AMERICAN LANGUAGE SHOW NOTES:
OBLIVIOTOPIA
© Alan Reade, 1999 and 2020
848 Community Space, San Francisco, California, September 10, 11, 17, and 18, 1999
Performers and Participants
Alan Reade--Vocals, Sampling Keyboard
pamela Z--Sound Coproduction
Kota Ezawa--Video Coproduction
Music taken from "California Dreaming" compilation CD, FFRR Records, 1993
Madeleine Lim--Video Images of Performance
Notes
This performance took me the longest of the American Language series to write, as a completed piece. I've always pulled bits and pieces for shows from stuff I've written in different times, sometimes decades apart. But once I did all the "pulling together" for this piece, it still took me four years to finalize it. I started piecing this performance together in 1995, while I still lived in Seattle. I kept writing it, finding reasons why I didn't like it, and putting away the latest draft for a year or so.
The performance originally came about because I was constantly commuting on buses to and from a software company (where I worked in editing and writing for several years), a good 20 miles each way from where I lived in Seattle at the time. Sometimes I would fall asleep briefly and then wake up and not know quite where I was, especially if I was still in the suburbs. Everything looked familiar--same chain stores, traffic, housing styles--but back in the days before digital maps I had a hard time pinpointing my exact location. I thought it would be interesting to write a show about a guy who keeps blacking out and then waking up as he's trapped on a nonstop bus mysteriously traveling cross-country. How the show was conceived and what it eventually became were quite far from one another, however.
After the many aforementioned drafts, and in between other artistic projects, I wrote the final version of the performance right before I left New York City for San Francisco, in the late summer/early fall of 1998. Removed were ponderous, pompous, bombastic pieces with titles like "Our Neighbors' Screams"; gone was a particularly onerous song that (I thought) skewered the Religious Right called "Crack Baby." Example: "Crack baby...I love you like you were my own...crack baby...but not enough to take you home." I usually hate music or writing that wears its politics on its sleeve, so why was I creating it myself?
The piece became about travel, and also about how the suburbs can be both a paradise and a trap. I wrote two things as the month of the show approached: "Obliviotopia" (which actually used excerpts from the erased "Our Neighbors' Screams, Parts 1, 2, and 3") and a new ending. The original ending had me in a NYC subway, nervously realizing that I have no change to give a panhandler with no legs and then having him rebuke my sympathy as he pushes my hand aside to open his own door to the next subway car. A person I had viewed as pathetic shows me hidden strength, hope that I can recover from even the worst situation. Well, I test-ran the show in spring of 1999 for a few people in my apartment, and the ending did not fly. "Is the ending about your fear of homeless people?" one friend asked.
The new ending adds a better "round-trip" arc to the storyline. When flying to San Francisco from New York, I'd stopped in Las Vegas to attend my best friend Dan's bachelor party and became stranded without money there. My parents, from whom I'd maintained independence for 11 years, flew me--and my two cats--home. And so that became part of the show.
This performance marked the first time I used all prerecorded music and sound effects--no band, no musicians, nobody on stage but me. I used a CD for background trance music and sound cues, slides of suburban landscapes and other strange visuals, and projected video of driving down open freeways and country roads to give the audience a sense of journey (that is, a state of motion, not the 80's rock band!). The effect I wanted was something like home movies and vacation slide shows, but with an edge.
The performance itself was underattended. The first night, no one came (a first for me), so we used it as a tech rehearsal. Audiences picked up after that, but I think that a big part of the problem was that the space was not in the best or most accessible part of San Francisco, which I didn't know when I had booked it. I had had a hit show in San Francisco, Bear-A-Go-Go!, that closed the week before this one opened--with full houses for each performance--but almost no one "crossed over" from that audience to see this piece. However, Obliviotopia did mark the first time my parents came to see a show I'd done. And thank heaven for work friends, who made up almost the entire audience one night!
Many of the musical elements of the performance were based on the vowel sound "O," which I translated to mean "circuit" or "round trip." The performance employed elements of all the tarot-card suits, especially focusing on The Fool card, a card about stepping off a cliff and hoping a net will be there for you. From the subject matter (my most autobiographical so far) to the way it came together (with me actually running some of my own tech during the show), this performance spent time in the realms of both oblivion and utopia.
Close this window to return to American Language.
The performance originally came about because I was constantly commuting on buses to and from a software company (where I worked in editing and writing for several years), a good 20 miles each way from where I lived in Seattle at the time. Sometimes I would fall asleep briefly and then wake up and not know quite where I was, especially if I was still in the suburbs. Everything looked familiar--same chain stores, traffic, housing styles--but back in the days before digital maps I had a hard time pinpointing my exact location. I thought it would be interesting to write a show about a guy who keeps blacking out and then waking up as he's trapped on a nonstop bus mysteriously traveling cross-country. How the show was conceived and what it eventually became were quite far from one another, however.
After the many aforementioned drafts, and in between other artistic projects, I wrote the final version of the performance right before I left New York City for San Francisco, in the late summer/early fall of 1998. Removed were ponderous, pompous, bombastic pieces with titles like "Our Neighbors' Screams"; gone was a particularly onerous song that (I thought) skewered the Religious Right called "Crack Baby." Example: "Crack baby...I love you like you were my own...crack baby...but not enough to take you home." I usually hate music or writing that wears its politics on its sleeve, so why was I creating it myself?
The piece became about travel, and also about how the suburbs can be both a paradise and a trap. I wrote two things as the month of the show approached: "Obliviotopia" (which actually used excerpts from the erased "Our Neighbors' Screams, Parts 1, 2, and 3") and a new ending. The original ending had me in a NYC subway, nervously realizing that I have no change to give a panhandler with no legs and then having him rebuke my sympathy as he pushes my hand aside to open his own door to the next subway car. A person I had viewed as pathetic shows me hidden strength, hope that I can recover from even the worst situation. Well, I test-ran the show in spring of 1999 for a few people in my apartment, and the ending did not fly. "Is the ending about your fear of homeless people?" one friend asked.
The new ending adds a better "round-trip" arc to the storyline. When flying to San Francisco from New York, I'd stopped in Las Vegas to attend my best friend Dan's bachelor party and became stranded without money there. My parents, from whom I'd maintained independence for 11 years, flew me--and my two cats--home. And so that became part of the show.
This performance marked the first time I used all prerecorded music and sound effects--no band, no musicians, nobody on stage but me. I used a CD for background trance music and sound cues, slides of suburban landscapes and other strange visuals, and projected video of driving down open freeways and country roads to give the audience a sense of journey (that is, a state of motion, not the 80's rock band!). The effect I wanted was something like home movies and vacation slide shows, but with an edge.
The performance itself was underattended. The first night, no one came (a first for me), so we used it as a tech rehearsal. Audiences picked up after that, but I think that a big part of the problem was that the space was not in the best or most accessible part of San Francisco, which I didn't know when I had booked it. I had had a hit show in San Francisco, Bear-A-Go-Go!, that closed the week before this one opened--with full houses for each performance--but almost no one "crossed over" from that audience to see this piece. However, Obliviotopia did mark the first time my parents came to see a show I'd done. And thank heaven for work friends, who made up almost the entire audience one night!
Many of the musical elements of the performance were based on the vowel sound "O," which I translated to mean "circuit" or "round trip." The performance employed elements of all the tarot-card suits, especially focusing on The Fool card, a card about stepping off a cliff and hoping a net will be there for you. From the subject matter (my most autobiographical so far) to the way it came together (with me actually running some of my own tech during the show), this performance spent time in the realms of both oblivion and utopia.
Close this window to return to American Language.