Review
Seattle Times
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Entertainment News : Thursday, January 06, 2000
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Master jugglers enlist MIT whizzes to concoct new show
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by Misha Berson Seattle Times theater critic
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What happens when the worlds of techno-geniuses and juggling whizzes collide?
A high-flying new show called "L'Universe," on tap to premiere at A Contemporary Theatre next week.
Imagine summit meetings within the Ivy League domain of Cambridge's hallowed Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where some of the brightest young nerd-inventors in the country huddled with the inimitable Flying Karamazov Brothers, the popular crew of juggling hipster zanies.
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At such powwows during the past year, fresh-off-the-screen schemes - "virtual juggling," radio and computer-controlled body music, glow-in-the-dark juggling pins embedded with sensitive communication devices called accelerometers - were hatched by the wonks at MIT's high-powered Media Lab and the four-man K crew.
Such brainstorms all feed into "L'Universe," an ambitious project directed by ACT head Gordon Edelstein, which has the Flying Ks up to their old musical, comedic and juggling tricks - and experimenting with a batch of ingenious new gizmos specially tailored to their antic performance style. |
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The show is also "a meditation on the nature of the universe," explains Howard Jay Patterson, the wry K-Bro known onstage as Ivan. "We thought we'd start with a nice narrow subject, and expand."
"We think juggling is an apt metaphor for what's happening to the universe," adds Paul Magid (a k a Dimitri), who cofounded the Flying Ks with Patterson back in the 1970s, when both were street performers and science buffs in Santa Cruz, Calif. (The other original Ks have since moved on, and the group just enlisted two new members: Mark Ettinger as Alexei and Roderick Kimball as Pavel.)
"There are all these galaxies and planets, moving in and around each other in this huge dance," amplifies Magid. "It's like this vast, ingenious juggling trick, performed by a mysterious force some call God."
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Spiritual matters, however, are not the primary focus of "L'Universe." Instead, it's doing cool things with sonar and 30 tiny, high-powered micro-computers, while entertaining audiences in the cheeky manner Flying K fans have grown accustomed to over the years.
As Patterson points out, the group has been puttering with various techno-musical devices for years. In such previous hit touring shows as "Sharps, Flats and Accidentals," they've donned "electronic juggling suits" equipped with modified drum triggers and plates which, when struck by clubs, sent messages to a computer to emit drum sounds. They've also created a digital "floor piano" to dance on.
But joining forces with the MIT Media Lab, a prestigious academic think tank funded generously by corporations on the lookout for marketable new technology, was a leap up the scientific ladder.
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Media Lab director Neil Gershenfield, author of the recent book, "When Things Start to Think," says the lab's 50 students and 10 faculty members are experts at "thinking about how to connect the physical and digital worlds."
The lab collaborated earlier with the comedy-magic team of Penn and Teller, designing a "spirit cabinet" which led to the development of a new auto safety seat.
"These projects teach us what does and doesn't work," notes Gershenfield, "and the best ideas often have wider applications."
The Flying Ks approached Gershenfield and his cohorts "with two concepts. One was the notion of a tour through the universe, using juggling not just to show tricks but to see how the universe works.
"The second was seeing the rhythm of the juggling catches as dance and music. They wanted to control sights and sounds on a programmable stage that lets you shape music with your body movements."
Some of the ideas spawned by Matt Reynolds, Bernd Schoner, Ben Vigoda and other impassioned grad students crash-landed on the lab floor before they got to the stage - including a cumbersome radio-communication scheme.
But other devices were keepers, including a routine in which shadow images conjured by ultra-bright video projectors are "juggled," and a sophisticated "floor dance."
Explains director Edelstein, who guided a workshop of "L'Universe" at ACT last June to solicit audience input, "The Ks wanted to use their whole bodies as musical instruments, so with MIT we created a color-coded grid structure on the stage floor, with four sonar cameras at the corners."
Sonar transducers are sewn into the leather caps of the performers, and "depending on where you stand on that grid, and how you move your arm, you trigger a different computer-sampled note on a specific instrument. With four people moving together, you can create all sorts of compositions."
One thing the Karamazovs adamantly did not want was a computerized system to help them "cheat" at juggling.
"What I've enjoyed so much about working with them is their insistence that the computer not be pre-programmed, and not correct mistakes," says Gershenfield. "When they goof, the club falls."
"This is live theater," emphasizes Magid. "We're using technology, but we still want to be spontaneous and in-your-face."
As their performance style evolves, so do the Flying Ks as a group. The big country house, surrounding acreage and barn theater the members shared in Port Townsend for many years was recently sold.
Magid now resides in Los Angeles, where his novelist-actress wife Rebecca Chace is working on a movie. And Patterson has moved his family to Portland. Longtime K Brother and audience favorite Sam Williams recently left the company, due to an illness in his family. Recent K cohort Michael Preston has moved on to pursue an acting career.
But Patterson and Magid have no plans to clip the group's wings. With comrades Ettinger (a "friend of the family") and Kimball (a Maine juggler recruited through an Internet ad), the Ks plan runs of "L'Universe" in Arizona, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and maybe a New York stint in 2001.
"This focus on music has opened a whole new arena for us," says Magid happily. Patterson concurs. And he swears that "The Gamble" - the hilarious trademark Flying Ks bit in which Patterson juggled increasingly bizarre objects the audience dragged in to stump him - is history. "It's gone forever," says Patterson, "and I don't miss it." | |
