Radar Redux.com is expanding the traditional concept of journalism, to cover a wide array of Baltimore Arts and Culture.
The antics of Jake Dibeler’s Heartbreak(er) shock and amuse. Wearing just underwear, the performers portray hysteric twenty-somethings– self-indulgent, navel-gazing, sex-crazed, morally deficient. Heartbreaker(er) consists mostly of monologues and dance routines. Top 40 love songs provide the soundtrack, these artifacts of mass culture that articulate for us on a daily basis our experience of love, via the radio, the TV, the car stereo, the iPod. I understand the performance as a response to these anthems.
In one act Kaitlin Gerren sits alone at her laptop, her back to the audience, in her underwear like she’s alone in her bedroom, and sings along to the Smashing Pumpkins’ hit “Bodies”: the empty bodies stand at rest, casualties of their own flesh, afflicted by their dispossession, but nobody’s ever knew, nobody’s felt like you, nobody, love is suicide.
In another scene Kat Sotelo, Dibeler and performer John Kan sit in a circle, singing along to The Black Eyed Peas’ “Meet Me Half Way” while stuffing burgers in their face and guzzling orange soda so that it runs down their faces and stains their underwear: I can’t go any further than this, I want you so bad, it’s my only wish. It’s music consumption paired with the visible action of fast-food gluttony.
In a similar vein, and what is the most memorable part of the performance, Jake Dibeler sings along to Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together”: I can’t sleep at night when you are on my mind, Bobby Womack’s on the radio saying to me: “If you think you’re lonely now…” Half way through he puts a condom over the mic, straddles Kan, who sits at the back of the stage in a floral print easy chair, and inserts the mic into his butt. This action is a little unclear, but I think of it as short-circuited desire. Jake, like Mariah, sits heartbroken by the radio, until he decides to skip the middle man and just screw the audio equipment. I don’t mean to say that each of the actions in Heartbreak(er) offers a clear symbolic reading. The performance grows out of sensibility that I would call punk, meaning it catapults out of a place of great tension and shows up madcap and over the top.
Dibeler was kind enough to speak to me about his performance. Although he identifies as gay, he doesn’t call his work “gay art”. That is to say, if I may interpolate, his art operates in a fictive space before we are sexually pigeonholed, like Never Neverland. While aspects of the performance might seem salacious, the performance actually demonstrates an adolescent resistance to sex and love. The costumes underscore this. While revealing, they make the performers look like children. Dibeler and Kan are like little boys in white crew neck t-shirts and awkward athletic socks. Garren like a little girl wearing her dad’s underwear, and while Sotelo’s lingerie is a touch more sophisticated, it still has a dress-up quality to it.
Besides laughing out loud, I also found parts of Heartbreak(er) quite moving. Because, laugh at pop love as I might, I’m also pretty vulnerable to its harmonies and its promises. The performance conveys a similar conflict. Humorous as Heartbreak(er) is, Dibeler, Garren, Kan and Sotelo show us the body and the psyche as the ultimate receptacle of this cultural detritus. Let me reproduce here Kat Sotelo’s tragicomic monologue. She stands alone on stage with a sheet of paper and rattles off what sound like New Year’s resolutions, punctuated by gasps:
to fill a hole in my chest gasp
to lose weight gasp
to get laid gasp
to be a better girl gasp
to get back at my mother gasp
to get kissed on the spot between my breasts gasp
to meet more men gasp
to buy a new espresso machine gasp
to impress you gasp
to stop lying in my personal ads gasp
to stop masturbating to the thought of my teenage neighbor–gasp–Darrell gasp
to make you jealous gasp
to eat for free gasp
to sleep on my back and not be afraid gasp
to afford new furs gasp
to get vaginal reconstructive surgery gasp
to stop biting my finger nails gasp
to use the ladies’ room in public gasp
to drink less cheap gin gasp
to give Treshell (?) a proper burial gasp
to stop renting porn from the video store gasp
to wash my sheets for the first time in two years gasp
to stop prank calling Kristen–gasp–Cook gasp
to stop steeling bread from the Korean grocer gasp
to stop trying to pick up men from the library gasp
to cancel my American Mothers Magazine subscription gasp
to stop kicking the cat gasp
to stop putting things in vagina that shouldn’t be there
In the last scene all four players stand holding hands at the front of the stage, like actors do when they bow for an ovation. “Time To Say Goodbye” as performed by Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli plays loudly. If you don’t know this song, you should youtube it. It’s a beautiful and unbelievably schmaltzy love song, and it produced some giggling in the audience. But as the four of them stood there facing the audience, covered in orange soda and ketchup (piss and blood?), Dibeler looking beyond us with furrowed brow, Kan’s face sad, Sotelo’s, deadpan, and Garren shivering as from cold, I felt close to tears.
Contact Jake Dibeler for DVD copies of Heartbreak(er)
jakedibeler@gmail.com
facebook.com/girlfriends
http://wiccans.tumblr.com/
No Comments