'Sleepwalkers' an awe-inspiring epic
THEATER REVIEW
BY CAROLYN PETRIE
Special to the Pioneer Press
9/26/02
Depending on your view of mortality, the act of spending 90 minutes reflecting on birth, life and death might leave you feeling moved, baffled or even amused. Margolis Brown Theater Company's "Sleepwalkers," an amazing pastiche of trippy meditations on those very subjects, will lead you through all those states and much more. Packed with dense, gorgeous imagery and executed with incredible creative precision, this multimedia event emerges as an awe-inspiring epic.

Margolis Brown's work is generally called "movement theater," a simple label for a complex performance art. Their shows bring together dance, spoken word, visual art, video, live music, wacky props and any other imaginative force that strikes the fancy of co-artistic directors Kari Margolis and Tony Brown.

In the case of "Sleepwalkers," the elements onstage include a breathing desert, a 15foot ladder, several lifelike baby puppets and seven Grim Reapers. Performed by a cast of 30 actor-dancers and a handful of onstage musicians, the show is like a gorgeous work of surrealist art come to life.

The show's torrent of rich images range from the profoundly moving to the just plain bizarre. In one brilliant, ephemeral pas de deux, a dancer transforms from a toddling baby to a swaggering adult in just a few steps. He and his father share a graceful and heartbreaking journey, supporting each other from the child's infancy until the father's withering old age. In another jaw-dropping, video-heavy segment, lovely female faces morph on a huge, sun-like disk while military planes form moving angel wings on either side of the stage.

Mostly, the stage pictures director Margolis has created defy easy description. They are layered not just with Pearl Rea's majestic lighting and Brown's trance-like original music, but with great humor and emotion by the ensemble, which seems at once a faceless mass and in the next moment a group of distinct, connected individuals.

Ultimately, all of Margolis Brown's overwhelmingly creative machinations exist in order to prompt a simple question: Are we conscious of all that's happening in our lives, or are we all sleepwalkers? Not to worry. The company's amazing dreamscape will keep audiences awake for weeks to come.

Performances: 8 tonight and 2 p.m. Sunday,
O'Shaughnessy Auditorium, College of St. Catherine,
2004 Randolph Ave., St. Paul
Tickets: $15 to $24