"Bad Bugs Bite"
by Ben Spatz

Photo by Markus Harnigel.

January 23 - February 9, 2003 (closed)
La MaMa E.T.C. (Annex Theater), 74A East Fourth Street
(Presented by La MaMa E.T.C.)
Thursdays through Sundays at 7:30 pm; $20
Box office (212) 475-7710; on-line ticketing available at www.lamama.org
Reviewed by Ben Spatz January 31, 2003

A woman is dancing another woman. It is some kind of interrogation. The woman being danced is naked, she is moving reluctantly, her energy spent, following the other's lead like the victim of an interrogation. She is positioned and repositioned until she ends, standing, at the center of the darkness. Then she is scanned. A thin green line, vertical, slides across her naked body. She is read like a barcode, her body undressed by the light, her humanity pulled apart by the inhuman dance.

At its most disturbing moments, "Bad Bugs Bite" by Andrea Paciotto undresses and dehumanizes the human body using the power of theatrical technology at its most invasive. This is at times particularly difficult to watch in light of the fact that the bodies onstage being undressesed are all female, while the bodies offstage that run the undressing and dehumanizing technology are all male. In any case, the design and deployment of technology in this piece is incredible, overwhelming, and immersive. The audience sits in two partitions, watching the performers through screens, between screens, and onscreen. Live interactive audio and video feedback completes the totality of the environment, and in these many layers of image and re-image it is genuinely possible to become lost, as in a dream.

The show is reminiscent of another show, "The Filament Cycle" by Stateless, which took place at La MaMa three years ago. That show was also inspired by the Balkan war and it also involved multiple layers of cinematically integrated video and sound. However, there was a kind of humanity in "The Filament Cycle" that is lacking here. Paciotto seems to be purposefully uninterested in sympathetic characters or meaningful storylines. He is going somewhere else, away from person and plot and into nightmarish abstraction. "Bad Bugs Bite" is a deeply haunting modern-surrealist montage.

Photo by Markus Harnigel.

In such a montage, the hallucinatory and visceral power of the component images are of central importance. A nightmare is a nightmare because of the intensity of its visions, not because of the events (if there are any) that take place within it. In this regard, "Bad Bugs Bite" seems like the first step on a journey that can go much further. The violence of technology is investigated here, but not pushed as far as it could go. The most strikingly dehumanizing "technology" is the dancing towards the end, while many of the truly technical innovations are not used to their full potential. We see, for example, how a body may be imaged and transported into a videoscape, without seeing what the repercussions of such a transition might be.

We watch a woman play out a live-action video game, scrambling around herself and falling down as she is killed over and over again by computer-generated assassins. This involves a level of virtual reality integration that I have never seen onstage, but it only happens once and seems to be only conceptually related to the rest of the show. We watch a woman cut another woman out of a skin-tight latex shell, and the cutting is intense, and the revelation of her nakedness underneath is quite disturbing - but the whole event, from the introduction of the plastic suit to its removal, is once again isolated and does not resonate strongly beyond itself. Moreover, one suspects that there are more powerful images to be created with such a fantastic object then simply cutting it off.

In his exploration of this innovative theatrical technology, Paciotto is embarking on a very interesting journey. He uses his new media in new ways, and this by itself is a radical proposition. However, like any new medium, theater that integrates virtual or electronic imagery must be explored very deeply if it is going to be an art and not merely a craft. "Bad Bugs Bite" is much more compelling and meaningful than a showcase of new-media theatrical techniques would be (not to mention much, much darker), but if it Paciotto is going to eschew character and story then he will need to go more deeply into the art of this new media integration. At this point his nightmare is disturbing and hallucinatory, but it is not yet unforgettable. [Spatz]

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