Michael Crotty. Photo Credit Ryan Patterson.
I attended Kevin Williamson's dance theatre event, The Lost Boys, a week ago at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica. I have to admit, Kevin Williamson is a treasure in the LA dance community. If you haven't seen his work yet I suggest you calendar it in and get your tickets early too. They'll sell out quickly. The performance was artistically strong, thought provoking and humorous all at the same time. So Dope and so Good! The Lost Boys set out to explore the impact of HIV-AIDS related memories on gay men who grew up during and after the onset of the crisis, but who did not experience its losses directly. Within the first 15 minutes of the performance, Williamson hit the ground spot-on around this theme. Williamson's clever use of spoken word, 80s/90s youth culture and radical gestures were perfect tie-ins to the content of the work. Oooohh Yeah, radical gestures - rated MA or PG13 - but they were so important to an aspect of the content - Internalized homophobia and self-abasement that is prevalent in some urban gay-male communities. Approx 30 min into the piece, I found the duet between the Kevins (Kevin Le and Kevin Williamson) really solid. The emotion and the fierceness of Le's quick Isolated movements paired with Williamson's Adagio was a great blend! I could feel the stiffness of the audience on the edge of their seats watching the intense exchange. That along with Munie's lighting sequence during this section made me feel like a participant in the show. In addition to recorded music by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and Ryoji Ikeda, Williamson and Jeepneys cleverly and appropriately used a montage of recorded music by Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson to set the stage of taking the audience back to the 80s and 90s. Seeing the artists perform popular movement sequences from Janet Jackson videos was extremely eye-opening in that 1) we can better understand learned views of sexuality and 2) how silly and corny those dances are 15 or some-odd years later but how they are meaningful to us in some way or another today as we relate the present to the past. Oh, and Psst...., if you do click the link to the Janet Jackson video, cue up to 3:35. In the end, The Lost Boys sought to share an evening of humorous, haunting, and potentially liberating portrait of how people can move creatively with the past to re-imagine the present and the Ensemble did just that. I look forward to seeing more work by Kevin Williamson in the near future. Check out some of our pics below. It was a wonderful evening in Santa Monica. I hope to see you at his next performance run.
Kevin Williamson's The Lost Boys Ensemble - Kevin Williamson, Michael Crotty, Raymond Ejiofor and Kevin Le. Photo Credit Ryan Patterson.
Kevin Williamson The Lost Boys. Photo Credit Ryan Patterson.
Here I am pre-performance with Kyle Abraham.
Here I am post-performance along with one of my favorite lighting designers AJ Munie.