Los Angeles
Times
March
28, 2004
Showman,
with a twist
Director
and writer. Choreographer and performer. Surrealist too? Ken Roht is all over
local theater.
By Rob Kendt
Special
to The Times
Jessica Hanna
is watching her husband, Mike Dunn, give birth. He squeals in pain--or is it
delight?--as he's wheeled on a desk chair by several attendants across a sprung
floor in a warehouse in an industrial neighborhood near Atwater Village.
Emerging from
this frenzied natal huddle is a tall, young dancer, Robert Porch, who
alternates elegant ballet moves with awkward baby waddles.
It's just
another vision from the gleefully twisted world of Ken Roht, a
choreographer-director-writer-performer and all-around theatrical auteur who
matter-of-factly calls his work "avant-garde song and dance--you know,
whimsical, surrealist music theater," as if we all know what he's talking
about.
Increasingly,
it is clear, thanks to his steadily rising profile in the local theater scene,
which last year landed Roht an open-ended $45,000 grant from Audrey
Skirball-Kenis Theater Projects and more recently netted him a $46,000
commission from the Eagle Rock Arts Center to create and co-produce
"Growing With Ghosts." The 50-minute multimedia dance-theater piece
with a cast of 40--including Hanna, Dunn and Porch--will open Friday at the
arts center, a former Carnegie Library built in 1917.
To say he
works in local theater isn't the whole story. You never quite know where Roht,
42, will turn up next: staging an "interspecies dance ritual" with
live snakes in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in the Hollywood Hills;
choreographing small theater musicals such as "The Shaggs," or
Offenbach's opera "La Perichole" for the Long Beach Opera; singing
Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly" album in its entirety with a
five-member chorus at the Evidence Room or appearing as a subject--and citywide
light-pole poster boy--for artist Bill Viola's Getty exhibition "The
Passions."
A step
ahead of the cast
Those were
just some of last year's projects, and that list doesn't include the two major
productions he produced, directed, wrote and choreographed last year at the
Evidence Room, where he's a member: "He Pounces," a dark meditation
on the dynamics of male sexuality, and "Splendor: A 99-Cents Only Stores
Wonderama," a giddy holiday extravaganza officially sponsored by the
discount chain.
It was
"He Pounces" that sold Jenny Krusoe, Eagle Rock Arts Center's
executive director, on commissioning a piece by Roht, and "Splendor"
that convinced her that he could do a show for all ages.
"I
think there's something very special about him," says Krusoe, who was
introduced to Roht by longtime friend Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW's
"Bookworm" show. "Here's someone who has a unique way of looking
at the world, but you can bring your kids to it."
Eagle
Rock's arts center, which was a library from 1917 to 1964, was presided over
for most of that time by bespectacled Blanche Gardiner; the late librarian is
rumored to haunt the space, still puttering and putting away books. Roht's
"Growing With Ghosts" riffs on those rumors, with 10 spectral
Blanches leading a chorus of youngsters from birth onward along a path paved by
book learning.
His
Blanches are played by men with a median age of, say, 40, and the nine
"kids" by a mix of male and female dancers with training ranging from
classical ballet to musical theater to Suzuki--another signature Roht touch.
Indeed,
he's known for shaping his choreography to performers of all shapes and sizes
without sacrificing a whit of his individual vision and for valuing attitude
and gesture more than precision.
"There's
no option with a cast but to just go in and do what he says," says
director John Langs, who hired Roht to choreograph "The Shaggs" and
who will bring him to Chicago for its run there in May. "He doesn't care
what your body type is, your dance experience, your background. He stays just a
step ahead of the cast, so they don't have time to think about their
limitations. And before they know it, they're in his number."
Dancers
with extensive training face no less of a challenge.
"Ken
takes what I can do and makes it fit his piece," says Porch, who performs
regularly with regional ballet companies and has taken this essentially
nonpaying "Ghosts" gig for the chance to work with Roht. "He has
me break back and forth between being this classical ballet dancer and being a
baby who doesn't know anything about ballet, like I'm having my first lesson.
With anyone else, it probably would get on my nerves, but I've seen Ken's work
and I trust it completely. Even if you don't get to look good or dance well in
this one moment, you know it's for an artistic reason."
Adrienne
Campbell-Holt, New York-based and classically trained, ranks Roht at the top of
his field.
"I've
watched Mark Morris, Bebe Miller, William Forsythe up close,"
Campbell-Holt says. "I've worked with the Wooster Group. Ken, I think, is
the most talented person working now. A lot of the work that's coming out now
is so influenced by the '60s and '70s or it's using technology, and it's
influenced by that. Ken is on a completely other plane. He's not trying to
imitate anything. He can sort of take every vernacular--he'll reference the
'20s and then science fiction and then the Wild West. He's very comfortable
with all of it."
Unleashing
the demons
How did
Roht's comfort zone and dance vocabulary grow so large? It's easy to trace his
darkly sunny sensibility to two seemingly contradictory influences: Lawrence
Welk and Reza Abdoh.
Roht--in
person an almost unsettlingly mellow SoCal dude whose haunted stare often is
the only clue to his fiery imagination and fierce will--grew up in Arcadia,
which he describes as an "80% Republican, upper-middle-class suburb."
He steeped himself in musical theater and led his high school swing choir,
taking inspiration, he says, from the aggressively chipper song-and-dance
stylings he'd seen on Welk's variety show. After high school he toured the
country with the Young Americans, a squeaky-clean national singing-dancing
group that performed for corporate clients.
Though he
says he "always had a darker soul than most of the Young Americans,"
it wasn't until actor Tom Fitzpatrick introduced Roht to Iranian ŽmigrŽ Abdoh
in the late 1980s that Roht's demons were unleashed.
Although
the iconoclastic theater auteur Abdoh was partly attracted to Roht's musical
theater background, he also saw Roht as a pliable leading man--and promptly put
him through a theatrical wringer.
"I did
things in the arena of getting naked and doing really radical things in front
of people that were a shock to my system," Roht says of his years as a
performer and choreographer on such Abdoh epics as "Minimata" and
"Bogeyman" at the Los Angeles Theatre Center and "Father Was a
Peculiar Man," staged across several blocks of New York's meat-packing
district. "I felt like this sort of self-flagellating monk or something."
"Those
shows were basically impossible to perform," says Laural Meade, a
writer-director-performer who worked with Abdoh then and today is a frequent
Roht collaborator. "That was the envelope [Abdoh] was pushing. He would
work with you a little while, see what your forte was, then design a role that
would not necessarily bring out your best but address things you needed to deal
with. Ken was struggling with his own volatility and control issues, so Reza
designed a role in 'Bogeyman' where Ken got to go around the stage in a rubber suit
and beat people up."
By the time
Abdoh died from complications from AIDS in 1995, Roht had already struck out on
his own, marrying avant-garde transgression to musical comedy ebullience in a
series of cabarets, operas and concerts with his theatrical rock band, Orphean
Circus. When Fitzpatrick--apparently an inspired artistic matchmaker--introduced
him to Evidence Room artistic director Bart DeLorenzo in 1999, Roht found an
artistic home.
"What's
great about Ken is that he creates his own opportunities," says DeLorenzo,
whose first major collaboration with Roht occurred when he gave Roht the reins
of the musical interludes in Charles L. Mee's "Imperialists at the Club
Cave Canem" in 2001. "No member of this company pitches more
projects, and no one has more divergent ideas in different directions than he
does. He's an impresario. My only fear right now is that he's going to do so
well that we won't be able to work with him."
Not a
moment too soon
Indeed,
advocates such as Silverblatt hope Roht's star rises high enough to nab him
productions in New York and Europe. For now, Roht has several ideas on tap for
the Evidence Room--a beauty pageant musical and something he calls his
"Hedwig show," a theater piece with a live rock band onstage.
"Last Resort," a "Beckett-like" opera he wrote with
composer Curtis Heard, will have an L.A. reading in June.
If this is
Roht's year, at long last, it couldn't have come a moment too soon.
"Right
before I got that [A.S.K.] grant, I was physically ill because I was not eating
well enough," Roht recalls. "I was borrowing hundreds of dollars for
rent; it was not a good time for me.
"I'd
made the decision to just be an artist. My belief is that I had to make that
commitment in order to actually achieve what I wanted to achieve. Now people are
fairly convinced that I can put them in a good show. That's a great thing.
"At
the moment I'm feeling very empowered," he says. He laughs and adds,
"At the moment. I'm old enough to know that ain't gonna last."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
'Growing
With Ghosts'
Where:
The Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock, 2225 Colorado Blvd., Los Angeles
When:
Opens Friday April 2. Fridays-Sundays, 7:30 and 9 p.m.
Ends:
April 25
Price:
$15
Contact:
(323) 226-1230