The show's co-creator, Kiro Kopulos.
After some triumphant bargain hunting at the Lands’ End Warehouse Sale, I enjoyed the scenic drive through the rolling farmland to the picturesque Wyoming Valley Church outside Spring Green to catch Past Point Zero, an unconventional theater production from longtime collaborators Kiro Kopulos and Ariel Weymouth-Payne.
The charming little venue is home to The White Church Theatre Project led by Steven Wasson and Corinne Soum. The two are internationally renowned mime and physical theater performers and teachers. In 2010, they acquired the church and then moved their company, Theatre de l’Ange Fou, and school, International School of Corporeal Mime, from England to this location where they offer performances, lectures, films and training.
Kopulos approached Wasson about staging Past Point Zero at White Church after Kanopy Dance Company collaborated with Wasson and Soum for “A Strange Day for Mister K.”
Past Point Zero, which opened on Aug. 6, is a collage of movement, projected images, elaborate costumes and Kopulos’ own score punctuated by music from John Cage and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.
As the show begins, heaps of clear plastic sheeting is softly lit so that it resembles a cluster of neon icebergs, and a large clear plastic orb mysteriously traverses the stage, looking like a giant glowing jellyfish without tentacles (but it’s really a bubble ball typically worn by players of bubble soccer).
Kanopy’s co-artistic directors Robert E. Cleary and Lisa Thurrell are striking in silver body paint and puffy white coveralls. Perched on chairs that blend into the background, they seem to float through space like aliens, their limbs gently tossed around.
Kopulos is costumed as a cosmic circus ringleader, and he mimes rolling dice and ticking off numbers on his fingers. He pulls back a plastic tarp to reveal both the graceful Weymouth-Payne and a large game board called Candyland Earth. Kopulos seems to officially set things in motion.
Cleary and Thurrell gingerly unspool yards of plastic sheeting that has been bulking up their costumes. They lay down this sheeting in rows and move with intensity and a serious commitment to each gesture, much like Japanese Butoh performers (or their glittering disco intergalactic space traveler counterparts). Weymouth-Payne, now sporting a metallic fabric robot head and toting a spaceship toy, travels across this field of plastic, urged on by Kopulos.
Cleary and Thurrell peel off their coveralls to reveal sexy costumes consisting of complex strings of dangling silver beads, not much fabric and lots of silver body paint. The beads make satisfying sounds when they sway and tap together, taking me back to sound of someone parting those beaded doorways of the 1970s. Thurrell is especially good here, elevating even simple movements like turning and twisting her foot inward with her toes splayed.
Later, Kopulos takes the audience on a tour through projected images from the “Wall Chart of World History,” punctuated by recorded messages about Earth’s creation more than four billion years ago. The clear ball returns, becoming a planet, which the four performers, now all in voluminous silver hoop skirts, orbit around.
I would be remiss not to comment on the smoke, which was pumped into the theater. It turned into a fifth performer, hovering in the heavy air in shifting cloud patterns before vanishing.
I didn’t always know what I was looking at, but realized as I departed that I don’t necessarily need answers to my questions. This performance has many beautiful moments, and some perplexing ones, but also a few that were genuinely new and unusual.
Past Point Zero will be performed again on Sunday, August 7 at 4 p.m.
