Adaptors add richness to dance scene
Dance review
By Mike Steele/ Staff Writer
SATURDAY/March 12/1994

The newest Twin Cities arts residents, Kari Margolis, Tony Brown and the Adaptor Company, are making their local debut this weekend and it's an auspicious one.

The Adaptors are certainly part of the postmodern mix - pulling from dance, theater and media, telling their non-linear, non-literal stories through images juxtaposed with snatches of dialogue - yet they're head and shoulders above run of local mill dance-theater.

Their images are powerful, clear and compellingly imaginative. Their use of dialogue is precise and (usually) ironic.

Their use of video projections is superb, focused, controlled, often haunting. Even going into dark corners, they have a bountiful wit and playfulness, sometimes almost childlike, that gets us beyond the sturm und drang, angst-laden drippings of the Generation X world.

I also liked that in their debut show, "Koppelvision and Other Digital Deities," they used an absorbing density of visuals to zero in on a relatively simple but important theme: that the father, the son and the holy ghost is found today in the iconography of techno-deities such as Ted Koppel, whose snappish, paternal, quietly quizzical voice soothingly leads us towards what seems to be a sound bite truth.

The Adaptors derive their power from laying opposites side by side, or turning one thing into an opposite thing.

The opening scene has a woman (who turns out to be a man) In a flashy mod red dress hanging from the ceiling as cranky crones dressed like so many Carrie Nations surround her seated on chairs, carrying poles which they bang on the floor in condemnation. Behind them sit three cowled medieval judges, Savonarolas filled with righteousness. Koppel's voice looms over it all intoning: "Such is the background of this eventful day," followed by Gregorian chants.

Within minutes, the pious begrudgers have ripped off their outer garments, grabbed electric shavers and gone into some orgiastic shaving ritual that turns from turn-on to menace. That leads into a scene on telephoning in which you can't tell who's talking to whom about what, though it could be ancient Greeks commenting on the day's events at Delphi.

Many of the images are classical, many of them biblical, some painterly and almost familiar, all of them broken by modern intrusions or contemporary vulgarities.

The most extraordinary image reveals human heads floating out of a fabric void sweeping upwards. The heads mutter and prate while Koppel's questioning voice asks "What happened to all those bodies?"

Other scenes show women in preRaphaelite hair yearning as three men walk through, finally coupling while the odd women out weep mournfully. There are Images of the plague, of the Messiah, even of a crucifixion surrounded by bloodied pietas. Giant eyeballs sparkle to eerie life.

Koppel's own image, mute but talking, is projected overhead until It becomes a rounded rose window, a stained glass icon that dominates the stage. Koppel as Christ, TV as the miracle mediating and interpreting experience and creating the modem world's reality.

It's all highly fragmented, like life, and doesn't give easy literalisms or interpretations; unlike TV it assumes an actively engaged audience interpreting for itself. It's a flow, a collage, an hour's worth of stimulating and provocative images that build into an accumulation of visual insights.

If there's an overall statement, it's that we should quit looking to the heavens (including the TV ether) for our deities.

The performing is powerful, carried out with absolute control and clarity by the 12-member troupe, certainly the most exciting and provocative addition to the Twin Cities arts landscape in some time.

Koppelvision and Other Digital Deities
Who: By Karl Margolls and Tony Brown, presented by the Adaptor Company, cosponsored by Walker Art Center.
Where: Studio 6A, Hennepln Center for the Arts, 528 Hennepln Av. S., Minneapolis
When: 3 and 8 p.m. today and 8 p.m. Sunday
Tickets: $14