TRIP/syck--a Hypnotic Fugue in a Small Space West of the River

The Pink House is a cozy, little space in Riverwest. People gather around a tiny stage for a show that runs for two performances. One weekend only. The 7pm show opens the program. April Biggs’ Sick Girl feels like an oddly pleasant and deeply engaging trip to the doctor’s office  crossed with an art installation and an abstract narrative dance performance. (Audience members are handed clipboards and intake forms on the way into the performance space.) Biggs is radiant. I’ve reviewed THAT performance for The Shepherd-Express.

After intermission, the program returns. It’s a provocative, little three-performance show that’s being presented by 53212 Presents. It’s a show called TRIP/syck. You should go. Really. It’s fun. It’s a fusion of different narrative styles that don’t often make it...anywhere. So it’s really cool to see this sort of thing presented onstage.

Selena Milewski’s Biopic follows the intermission. It’s an exploration into phantoms of biography and mediated reality through the lens of popular cinema. There’s a pre-recorded bit that’s projected onto the wall--a mutated isotope of an Academy Awards telecast. She’s hosting the ceremony while presenting an award for a category in which she’s the only one who has been nominated. Milewski stars in weird fragments of nonexistent feature films which play out on the wall as a living Selena dances in the projection. It’s hypnotic. Milewski has the kind of striking beauty and magnetic presence that fits well into a glowing rectangle. There’s no question that she’d be good for big money projects in two-dimensions, but there’s something alive living in the projection...and it’s her.

​Cinema and video produced by Zeze Schorsch are projected onto the wall. They play with corpses of what’s already been and there they are projected against the screen in biographical mutation as a very real and living Selena dances around in the light cast from the past. Very cool stuff...and a clever (if possibly inadvertent) satire on the nature of film as art on the precipice of the SAG strike that’s coming at month’s end. So much money is cast into the yawning pit of creative energy in LA. The live stage in all its many forms is capable of so much more than anything that’s restlessly being projected on so many vapid multiplex screens all over the country. It’s so much more when it’s alive...especially on intimate, little floorboards somewhere West of the river.

The program ends with a weird, little tour de force of trippy disorientation called Afternoon of Fawning. It’s a mind-warping deconstruction of performance. Forrest Jackson, Posy Knight and  Zeze Schorsch are rehearsing a show that they’re performing...as they’re performing it they’re rehearsing it. Basic relationships break apart nonlinearly as the narrative slides around itself looking for the right diagonals...looking for the right rhythms. Everything’s unfixed on some level of being live as video of the audience and actors shot from various angles are projected against the wall. We’re the audience and we’re in it as they’re in it and we’re all looking into it and around it. Schorsch and Knight and Jackson play mutated amplifications of themselves as light and life are haphazardly refracted through the video in uneasy projection through. every reflection.

There’s good beer and snacks too. And wine. It’s like a gallery opening or something. In Riverwest.

TRIP/syck: a collection of 3 intimate studio showings is presented by 53212 Presents at The Pink House on 601 East Wright Street. For more information, visit 53212 Presents online.