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Gang
Wizard features toys, gee-gaws, and noisemakers extraordinaire,
and a hyperactive performance aesthetic. *
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Bleepy-Bloopy
Noises: When experimental musician and videographer Eric Hausmann joined me for the 7th Annual Olympia Experimental Music Festival, we didn’t know quite what to expect. What we got was a wild variety of musical styles, technical abilities, and performance approaches. And what we had, consistently, was fun. This was no overpriced, fancypants event full of goatee-stroking theorizers or a showcase of overserious minimalist compositions, but a romp through the tangled underbrush of homegrown experimentalism. A Symphony of Expectoration The festival runs Friday through Sunday, occupying just one venue each day – except when artists Le Ton Mité take the audience on a ramble down the street. Saturday afternoon, we arrive at Olympia World News, an airy café and ’zine shop, midway through Jennifer Robin’s set. Upstairs in the sunlit performance space, a thin, half-dressed alien girl with big eyes and an infectious laugh attacks the microphone with squeals, rants, and the seductive beat of her distinctive prose. Like many spoken word performers, she combines lyrical flights of fancy with a shocking directness of subject matter (sex, death, space dildos, etc.). Unlike most of them, this novelist, radio personality, and Signum contributor is also geeky and silly, mixing ridiculous humour and sloppy ad-libs into her poetry and expressive performance. She seems devoid of earnest artsiness, posed toughness, pretentious solemnity, and removed cynicism (the Four Horsemen of Performance Apocalypse). Backed by a pouty blonde boy who goes by the moniker Glamorous Pat, Jennifer launches into "The Freshly Dead," a fourth wall inferno of tongue-twisting text and gleefully warped imagery. After treating us to a symphony of expectoration, Jennifer closes her show with – what else? – a reading of choice Alf jokes. Robin’s display of energetic madness portends well for our visit to Olympia. Last weekend, this small but astonishingly creative town played host to another festival, one devoted entirely to performance art. Later this summer, Yo Yo A Go Go will bring a bunch of indie rockers to town, while folks from miles around flock to their capitol city for Lakefair’s carnival rides and mainstream fare. LadyFest, an influential festival now replicating itself across the States and abroad, originated here. Home of Evergreen College, Olympia is known internationally as a powerful force in independent music and women’s culture, a magnet for outspoken lesbians, punk rock ladies, and hipster grrrls. That reputation has been fueled by the success of homegrown indie businesses in the last decade, whether that means prominent record labels like K and Kill Rock Stars, or the Queen Bee guitar straps and handbags sold by designer Rebecca Pearcy. |
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