Republicans have shown a distinct discomfort concerning women and especially their bodies. If they're not trying to pass legislation to control a woman's reproductive options, they're trying to restrict their access to contraceptives or health care altogether. Nine out of ten times, they're the ones behind laws trying to regulate sexual behavior or leading crusades on censorship (Tipper Gore might be the lone non-Republican exception), and are usually the first to object to cutting edge fashion, tattoos, and body modification. While Republicans might at times have persuasive arguments supporting their positions (usually persuasive only to their own kind, however), the real reason for their crusades may simply be a fundamental discomfort with women and with women's bodies.
If so, Republicans would have found last night's concert at Variety Playhouse a particularly uncomfortable event. While to the rest of us, it might have been an enchanting expression of artistic and creative licence, to some others, it might have forced them to confront a lot of suppressed emotions.
Take the opener Kenbra Pfahler. She took the stage wearing a huge, teased-out wig, bowling balls taped to her feet, bikini briefs, and a small bib top, and nothing else, except for a lot of eye makeup. She could barely stand on the bowling balls and needed two poles to support her, and had to crawl on stage on her hands and knees as walking on those balls would have been impossible. As she sang to pre-recorded music about her fondness for the film Blade Runner, of all things, it was impossible to ignore her near-nudity.
Kembra is best known as the singer and leader of the band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, but for some reason she is doing this tour solo. It worked, as she's really more of a performance artist than a recording artist anyway, and she frequently improvised, changing her act in response to audience comments and engaging them in direct dialog. During her second song, as she was trying to casually untape her feet from the bowling balls, she worked the request "Will someone please help me taking these off?" into her song. Several people at the front of the stage obliged her.
Eventually, even the little bib was gone, although she did pull on a pair of thigh-high leather boots. Like with her band, Kembra's performance combined in-your-face sexuality, gothic horror, satire, and improvisation. It was at time hilarious and not infrequently bewildering, yet despite the fright wig and horror-show make-up, you could sense her vulnerability as she performed on stage alone and very nearly naked, improvising her way through a set that would have collapsed the very instant she stopped being interesting or creative. It was that vulnerability that bonded her to the audience, and probably led CocoRosie to select her to open their show on this leg of their tour. However, I'm sure that any Republicans present were probably squirming in discomfort.
For some reason, after her set, I was reminded of Method Man's line in the movie Garden State: "Who just saw some titties? Everyone raise your hand if you just saw some titties!"
A vanity mirror and bureau had been prominently placed center stage before CocoRose, or Kembra for that matter, started performing. During the long (a little too long in my opinion) delay between dimming the house lights and the band taking the stage, smoke was pumped out of the open bureau drawers as a hum droned from the amplifiers. This went on for nearly 10 minutes, and the audience started chanting "Coco! Rosie! Coco! Rosie!" until they got bored of that and stopped, but the intro still dragged on, far past the point of suspense and into exasperation territory.
But of all the uses that CocoRosie might have had for the on-stage vanity that I could imagine during the long pre-set tease, actually using it to apply makeup and adjust their ever-changing outfits was not one of them. But that's exactly what they did.
CocoRosie's feminist statement wasn't as confrontational as Kembra's and didn't involve nudity, but instead they created an ultra-feminine fantasy world of vanities and dressing-room mirrors, playing dress-up and make-up like little prepubescent girls might, all while singing their quirky songs. If you're uncomfortable around tutus, hair rollers, ballet outfits, and brassieres, this wasn't going to be a show for you. If you could enter their hyper-feminine fantasy world, it was a spell-binding trip.
CocoRosie is the duo of sisters Bianca "Coco" and Sierra "Rosie" Casady. Both sisters sing, but with markedly different voices and styles, and Rosie plays harp, piano, and pads, while Coco occasionally plays various flutes and toy instruments. For this tour, they were backed by a keyboard multi-instrumentalist and a beat-boxer who provided the percussion (and an extraordinary mid-set intermission during which he did an extended solo). The beat-boxing and keyboards emphasized the hip-hop and electronica aspects of their music and provided a nice counter-point to the freak folk and operatic elements of their sound.
Rosie's operatic voice (she had formally trained at one point in her life) was ethereally beautiful and she totally captivated the audience with her singing and harp playing.
Coco's voice is, well, strange, which makes it totally cool. There's no mistaking which of the two of them are singing, and their songs are based around the give-and-take of the two different vocal styles.
The performed most of the songs off of their most recent album, Tales of a Glass Widow, including Tears for Animals followed by Afterlife early in the set. They also performed many of their older songs as well, but see my sole complaint down at the bottom of this post.
They constantly changed outfits, often on-stage, sometimes demurely at the back of the stage, taking items off of a clothesline strung up back there. Their wardrobe and makeup hardly conformed to contemporary ideas of glamour, but adhered more to dreamlike, childhood dress-up fantasies, with bizarre, often random, combinations of men's and women's apparel. After the beat-box intermission, Coco took the stage with one breast stuffed to absurd proportions and a hunchback's hump on her back. Fortunately, as with most outfits last night, it only lasted one song.
Here's Coco singing while holding Kembra's Future Feminism sign, wearing an open nightgown, men's long-john pants, suspenders, and a bra, and this wasn't even one of the more bizarre outfits.
This was.
I have many more pictures of this strange and beautiful set posted over on my Flick page for those interested in seeing more.
The stagecraft and settings were exquisitely choreographed, and even included some dancing, especially by Rosie near the end of the set, when she put on a surprisingly energetic, cheerleader-like performance in front of a hand-held, undulating sheet. In many ways, it was the most theatrical concert I've been to since David Byrne and St. Vincent's Love This Giant tour, although both shows were completely different in so many other aspects and ways.
Their set lasted nearly 75 minutes and they still gave two separate encores. All told, the performance lasted nearly two hours, if you include the 10-minute tease before they took the stage.
Superb. Bravo Coco, bravo Rosie. Now, my only complaint: they never performed Lemonade, the stand-out song from their previous album, 2010's Grey Gardens (with over 5 million YouTube views, it's arguably their most popular song). I hope that CocoRosie doesn't become one of those bands that refuse to play the songs their audience most wants to hear, like Animal Collective and My Girls at one point in their career.
However, it might have been for the best that they never did perform Lemonade, as the song has such a strong emotional impact on me that I cry almost every time I hear it, and might have started bawling out loud at Variety Playhouse. I got choked up just now posting the song below. But especially toward the end of last night's set, I kept thinking that each next song was going to be it, and then I thought surely during the first encore, and then, how could it not be the second encore? But it was never performed, and I walked out feeling thoroughly entertained, enchanted, and exhilarated, but also feeling like I had been denied something.
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