Reviewed: Applied Mechanics' "We are Bandits"
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Pussy Riot LARPing.
A Turkish pop star, a philosophy grad student and an ex-con street performer walk into a bar… No, seriously. Not quite sugar, spice and everything nice, these women form a literal band of unlikely heroes facing up to misogyny and inequality in Applied Mechanics’ performance of We Are Bandits.
Inspired by the Pussy Riot arrests of 2012, director Rebecca Wright and production designer Maria Shaplin seek to create a fully functional (and believably dysfunctional) story of a society where, just like in real life, everything happens all at once. The characters each follow their own plotlines continuously throughout the show, and they interact with the space and each other independently. You are just as likely to see a character starting a revolution as you are to see a character brushing her teeth. In this sense, the show functions more like performance art than a traditional play.
We Are Bandits does not take place on a traditional stage, but in a large room where audience-members are encouraged to roam around and pay attention to whatever they find interesting. Tape on the floor differentiates different buildings or rooms, like a large-scale blueprint, (luckily, with a little “map” printed into the program so we wouldn’t get confused).
From an audience’s standpoint, I sometimes found myself following one character or another, and I experienced a completely different performance from the other people in the audience. Shaplin describes this style of performance as a kind of LARP (live action role play) in which the audience is sometimes asked to take part.
“It's as though our director and designers are the dungeon masters,” Shaplin says. “The actors are experienced players who have created characters with complex histories and trajectories, and the audience is like the kid that is new to this campaign, and has to learn the rules of the world by observing and discovering how it works.”
By the end of the rehearsal project, the entire performance was scripted, though the actors and directors worked together to form the end product.
The show itself is about a group of strangers each with their qualms about the politics of the unnamed U.S. city they call home. When pop star Zenyo quits the business after being sexually abused by audience members at one of her shows, she feeds the activist fire and starts a band called The Bandits which more people join as they too realize the inequalities they face. “There's also a long history of protest art and radical activism that The Bandits are connecting to,” Shaplin says.
Maybe my feet hurt a little more than after a traditional play, and maybe I feel like a missed a plot point or two, but the whole experience is an interesting blend of the fiction that Applied Mechanics created and the reality of the message and the authenticity of the “performance art” style of delivering the story. “It's actually not possible for every audience member to see everything,” Shaplin says, “But we think that's fun.”
Free, through July 30, Asian Arts Initiative, 1219 Vine St., appliedmechanics.us.
