The Daze of Thunder

×

Expand

Image via Cooperative Performance

Cooperative Performance embraces the abstract in its latest video theater offering Thunder Domestic.  Creator Zach Byron Schorsch’s dance experience moves across the screen in a series of videos with no fixed order. Viewers choose the path of the abstraction by choosing from links in brief fragments of narrative text written in the second person point of view. Schorsch explores a minimalist notion of familial connection in a simple tale of a family going on a hike. Links move from one video to the next in a story chain that could be 20 minutes to an hour. (All videos combined total some two hours in length.) The collective video pours itself into a strange collage. Marissa Jax moves around inside a home from a fixed point. Selena Milewksi is a ghost in shadow. Katrina and Tom Hjelmgren play Rock, Paper, Scissors. A playfully jazzy sonic synth swims through it all amidst distorted voices.

The lightly rendered chronicle serves as the center of a somewhat amorphous cascade of moods. Individuals dance through disorienting video convolutions amidst the occasionally transcendent sonic landscapes of composer Forrest Jackson. Questions are lobbed at the viewer in persistent repetition amidst a drippy, dreamy narrative miasma. The experience occasionally brushes up against a pleasant kind of disorientation that embraces a whimsical perspective on the nature of family.

Thunder Domestic aspires to explore the family dynamic. Occasionally the story lightly treads through enough coherence to suggest something potentially insightful about family, “in a virtual world of destiny versus choice.” For the most part, however, any deeper meaning is tripping around an enjoyably amusing video funhouse maze. The dance is far too lost in twisting impressions of sound, light and movement to embrace much of a wold beyond itself. 

Cooperative Performance’s Thunder Domestic is available through May 9. For more information, visit the Cooperative Performance website.