Hailing from faraway Yerevan, Armenia, Theater 8’s production of “The Maids” opens the first week of Tricklock’s Revolutions International Theatre Festival 2011.
The festival has an 11-year reputation for bringing Albuquerque some of the world’s theater. It is often uncanny and wildly different.
The VSA North Fourth Art Center hosted the performance, with UNM’s Tricklock Company initiating the festival and its events.
Upon entering the space and taking your seat, you’re greeted by a raised platform with a body wrapped in a blood-stained funeral shawl. Black strips attached in the back center of the platform fan out in a peacock pattern, each secured along the ceiling.
Once it begins, the lights dim, slow, booming drumming echoes, and a tall, male figure shoots up to tower and stares seriously around the audience. He leaves silently and dramatically, and in the lighting transition, you get introduced to the denominated maids themselves.
They’re dressed a little on the slave side, with wrapped fabrics and loin clothes, but fancy boots. The lights crack back on flashing with sudden, avant-garde music blasting as the maids stomp back and forth in a weird fashion show.
As the maids interaction continues silently, you get the impression that you’re watching more of a dance than a play, or maybe something even more generally named, like “performance art.” It becomes something mixed and blurred to the point where trying to define it doesn’t even matter anymore.
Without language, art is still art, and certainly running themes are being pulled out and identified, things like power, death and sex.
Lots and lots of sex.
During the fashion show, the maids make out for a bit, then go back to stomping around.
Props fly in from offstage, and the maids will greedily snatch them up and fight over them. One will dominate or threaten another, and their struggles turn slowly sexy.
That’s when the male figure returns and walks around, eyeing the maids unblinkingly. He’s dressed in all black, with a flowing cape and do-rag and heavy, almost raccoonish eye-makeup. He’s like a weird, goth Zorro, and the maids stop their various sex games to tremble in fear, helped along by a sudden music change.
Maybe it was that he looked like some kind of queer superhero, or the total seriousness of his theatrical pacing, but his every entrance just seemed funny.
The musical transitions helped the scenes along, and the maids got a new prop to mess with — a packet of papers, a massive hot balloon canvas or a bed frame. They fought each other, for or with their props, and then usually ended up humping things.
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Then Zorro came back and walked around dramatically. If he got really angry, his theme song would play — the craziest of the crazy music, and the only song (other than the slow drum beats) that really played more than once. He also might manhandle the maids a bit before sauntering away. And then back to the maids dancing, fighting, and maybe a bit of humping before Zorro’s inevitable return. Repeat.
So what’s the point, you might ask.
Well, imagine it’s a bit like a David Lynch film, where every scene, character and situation is from everywhere, too dream-like and surreal to be completely pants-on-head nutzo. You’re playing with light and sound, images and moments. Sure, there were some Armenian chicks making out, and the ghost of Inigo Montoya making his angry face, but it’s really a structure of twinkling flashes of emotion from one instant to another.
This really kicked into high gear in the climax, where women strip down to their underwear, the fan of straps are unleashed into a spider web of black ribbons, and the platform literally opens with trap doors in the top. The maids are murdered and held underwater, with more straying water than the splash zone at Sea World from the hidden pool contained within the platform. Then Blacula entombed the maids by shutting them inside. You don’t really see it coming.
Sometimes it’s hard to find value in something so abstract that the entire point is simple provocation. But art is intended to evoke an emotional response, and that response is always personal. Revolutions has much more to offer in the realm of new art and performance, and with it all practically dropped on your doorstep, it would be hard to excuse yourself from experiencing it.
