Volatile Performance Art Gives Festival an Edge

The challenge at the Orange County Artists Festival at Bogart’s in Long Beach Wednesday night was to be experimental, and the performers in the eight-act lineup who met the challenge most successfully were those with the old kid-with-a-chemistry-set spirit: mix compounds without worrying what the instruction book says, and hope for a big, colorful boom.

The real heat and sparks came in two kinetic “performance art” segments near the end of the 3 1/2-hour program.

One was “The Medicine Show,” an impressive collage of singing, acting and electronic effects by Chad Jasmine, who usually performs with the rock band National People’s Gang. In a linked progression of songs, monologues and well-synchronized dialogues between live and taped voices, Jasmine focused on religion. It’s an awfully broad subject, and the ideas and substance of Jasmine’s treatment seemed diffuse, perhaps because he didn’t concentrate them in one scene or story line.

But his skilled, intense performance was enough to make the piece continually vivid and turned it into a reminder of what a volatile, prickly and ultimately threatening thing religion can be. Jasmine’s use of gesture and his mastery of a range of sung and spoken voices made “The Medicine Show” an unpredictable, on-the-edge tour de force, precisely the kind of thing promoter Jim Palmer aimed to foster in putting the festival together.

The other highlight was the festival finale, a skit by David Wingate and Gil Fuhrer. The premise was as old as hippiedom itself: A teen-age counterculturist, played by Fuhrer, receives orders from Dad to get his long, scraggly locks shorn. He nestles into the barber’s chair, casually asking for just a little off the top. But the punch line took this stock routine into gonzo nirvana.

No sooner had Fuhrer settled in for a trim than Wingate appeared, costumed to look like some cross between a voodoo witch doctor and a samurai warlord. With early Pink Floyd psychedelia pounding over the sound system, Wingate attacked his partner’s long curls with scissors and shears, cropping him close to the scalp and claiming the victim’s mustache for good measure.

Using the shock value of realism-as-performance, the duo gave tired old slapstick a fresh, hilarious jolt.

Beale Dabbbs, the singer from the band 3-D Picnic, also provided something unexpected when he teamed with vibraphonist T.K. Wiley for a strange rendition of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” that veered between passion and lounge-singer parody.

Matey Yalch, singer with Bell Jar, attempted a free-form performance piece based on a phone conversation between himself and the audience, but it was a long, desultory affair that could have benefitted from more structure and planning. Even experimenters need to map out set procedures to follow.

Others on the bill weren’t as imaginative or daring, rendering acoustic versions of songs that they usually play with electric bands. Of those, an offbeat acoustic set by rock band 4 Dada fit the program’s experimental concept best.

The Orange County Artists Festival was an installment in Bogart’s Wednesday night “Esoteric Evenings” series featuring performances that depart from the usual rock club fare.

It’s the sort of thing that would be good to have in Orange County, too. Then local performers willing to take risks wouldn’t have to wait for an invitation to cross the county line in order to test their ideas.