed by the actual couples. It’s pretty cute. As a format, this is fairly awesome, with the stories of the couples getting woven in and out of each other as a series of thematically related vignettes. Some of the sequences have more depth than others, relative to the complexity of the relationships themselves.
Staged out of doors amidst park benches with the audience seated on blankets, the hour-ish piece could have been a little tighter in its current form, but its charm had a good half-life even as I bolted down piece after piece of work at the festival. San Diego’s People of Interest has a framework for future pieces here, and they’d be wise to iterate on that.
Part circus act, part dance theatre, all delightfully strange. Poland’s Teatr KTO takes themes from TS Eliot’s poetry and turns it into a public spectacle of giant headed business drones going through the motions from office life to office parties. From a NoPro standpoint there isn’t a lot going on with how the processional aspect is used — there was just one move from point A to point B in the WOW production, none of which was particularly integrated into the site — but that didn’t stop me from laughing all the way through.
Oracle Performing Arts presented ten five-minute plays in a pop-up tent on the grass. Again, not really in our wheelhouse, but the one I caught Winter Games, was far, far better than any play in a tent had any business being. The only real downside was the “Point Loma Pause” — the need for actors to take a moment as jets taking off overhead drowned out all other sound — interrupted a really good monologue three times.
Five short plays from Backyard Renaissance Theatre Company set in and around the Stone Brewing World Bistro that varied wildly in tone and content. This is akin to formats like Moving Art’s Car Plays or Chalk Rep’s i: a grab bag of shorts that hit as often as they miss. Sadly the three best pieces of the five were marred on a Saturday night viewing thanks to a very busy night at the restaurant: which is San Diego’s largest. A particularly emotionally taught scene about the breakup of a lesbian couple — both former members of the Air Force, one dealing with some severe PTSD — was wrecked by the bro-dacious yammering of a nearby table for 12.
The standout piece of the bunch was nearly brought low by proximity to that same table. The only interactive piece of the crop took the form of a meta-play about three actresses who all bore the mark of an “organization” that they hoped to flee. Somehow a structure that shouldn’t have worked, in a setting that wasn’t entirely conducive focusing on connecting with an actor, hit with force well above its weight class.
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