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Conceived
and Directed by Pete
Guither
July 8, 2001 - August 19, 2001
Strawdog
Theatre
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The
Living Canvas - a performance piece integrating photography, music,
text, and movement to capture the nuances of artistic expression
inherent in the nude human form.
The
Living Canvas is a performance piece unlike any other - photography
made flesh; the still life transformed with movement; the body
as you've never allowed yourself to see it before. Photographer
Pete Guither and his troupe of performers move through discovery
and play, civilization and commerce, barriers imposed by society
and from within, presenting nudity as expression, the texture
of movement, the body as canvas.
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REVIEWS
The
Chicago Reader by Kelly Kleiman
Give
photographer Pete Guither credit. He's figured out how to get coverage
in a town that neglects visual art: pretend it's performance. Guither's
photos, which use naked bodies as backdrops on which images are projected(including
traffic signs, the flag, and parts of a dollar bill), open the show
and they literalize a good question: what do we project onto nudity?
But the subsequent live action--a dozen naked people onstage posing
and undulating, as projected images appear on their skin--answers
meretriciously. Coeducational nakedness is not Edenic innocence to
those of us living after the Fall. Naked people don't go around touching
each other chastely, because genitals are displayed to signal availability
for sex, thereby assuring the propagation of the species. Nakedness
can be asexual, but it rarely is in people with such flawless figures.
And who challenges conventional constructions of the body by making
sure every woman in the group sports a neatly barbered pubis?
The
company gambols through a portentous narrative that combines old-hat
nonconformism ("I refuse to be ashamed") with New Age invocations.
Music is static and repetitive, though it's credited to everyone from
Samuel Barber to Pink Floyd. And when anything dynamic plays, like the
Commodores' "Brick House," we're compelled to notice the extent
to which "dynamic" means "involving sexual suggestion,"
undermining the evening's point. There's an occasional entertaining
bit, as when the company "wears" a Timex ad while miming clockwork,
but the movement (credited to Mark Hackman) isn't actually dance: it's
more like hair tossing for a photo shoot. Guither's pictures are worth
serious attention. He should give them the respect they deserve by presenting
them, instead of the process by which they're produced.
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