Review Inspired, enchanting puppet theater with a punch: the eco-themed 'Memory Rings'
The Los Angeles Times calls CAP UCLA's final theater presentation of the season, "Inspired and encha
The Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA (CAP UCLA) is dedicated to the advancement of contemporary performing arts: dance, music, spoken word, and theater; as well as emerging digital, collaborative, and cross-art platforms inspired by today's leading artists and creators. On April 8 & 9, multimedia theater company Phantom Limb tackled environmental change from the perspective of the world’s oldest living tree. Its story was told through fairytale, puppetry, dance, music, and visual design in UCLA's Freud Playhouse.
It should come as no surprise that our species, increasingly cut off from the natural world, has become extraordinarily adept at tuning out the havoc it’s wreaking on the planet through climate change.
Humans, like most animals, are preoccupied with satisfying immediate needs. This is understandable, though an insufficient excuse for inaction given our culpability and capacity to adapt and change.
Phantom Limb Company, a marvelously inventive New York troupe that has a magician’s touch with marionettes, is part of a growing artistic movement to heighten environmental awareness through the arts. The company’s latest project, “Memory Rings,” presented by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance at Freud Playhouse this weekend, offered a multimedia fantasia on ecological themes.
A work of movement-theater, lyrically directed and designed by Jessica Grindstaff, the production enlisted a forest of woodland creatures in a collage of fables, fairly tales and epics depicting fraught encounters between humans and nature.
This breathtaking longevity prompted Phantom Limb’s meditation on how our relationship to the natural world has changed over the millennia. The result is a kaleidoscopic review of the deforestation in “Gilgamesh,” the big bad wolf’s fate in Little Red Riding Hood story and the workaday routine of the Seven Dwarfs kited out like miners, with brief comic forays into our Google-crazed contemporary moment.
— Charles McNulty, Apr. 9
Read the full article at the Los Angeles Times website.