RECOMMENDED
As Cupola Bobber, Stephen Fiehn and Lucky Pierre’s Tyler Myers have put together a performance chamber-piece ostensibly centered on the figure of Kevin Bacon in “Footloose.” The real themes of the evening, though, are endurance and vulnerability. During the opening third of the piece, Fiehn and Myers trade riffs and variations on Bacon’s climactic speech from the film while running on treadmills; as in much of the piece, they appear here only in silhouette, backlit behind three large cloth screens. Later, Fiehn stands on top of Myers’s bent back for a painfully long dialogue, capped by Myers’s strained rendition of Kenny Loggins’s “Footloose” theme. Throughout, the artful use of shadow, space, and dime-store props (they make great use, in particular, of the sound of an electric fan miked at a distance) create a haunting and thoroughly original imaginative atmosphere. The delicacy of the work as a whole is underscored by the unwelcome appearance of an actual “Footloose” clip at the end: the jarring unreality of this heavy-handed move emphasizes by contrast the mysterious, fragile presence of everything leading up to it. (John Beer)
This production is now closed.
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