PERFORMANCE REVIEW : Taper’s ‘Out in Front’ Mixes Post-Riot Cultural Furies

It’s a misnomer to think that the Mark Taper Forum’s “Out in Front” festival from Thursday through Sunday was the first effort by local artists to deal with the euphemistically termed “aftermath” of the April unrest.

That hard work actually began in places like the 18th Street Arts Complex, home of Highways’ performance space (with its festivals of voices, issues and cultures), High Performance magazine (with its special issue on the unrest) and the Electronic Cafe (with international topical teleconferences). Where, some wags could be heard saying, was the Taper when the smoke cleared?

Probably an unfair question for an institution that can’t always stop on a dime and turn direction. Indeed, if Friday’s and Sunday’s “Out in Front” evenings indicated anything, it’s that a few months’ separation from events can help the mind wonderfully.

That doesn’t mean that the salad of L.A. cultures wasn’t getting tossed more furiously than ever. Keith Antar Mason’s six-man Hittite Empire boomed onstage Friday with an excerpt from Mason’s “forty-nine blues songs for a jealous vampire.” This was a continuation of the increasingly elaborate works Mason has been developing at Highways in which our eyes and ears are asked to follow at least three different layers at once.

And like the Highways work, not all of the layers compelled equal weight or attention. The excerpt’s title, “Moving Target,” refers to the way black men feel about themselves on the street, with Rodney G. King as the ultimate symbol. The symbol, though, didn’t resound in long stretches of speech awkwardly tying all of (slave) history together, or an even longer, obvious passage where “The Star-Spangled Banner” is sung while a man is beaten by a pair of LAPD’s finest. (These sections accounted for “Moving Target” being twice as long as its reported 17-minute length.)

The piece’s anger was best broadcast in minimal ways, such as Mason seated off to the side repeating (mysteriously) “How high the moon?” or (ironically) “Did you see the video?” And while it’s good to see Mason’s kind of theater at the Taper; it also loses the impact of Highways’ intimate environs.

Following the Hittites, the Maurice Kitchen-directed Kitchen Cultural Choir cranked things down to a more conventional level, with fine a cappella singing interlaced with simple, but not very electric renditions of talks by black liberation figures like Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X. American Indian poet John Trudell was next, trying to speak his lyrics over his solid blues-based Graffiti Man band. A last-minute insert then lifted things up: Jalapeno Chillin’, a sharp, smooth quartet of young Latino doo-wopping comics who did their whole act in the aisles.

“Out in Front” earned its title Sunday, with the appearance of the multi-gifted Roger Guenveur Smith and “Christopher Columbus 1992,” his new, ironic work on how history is made by the historians.

Rather than issue a lecture on what a bad guy Columbus was, Smith dared to become Columbus, but updated to a ‘90s Third World tour promoter. From a wordless display of brilliant Etienne Decroux-like mime to a climactic speech with Columbus stripped down and examined by the beam of an LAPD helicopter, Smith’s work expanded the solo performance form by constantly throwing the audience off-guard and letting his sound designer, Marc Anthony Thompson, literally revolt against the conqueror.

Lula Washington’s Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Theatre’s “Check This Out” did lecture when it wasn’t moving to Bob Dale’s stunning sound montage of deep beats and tinny crashes. Hip-hop culture clearly influenced this group’s dance, but the spoken material never rose above such loaded-but-vague chants as “If you want to change the world today, then raise your fist for justice today!”