None of it's easy. In fact, it's preposterously difficult. Living, that is. Dying, too, we assume. And then there's creating art.
Considering that artist's palette comprises life, death and the spectrum of human emotion and experience in between, the trial in making good art lies in deciding not what to use but what to leave out.
In "Id: The Reckoning," Johanna Buccola has left out words, at least for the most part.
Buccola, 26, recently moved to Seattle after having spent the last six years in New York City, where she studied and worked in theater, comedy, improv and dance. It's also where she wrote her most recent one-person performance piece. She's now performing "Id: The Reckoning" at Capitol Hill's Odd Duck Theater, introduced by an avant-electronic music set by her boyfriend, Michael Pares, who works under the name Manic Amyche.
In the show, Buccola undertakes a wordless portrayal of the emotional subtleties of living and dying.
All this and it's funny, too - but not in a comedy-club sort of way.
"The show is made up of different characters I've created," she said. "But when I talk about characters, I don't mean it in the normal narrative sense. Most of my performance is silent. I love conveying things with the most minimal gestures and physicality. The characters don't come out on stage and introduce themselves and tell you their life story. You see them as something is happening to them in a specific moment."
A musical score "acts like a soundtrack for a silent movie," Buccola said. "It sets an emotional tone without needing to resort to words. When I was writing the piece, I would just incorporate whatever music I was into at the time into my work - like the "Twilight Zone" sound-track. I'd listen to music and if I started doing something to it in my room, I'd keep it."
Buccola moved to New York from Oregon in 1998 to study at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. She was especially drawn to comedy, focusing on characters instead of relying on gags, punchlines and one-liners.
"It just felt natural to me," she said. "After I finished my program at school, a friend of mine wrote a play with specific actors in mind. He wrote this character for me, Pam. It totally fit me. She was just this dorky, kinda uptight Christian teen. So I took that character and started writing more stuff for her. I would get up and perform a really lame monologue, like I was auditioning for Tisch [School of the Arts at NYU], or something. Then I would do a really bad jazz dance as part of the audition. I did that at Gotham Comedy Club a couple of times, and from there I started writing more characters as they came to me."
Over time, the stable of characters in Buccola's head lead her into new territory. With some guidance from her director, Karen Herr of the all-girl improv troupe Goga, she combined comedy and experimental theater into a style all her own.
"It was just something that evolved," she says. "My first show was called 'God is Cool' and it was based around Pam. The second one was 'Id: The Omen.' It was creepier. It was made up of five different characters and was based around a sort of horror spoof. After I'd finished the performance, my director suggested I do a sequel. 'Id: The Reckoning' was darker than 'Id: The Omen' ...but the comedy's there if you want to see it."
While she was living in New York, her father, in Silverton, Ore., was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease. Shortly thereafter came the terrorist attacks on September 11. The slow, steady march toward death was juxtaposed in her mind with the bombast of fiery Armageddon and led her to ruminate on the fear of death we all share.
"So much of my time has been spent dealing with the knowledge that I'm going to die someday, that my dad, this person I never imagined losing, is going to die," she said. "The Blue Angels were practicing last week and I didn't know what it was. I was scared out of my mind and it really pissed me off. I felt like I didn't have anyone to vent to. People here didn't live through 9/11 like New Yorkers did. They lived through it in a different way, but it's hard to talk to people out here about it and have them understand how it felt. It was so quick and terrible on 9/11. With my dad, it's been a slow process of watching someone deteriorate."
"Id: The Reckoning" provides Buccola a way of engaging the audience's emotions without telling them how to feel. Made up of a series of short mostly silent vignettes (there are two short monologues) set to music, Buccola's characters move through emotional states ranging from loss, to fear, to self-consciousness.
"People can connect with this show and you don't have to hold their hands and tell them exactly what it is you're doing," she said. "Everyone has these strong emotions. A lot of time I feel like I'm the only one who has them, but it's not really true. It's so common to feel things like fear and love and loneliness, but we all tend to think that we're experiencing them for the very first time whenever they happen to us."
For Buccola, connections are key:
"We connect with people when what's personal becomes common and what's common becomes personal. That's the space I like to get into on stage."
Johanna Buccola will perform "Id: The Reckoning" on Saturday, Aug. 13, at The Odd Duck Studio, 1214 10th Ave. Tickets are $7, and the show starts at 8 p.m.
Freelancer writer Sean Molnar can be reached at editor@capitol hilltimes.com.[[In-content Ad]]
