Act Out/ Performance Night

8:20 - Intersection for the Arts. What?

This is a general mixed performance night, much more in line with traditional APAtureness, where all disciplines are mixed in together. Tonight is also Sam Chanse's performance. Sam has a longer history with APAture at this point than I do. And she's the featured artist in performance.

8:22 - Ellen Oh welcomes us. Day Seven. Year Ten. Upcoming events. Upcoming programs. Thanks sponsors. You know the drill by now, right? Intros Jack, committee member. Bar is open.

8:25 - Jack - welcome. Pitch for the rest of APAture and t-shirts and booze.

Philip Huang (writer) born in Taipei, lives in Berkeley. Model turned actress. (Plus, he's a kickass writer. Seriously. One of his readings actually brought me to tears. Me!

8:26 - Philip - sneaks out the curtain. In character. Asks for cup of tea. Khalil brings it and sits down next to him. Giving us character: nervous giggly diva. Making a lot of our sipping his tea. Licking the cup, spilling it all over himself and licking it off. Shy giggling again: it's delicious. How's everyone doing tonight? Welcome my fellow Asians and Filipinos. Big laugh. Turning 33 next week. Prime number, lucky year. Bittersweet: year that Jesus committed suicide. Maybe accidental overdose. Love that you can interpret the Bible any way you want.

Went to Israel last year. Had so much fun in Israel got AIDS twice. Talking back and forth with woman in the audience. Wanted to have a three-way with an Arab and a Jew on top of the Wailing Wall, while shooting an M16. Didn't get to do that. Did get to shoot at the wall and accidentally shot a child, but it was a girl.

Did meet with a rabbi, Kabbalah. He shared the unspoken name of God with Philip. He'll share it wiht us tonight. Makes sucking sound while pointing at it his dick.

Did an "internment" at an animal shelter. Internship. I'm not Japanese. Khalil Solomon everyone! They're community activists; want to promote awareness about a health issue. Khalil is the black Alicia Keys. Khalil gets a guitar.

(This stuff is so offensive it would be funny, but timing is a little off.)

Singing that Beyonce song "to the left, everything you own in the goiter to the left" singing about a goiter. Ties a scarf around his throat to look like a huge goiter. Goes off on a rant about the goiter. Goiters are treatable. Tells story about having a goiter in the Philippines when he was ten. Falls into sobs. Khalil starts singing goiter song. Philip runs around doing interpretive dance. Goes into the audience and makes people touch the goiter.

Philip: can we hold hands? We can end goiters tonight.

Is that the end? That was weird, Philip. WTF? Wow, that was a weird little trip through Philip's freaky fuckin' mind.

8:42 - Jack: does a bit of a spiel about KSW and APAture. Intros Irene Fay Duller. Founding member of 8th Wonder, more stuff that I can't keep up with. New piece from her called "Skywalk" about finding home. All stories are true.

Irene: has a group of performers with her. using black boxes a set. Four characters. Girl talking about climbing a mountain. Boy talking about going back to find his roots. Girl talking about being out there and having a dream of ancestors.

(This is very Bindlestiff-style. Dance, movement together with monologue, identity stuff. Dream stuff.)

Now they're interacting. Texting in the Philippines a different language. We're a clever and creative people. Made up conflict between a guy and a girl about whether or not text language is good.

Going into a poor area to observe poor people. Leave your first worldliness. Guy gets grossed out. Describes the garbage by listing it. No one should live here. You are so first world. Monologue about his feelings.

Dancing bell-bedecked woman comes out. Music. She has a boa of fake flowers. Gives it to a girl. (Okay, so this is an esxperience of traveling back to the motherland, having dreams; failing to have the experience you wanted.) Takes the flowers away. Girl wakes up. Gets excited about the dream. She came to me, the river goddess. In touch with the earth. She's been researching this stuff.

(Damn, she's got some sharp things to say about roots searches. Could be a little tighter. It's kind of slow anyway and the performances aren't paced right.) They go out to the forest to collect the things the goddess told her in the dream. Her offering doesn't work out the way she wants it to. This was her test.

The mountain climbing part. Three of them describing the scene. Trying to keep up with the effortless guides. List of things back home they're thinking about. The grant proposal. Rice terraces full of blues music. Singing a canon. Goddess comes back out and dances. On the peak.

Wow, that was interesting. I'd like to see the whole piece when it's finished. I always wondered what the next step for Bindlestiff-trained writers and performers was gonna be. There it is. That is definitely a development.

9:06 - Jack: all artists are volunteering tonight. Please go talk to them and ask them when they're performing next.

Intro dance number. Rogel Camba. Danced on MTV show. Funkanometry. "Dark Identity" piece.

Rogel: group of six dancers all in black. Interpretive hip hop dance, to Portishead. If I'd been a dancer when I was sixteen and hiding in my room, listening to the Smiths, this is what I would have choreographed.

Okay it's picking up now. Aaannd we're back to agonized. Aaaannd we're picking up again. Each dancer gets a spotlight in one of these segments. Oh, this is the sexy segment. Good thing there's three boys and three girls! Feeling each other up and freeze-framing. Now we're writhing on the floor. Yeah, let's end with that ... with one of the boys doing one of the girls doggy style. Oh, it was Rogel doing the girl doggy style. Ladeez? Whatcha think?

9:22 - We're still in intermission. Pireeni stole the rest of my burrito. Mark stole the rest of my chips before the performance even started. Somebody opened the door so I can tell it's cooling off outside.

9:31 - Jack's back: people are milling, trying to find seats. Somebody gets into my personal space. Get out of my personal space! Jack intros Truthisreal TIR. www.truthisreal.com.

Sam comes out. Doing spoken word act in a black hoodie. Wisdom is knowledge. Pumping herself up. Pome about her grandmother. Called "Grandmother." (Hitting it all: "rice," "gold mountain," "sour plums," "other," "mango")

Now she's doing another character. Suzette Law, doing a weird voice. She's a volunteer for APAture festival, Professor Dariotis forces us to be here*. Conscription. Suzette has to be personal emcee for some girl, I mean woman. Intros Samantha Chanse. New stuff.

Now she's doing herself. HOW META!

Opening remarks: I am unworthy. Wasting other people's time. Quick to pass judgment on others. Unsuitable for employment. Quick to anger and to remorse. Bad at finances. Sometimes I laugh at babies ... falling. I hate you all but most of all I hate myself.

9:47 - Doing her dad? Calling somebody. His son is in medical school and coming home for a visit. Making a reservation with a friend at a restaurant. Daughter is Suzette, creative writing major at SFSU. Oh! Dig at "community organizers." Yeah, she said it.

Back to Suzette. Presenting the next piece while Sam prepares. Brings Goh Nakamura up. Childrens' book by Sam as a child, called "Fright Night," projected onto screen. (This is a real book Sam made as a kid, actually. She forced me to read it at her birthday party when she was drunk.) Suzette reading Sam's notes. It's a metaphor for bifurcated identity. The monsters coming out of the cemetery are people of color trying to invade white communities. Goh is playing atmospheric woo-woo music in background. Dismantling white hegemony.

9:58 - Sam playing Sam as very insecure. Pulls in bit from stand up about her last name. I like this bit, or would like it if I hadn't seen it twenty times already. Okay, not her fault. White kids with Down Syndrome. "Bitch you think too much Syndrome" thing. (This is interesting. She's playing it really slowly ... maybe b/c it's a "theater piece" and not a standup routine. It's really working. What's the lesson here? Slow it down.) Ooo. She added a weird little incestuous element to the end.

Back to the Dad. He's on the phone again. Same guy. Wants to add one more person to the table. The guy he's talking to is the chef. How messed up China is. They do Chinese things better in SF than in China.

10:08 - Sam's back. She's hapa, multiracial. Grew up in New York, there weren't that many of us. Wrote a song about her experiences being mixed (with Goh backing her up.) Song called "hapahapahapahapahapa." This'll get better with time. Food metaphors. Ouch.

Suzette again: there's real stuff going on in the world. We're going to have the first multiracial president and nobody talks about it. And all she's talking about is her identity.

Dad's back: calling him again. Why don't you bring a friend? Slight change of plans. His son's bringing "a friend" who's not a girl, so I can't go. I'm not comfortable with it. They don't want to get married so you can still go.

Sam again, doing her stand up thing about her Dad. Suzette: theres only one more thing left. Thanks to Intersection and volunteers, and people in light and sound booth, and audience. One more thing she's gonna do.

Dad's back: talking to Suzette. Arguing about not getting over Chris' five year relationship.

10:24 - Lots of applause. That was really good. Best thing I've seen so far at APAture. And she didn't pay me to say that.

Jack: last words.

And we're done.

* ETA: "Professor Dariotis" is Wei Ming, who wasn't "Professor" yet when we started APAture, but was a lecturer at SF State. She has stocked APAture's volunteer corps with her students since the beginning, by requiring them to do community service, and then telling them that volunteering at APAture would do the trick. Nice, huh? The first hired APAture coordinator, Andrew Amorao, was one of Wei Ming's students, and nearly every APAture intern has been too. Wei Ming hooked us up with the Filipino fraternity (can't remember the call letters), who did security for us the first three years. For scale, just realize that during the first few years, we required about 80 volunteers for the entire festival. I can't understate how key Wei Ming's professorly arm-twisting has been to the success of the festival.

Comments

[Amy]

Wow, that was a real book? Now I'm kinda disturbed. On the other hand, it's pretty amazing for anybody to save a piece of crap like that for all these years.

[claire]

amazing and disturbing. especially if they force you to read it late at night when they're drunk.

[Amy]

Here's a link to Sam's YouTube page, where you can see her performance in multiple parts:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ebuhead

And sorry for my "piece of crap" remark, I'm really bad at sarcasm. I'm sure I have similar childhood drawings at home, I'm just too modest / embarrassed to show them to anyone (whether drunk or not).