Writer, Artist and Critic
KATHY ROSE at the Annenberg Center's Harold Prince Theater, Philadelphia
"Oriental Interplay," which opened Tuesday night's program, offered a playful introduction to a world where the physical and animated realms interact in dizzying ways. Rose's and Makiko Oka's white robes became screens, allowing images projected on them to transform their bodies. Dresses grew up on them like flowers, or dripped off like spilled drinks. On the screen behind them, a growing, amoebic chaos of dancing tubes, dots and hands amplified the polymorphous confusion.
"Syncopations," an excerpt from a long, early work, had Rose surrounded by giant filmed hands, and later, seven near-identical dancers moving around her like a giant water-ballet halo, their patterned movements pulsing to an insistent syncopated beat.
Like Sarah Bernhardt or other early silent film stars, Rose has a generous-featured face that projects across a theater, and holds its own against much larger images. Later in "Syncopations," she called up images of Isadora Duncan, sending a diaphanous scarf in the air against a huge, floating filmed scarf. It was around this point that I gave up trying to keep track of the various levels of reality and illusion, surrendering to the sheer beauty of the moment she'd created.
But she had more up her sleeve. "She," her 1993 tour-de-force, presents Rose as a kind of sci-fi Balinese insect queen. With goggle-eye masks, iridescent costumes and headdresses, she and her two acolytes called up Kali, the bone-eating Hindu Goddess, and, lining up behind each other, the many-armed (insect-like) Shiva. "She"'s final moment, with Rose's silvery, new-found wings held aloft on shadow-puppet sticks by her insect-assistants, is one of the most truly strange images I can remember seeing on a stage.
It was during her "Precious Metals" that I began wondering if Rose is really some pagan High Priestess, exiled to the world of contemporary art. Turbaned and robed in a coppery, glittering fabric, she held us in thrall to the molten ripples of her costume. The centrality of her tableaux, inherent in her projection technique, also gives them a hieratic, hypnotically compelling power.
Her work-in-progress, "Kleopat'Ra," offers a further evolution of Rose as priestess/ancient queen. Her Kleopat'Ra, in Nefertiti headdress and golden gown, moved with near-imperceptible slowness through several dreamlike scenes, narrated by poetic phrases projected above like silent-film titles. Onscreen, a nude body became undulating sand dunes, and floating locks of hair, a field. This, her most theatrical work to date (does it show the influence of Robert Wilson?), promises to be a stunner when complete. But don't wait till then; see her now if you can.
--Miriam Seidel