Hot, Hip and on the Verge

A dozen young American companies you need to know

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MAD DOG

The Poetry of Moving Bodies
by Randy Gener

New York City's experimental scene is overrun by spin doctors of text—cynical manipulators looting language for easy irony or manic effects, empty visual formalists pulling the wool over our eyes. Brooklyn-based mad dog can run sensual circles around this cabal of deconstructivists. In its 1999 bare-bones staging of Peter Handke's word score The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, 10 barefoot actors executed inventive entrances and exits in an open playing area marked off by tape. Some of the text, comprised exclusively of stage directions, was heard in a voice recording, enveloped by electronic sounds of street noise, bird calls, navy-ship whistles, irate phone conversations, children laughing and Latin jazz.

Mad dog's dance-theatre works are sexy meditations on the physicality of urban bodies in motion. To whom it may concern, the troupe's bewitching signature work, was a site-specific response to John Cage's theory of happenings. In a vacant office space on the 15th floor of a Wall Street building, 12 men and women in corporate suits and running shoes, each sadly clutching a bouquet of flowers, portrayed a sea of ordinary humanity: wake up, go to work, work, party at night and return home. The Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, says director Phil Soltanoff, "has been a huge influence on how I've thought about space, sound and the making of signs. The slight movement of a line in Mondrian's painting, the lines connecting to become a form, the color blue moving into a wider blue—I find these little changes to be huge adventures."

Similarly, mad dog roves freely through inspiration and close observation, new technologies and colliding media, rhythmic patterns and hybrid shapes. A self-taught musician and composer who teaches at Skidmore College, Soltanoff says that the ensemble is immersed in a search "for what theatre can communicate in a pure way-a theatre without language."

The company is in residence at five myles, a gallery and performance center in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn that Soltanoff and puppeteer Hanne Tierney created in 1999. Lately, however, mad dog pieces have been too large-scale for its headquarters, so company members develop new works at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. And mad dog has taken the international plunge, teaming up with the French acrobats and jugglers of the Toulouse-based Compagnie 111 to create Plan B, which wowed kids at the New Victory Theater this past October.

LEMnation—mad dog's latest work-in-progress, inspired by the sci-fi writings of Stanislaw Lem—could be called a sonata for live actors, Ken and Barbie dolls, and camera projections. But that would make it seem too esoteric. Trickery, snootiness and ennui are nowhere on display. "We're not trying to pull a fast one on an audience," says Soltanoff. "Mad dog is much more innocent. It's much more serious—not smug."

Next: Out of Hand Theatre, Atlanta, Georgia

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