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    Theatre Review: Shadowbox’s Second Gallery of Echoes Shines Light on Diversity of Talent in Columbus

    Over the last few years, Shadowbox Live has consciously broadened beyond their rock and roll sketch comedy into more ambitious projects that are harder to categorize. On Wednesday they opened a follow-up to their acclaimed Gallery of Echoes. Where the first iteration used proven work from the Columbus Museum of Art collection, this new piece subtitled ColumbUS Public Art Project used local art chosen through a juried process. One of the things this new Gallery of Echoes does best is display the sheer breadth of talent in Columbus – the 20 pieces of art chosen aren’t easy to pigeonhole based on medium, subject matter, or any other yardstick the audience would bring to them, and Shadowbox largely does justice to the source material without trying to make it fit into one box or another.

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    Perception comes up again and again. A huge, beautiful RagGonNon collage from Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, “One Day in 1307 AD: King Abubakari II,” blooms into a magic realist narrative about a Malian king mounting two expeditions to America, delivered in spoken word by Brandon Anderson with house band Light’s music using the same Pan-African color palette and jangly pop as Paul Simon’s Graceland. Sunapple Studio’s group piece “The Ladder of Hopes and Dreams” takes the hopeful and seemingly precarious qualities of the sculpture and pays tribute to the struggle and the possibility of transcendence with a soaring melody line and fascinating dance from Miriam King, Amy Lay, and Nick Wilson.

    Some of my favorite moments here let Katy Psenicka’s choreography be the lead voice and focused on dance. Catherine Bell Smith’s “The Ninth Hour (None)” a lovely and melancholic totem to lost time using 9 hourglasses was represented by 9 dancers tumbling and shifting around each other, moving through various configurations, creating images I wished I could have seen more clearly – the mood lighting throughout the show skews too dark – but made me want to lean in and absorb them. Chelsea Bennett’s “good bye my i” takes an almost Buddhist look at spirituality and the kaleidoscopic music from Light has a really appealing tension with almost Phillip Glass harmonies between the dance and the visuals. Also spiritual, Mireya Schoo’s Metamorphosis plays with Blakean dualities of innocence and experience with Miriam King and Nick Wilson as Adam and Eve figures and Amy Lay referencing the snake in a lusty, vibrant way with long, shifting movements.

    One Day in 1307, a part of Gallery of Echoes. Photo courtesy Shadowbox Live.
    One Day in 1307, a part of Gallery of Echoes. Photo courtesy Shadowbox Live.

    Of course, with 20 pieces, it’s not all going to work. Sometimes good intentions lead to hamfisted results, most notably (and it pains me to say this because the conversation’s needed now more than ever) with Jaymie Kiggins’ “Resting in Pieces,” a peace sign made out of salvaged rifles where the over-the-top music and shouted cliches in the worst kind of point-counterpoint manner run directly counter to the interesting nuance of the piece shown in detail by the strong throughout the show video. Christopher Tenant’s (one “n” in the video projection, two in my press kit) “The Ghoul” has too direct a pantomime of the action around the painting and not enough ambiguity or mystery, a problem that also weighed down the music and dance around Amandda Tirey’s astonishing pop-art abstraction “Bloodfly Juice.”

    Both set closers exemplify the best parts of the kind of feel-good theatre Shadowbox is known for and the good parts of the Columbus boosterism a show like this has at its heart. Richard Duarte Brown’s “Pass the Brush,” a representational painting of a young man reaching his brush toward the canvas evolves into a shimmering neo-gospel dance number with terrific singing from Leah Haviland and the dancers in post-modern B-Boy garb playing to the camera and making light and color appear. It’s a stunning image in the show and a heart-stopping evocation of why people continue to make art, why they fight to be able to do it. Stephanie Rond’s “We the People, Yearning to Breathe Free” shows two textured people with their backs to us entirely in shades of blue and grey looking at a graffiti stencil Statue of Liberty and the band explodes this into a riotous slab of metallic ’80s funk that turns cliches about journeys of the heart into something that made the floor move the night I was there.

    Even with some misses, this new Gallery of Echoes makes me hope Shadowbox continues doing pieces like this in the specific and in the abstract. In many ways, its looseness and overstuffed quality is one of its assets, keeping the audience’s attention from wandering and shoving as much of what the troupe loves about Columbus and its art in a fast moving two hours with intermission.

    Gallery of Echoes: ColumbUS Public Art Project runs through June 19th with performances at 7:30pm Thursday, 7:30pm and 10:30pm Friday and Saturday, and 2:00pm and 7:00pm Sunday. For tickets and more info, visit shadowboxlive.org/light/columbus-public-art-project.

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    Richard Sanford
    Richard Sanfordhttp://sanfordspeaks.blogspot.com/
    Richard Sanford is a freelance contributor to Columbus Underground covering the city's vibrant theatre scene. You can find him seeking inspiration at a variety of bars, concert halls, performance spaces, museums and galleries.
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