Buddy Wakefield delivers a riveting special performance of The Gentleman Practice at the Sunset Temple Theatre for Innermission Productions.

The Gentleman Practice Tour Poster,
with information added by Innermission Productions.
Used for educational purposes.

his past Friday, January 28th, Innermission Productions (sponsored by Planned Parenthood) kicked off their V-Day benefit production of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues with a special show by Buddy Wakefield, stopping by the Sunset Temple Theater for his Gentleman Practice Tour.

Buddy Wakefield is a two-time Individual World Poetry Slam Champion featured on NPR, and the BBC, signed to Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records and now writing the eponymous book of his present tour for Write Bloody Publishing. In 2004, supported by Norman Lear, he won the Individual World Poetry Slam Finals at the International Poetry Festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands. In 2005, he won again and has gone on to tours with Derrick Brown and Anis Mojgani, as well as tours with Ani DiFranco.*

After a rousing chant of the c-word at the end of the excerpt performance “Reclaiming Cunt,” Buddy Wakefield took the stage, admitting it was an unusual overture for his show about masculinity and authentic identity. After asking the audience to breathe, reminding us that air “is the good stuff, and all we need,” he launched into a two hour tour-de-force. The charm of the relaxed tone of the show amplified the power of Wakefields’ deft skill in words.

The proceeds of the entire production, which will include the original Vagina Monologues, as well as the companion piece A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant, and a Prayer and the all-male response MENding Monologues will benefit playwright/performer/activist Eve Ensler's V-Day, a campaign seeking to end violence against women by spreading information and engaging the arts in events throughout February across the world.

San Diego/University Heights V-Day 2011 by Innermission Productions has also selected a local beneficiary: San Diego’s very important Center for Community Solutions, which among its countless services for abuse survivors has San Diego’s only Rape Crisis Center.

“Forgiveness,” Buddy Wakefield explained patiently, “is giving up all hope for a better past.” It is accepting what happened in order to move forward. Eruptions of agreement punctuated the rapt peace of the attentive patrons of the Sunset Temple Theater tucked behind Claire de Lune."We are not tragedies," he insisted, on human resilience.

Wakefield, a poised man with a resounding rich voice and a wit that flows instantaneously, comments frequently on letting go, but earlier work reveals a long struggle with the Why. “Yeah if you ever wanna come inside just knock on the spot where I finally pressed STOP,” he expounded, exasperated, “playing musical chairs with exit signs. I’m gonna cause you a miracle when you see the way I kept God’s image alive.”

Wakefield’s strength is his entire person. He has an active, physical presence, and a verbal carte blanche that at times gushes incessantly like the uninhibited clamor of a best friend. The effect of the ebb and flow, the entreaties for mindfulness mingled with the sharp observations of our condition, emanates into the inspired resonance that is Wakefield’s profoundness.

His insights, his command over his own poetry that he delivers with thespian carriage, meshed with humorous quips and anecdotal tangents, held the audience spellbound in the sentimental, empathetic, and challenging material.

Being helped along by audience volunteers—a woman piano player, a man on the ukelele, and a man with flowing hair who plays a twelve-string guitar named Josh that he humorously at first called “Moon Unit”—the show is a kinetic experiences that ambles gracefully through earnest pleas and critical tirades that portray Wakefield’s forgiving and kind worldview juxtaposed with a weary awareness of personal pitfalls. Wakefield admitted that he is ready now for a bit of “stillness,” on several acres of land with a man he is “very much in love” with.

Gentleman Practice closed with an unfinished love poem, being built throughout the days on the road in mobile phone self-texting from gleams of inspiration, that reveal how much his love is on his mind. But that fragmented piece, unpolished, delivered choppily, bore the most sincere and solemn joy of the show, leaving many in tears. Gentleman Practice—retrospective of a decade of pain and joy—ends upon the advent of love.

The whole show is, one realizes, actually a grateful, gorgeous ode.

Please see all of Innermission's excellent performances of the monologues this coming season. The coming dates are: The MENding Monologues conceived by Derek Dujardin and directed by David Kelso - 2/9 and 2/12 @ 8pm. A Memory, A Monlogue, A Rant and a Prayer edited by Eve Ensler & directed by Kym Pappas - 2/10 @ 8pm & 2/12 @ 2pm. And last but certainly not least, The Vagina Monologues directed by Carla Nell: 2/8 and 2/11 @ 8pm, 2/13 @ 2pm. All events from now on will be at the Diversionary Theatre, 4545 Park Blvd, San Diego CA 92116.

Buddy Wakefield // Center for Community Solutions // Innermission Productions: VDAY 2011 // VDAY.org

*Bio information supplied at buddywakefield.com

New pieces exhibited at MCASD’s Jacobs Building starting January 23rd, 2011.

 

Digital still taken from MCASD.org. Used for educational purposes only.

n “Madame Curie,” Jennifer Steinkamp finds and beautifully amplifies the consonance between two of Marie Curie’s great passions—gardening and physics—in her eponymous immersive video installation experience. Twigs, branches, stems, stalks, and blossoms—of plants selected from Edie Curie’s horticultural writings in her biography of her mother, Marie—gyrate, bunching together and pulling apart, in a convincing fibrous ebb.

The nuances of Steinkamp’s sophisticated algorithm believably evoke the restrained, tentative tug of scapes and internodes grappling as they swish in wind. I followed a single stem across the screen to see where the loop restarts, but I was surprised at the excellence of the video’s loop. The masses of flowers ramble realistically and beautifully, yet after awhile one wonders: Are they being blown about, or kneaded by invisible hands, or are they growing?--Germinating in seed like a botanical homunculus, waiting to emerge?

Walking into the dark room, with its three large panels, and the projection’s varying scale The installation warps the room’s interior by pushing at the visual plane. Plants mound up and bulge from the wall, then contract and make small black clearings that drop the wall away, playing optically with the spatial boundaries of the room. It is a serene, meditative space, that evokes the stimulating peace Curie may have found spending countless hours nurturing growth and cultivating beauty.

Madame Curie’s two Noble Prizes and her longtime work developing theory of radioactivity, hardly needs immortalization. But Steinkamp’s tribute to Curie’s love of gardening is a commemoration of the powerful versatility of creativity.

oan Jonas’  “The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things” is an exploration of the Southwestern United States delves crudely into themes of cultural proximity and juxtaposition, parallelism, cross-exposure versus contamination. The folksy effect of the exhibition at times seems to ponder, what is the most direct way between a concept and its execution. Jonas desires to landscape an idea, letting disparate propositions take root and harmonize with the geography, in a similar fashion to the random settlements and their sprawl across the Southwest. The video/sound installation tucked around the corner of the exhibition space reveals the process of artistic creation, the video contextualizes the exhibition as a gallery of processes and visceral interpretation, asking the question: Can the rough but indulgent delivery easily elicit a cerebral response? The accomplished Joan Jonas, a noted performer, and a pioneer in video art, has a lovely, direct manner of doing things, reflected in this exhibition in which, much like her performances, the gratification being aspired for appears to be the immediate. Beyond "Can Do," it is a "Just Do It" attitude.

Raul Cordero’s exquisite linen oils, that together have been presented as the sliding-puzzle-esque “Hendrickje,” blending text and flourishes of polyester resin that either marry or marr the images are well done, striking, and polished. The collages explore the effect of additions to an image. Do they lose context by being pastiches? Is the deconstruction of Rembrandts’ “A Woman bathing in a Stream (Hendrickje Stoffels?),” which is the foundation for the work, anarchic? Does it have meaning beyond its own existence and aesthetic dynamism? It’s thrilling work.

I must give special recognition to a piece that references Filipino culture. Rita McBride’s 1990 sculpture “Toyota” returns to view at MCASD. The material and motif of rattan furniture, very popular throughout the Philippines, is exclusively used to construct the body of a Toyota. Although the actual car came first, the Toyota sculpture is so expertly crafted that it can be seen as a precursor to the eventual mechanical copy. The sculpture, and its technological counterpart, can be together be viewed as a triumph of Asian design and precision. It reveals the ingenuity and engineering prowess that is as much instinctive in a country still considered by the world to be developing as it is in a neighboring country much considered to have arrived.

Finally, in Matt Mullican’s “Untitled (Cosmology, History, Language, Arts” oil rubbings of contemporary glyphs suggests that science can appear essentially mystical. The artistic depiction of icons in this piece, in its print-block esque bleeds and muddling, strips the context of our daily symbols and what is left behind seems arcane and mysterious.

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego // Jennifer Steinkamp // Joan Jonas // Raul Cordero