Remember when Kanye West performed at Saturday Night Live’s 40th anniversary special? Every other guest that night was stoic and respectful, harkening back to the past in a greatest-hits parade. Kanye, however, was there to make art, for better or worse. Well, the young performers of Third Eye Warriors are here to make art, and Pangea is their canvas.
Every year the Cincy Fringe gives FringeNext performers the opportunity to showcase their budding talent. This year Pangea is one of those shows, with the next generation of the School of Creative and Performing Arts putting on a 55-minute show that’s youthful in its exuberance, but adult in its language and themes. There’s no plot, per se. Instead it’s a tone poem with a thematic through-line of generation butting up against generation, with millennials raging against the futility of the end of history.
The format is a compilation of images and video projected onto the wall, monologues and rhymes erupting in rapping plaudits, scenes of dance and music, songs and performance art. They are bound together by a searching sense of spirituality. Pangea is described as a breathing theatrical art gallery, with writer/director Maliyah Gramata-Jones hoping to remind the audience about the common bonds and roots all human beings share.
What shines through loud and clear is the plight of the Other, the minority or the woman or the homosexual — anyone who has gone against the norm. The subject matter has been ripped directly from headlines. They want to harness the energy of Baby Boomers, with arbitrary slogans incorporated from the hippie era with earnest conviction, but that battered idealism is gone, beaten down by Generation X’s inverted millennialism, the sense that everything worthwhile has already been accomplished. Only optimism stemming from teenagers might hope to reject this, but who can fault them for not being cynical yet?
The craft on display is topnotch, although at times voices were incomprehensible as e some were more booming than others; mics would have helped them be heard over the pulsating music. Mostly, however, what needed to be communicated was done so through their bodies, the universal language. The dancing, consequently, is entrancing and carefree in its staccato gyrations, and the use of costumes, especially the incorporation of Kabuki masks and, at one point, something resembling a fright mask straight out of The Purge, are appropriate and well-timed. The most important costumes are, of course, the hoodies that return time and again as an accusatory leitmotif.
At times Pangea does feel like its collective body thinks it is the first to have an original thought. The pedantic quality to its rhetoric, fortunately, is balanced out with well-placed ironic jabs. The show wants to be shocking, but while it might discomfort, it never seeks to alienate. These are clever individuals with bright futures, here to make art if the world doesn’t beat them down first.
With an M.A. in English from Xavier University, Bart Bishop has been teaching composition for six years. He’s edited two published novels and loves ranting about movies and comic books. This is his third year of reviewing the Cincinnati Fringe Festival.
Read the official 32-page FRINGE FESTIVAL GUIDE here
and find the full performance lineup
here
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This article appears in May 27 – Jun 2, 2015.